Sitting here among the piles of snow that now cover Boston, I realize that I don't remember childhood snowstorms as well as I remember tornadoes. For one thing, nothing especially untoward has ever happened to me because of snow. However, tornadoes are indicated by a siren, and a downright terrifying one at that. Also I think that the effects of a blizzard are pretty well known and finite: you could lose power or water, not be able to get out of your house, starve or freeze to death, etc., whereas with a tornado, one never really knows what will happen. You might just end up in Oz for all you know. Pretty scary stuff.
Michigan, where I grew up, is at the tip of Tornado Land (not even sure it's officially in Tornado Alley, but it is susceptible) but is sheltered by the lakes and generally doesn't get many tornadoes. Therefore, the tornadoes we did get, maybe one every few years, made enough of an impression. There was one in particular that anyone living in the Detroit area in 1990 (I think - could have been '89) remembers well, particularly if they were in school at the time. I was in third grade and remember it clearly.
The first thing to know is that my elementary school had a lot of outside walls and most of that was windows. There were two parallel hallways of classrooms, with courtyards between almost every one. At least one wall of each classroom, and most of the hallways, were big plate-glass windows. The rooms in the middle of the school were back-to-back, with the bathrooms in between (and doors from both classrooms, its own special kind of terror!). In one such arrangement, at the end of the hallway, the girls' bathroom also had big plate-glass windows. So of course, that is where the third-grade girls were shuffled into when the tornado siren went off that day.
Your whole life in Tornado Land, you are told to stay away from windows! Yes, they often say the bathroom is the best place to be, but not when the bathroom has an enormous window in it. Even at 8 or 9 years old, I remember squeezing into that smelly bathroom with 20 of my peers and looking at that sheet of glass maybe 8 feet away from my face and thinking, This is really dumb. And then my friend Melissa started in.
Don't get me wrong, Melissa was a really nice girl. She was probably my best friend in third grade, until she moved away. I don't know what possessed her to do this, but after we'd been shut in by the teacher and left to our own devices (another brilliant plan, grown-ups), as the sky got that weird green tornado-y color and things were quiet and creepy, Melissa started listing off all the ways in which every person in that bathroom was vulnerable: The people by the window are going to die first because they're going to get crushed by the glass. The people by the toilet are going to get sucked down it. (This included me, and I have to say, I did not appreciate this assessment.) The people over there by the vent are going to get sucked in. And so on. It was terrifying even for those of us who hadn't seen The Wizard of Oz (or hadn't seen past the beginning).
This went on for what felt like eternity, until the tornado had passed (leaving us all unscathed, as with pretty much every tornado I remember) and the teachers came to get us. We all walked back to class pretty subdued. I have no idea if a similar situation played out in the boys' bathroom, but for their sake, I hope not!
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