The Weird Weather of Etterville Missouri

I was awakened out of a sound sleep by the buzz. Anyone who's heard it cannot forget the sound, and anyone who hasn't can't begin to understand. But for those of you who've heard it, it was the buzz.

I stood up and listened. The buzz came closer for a little bit, then passed overhead, then died down. After it died down and went away to the northeast I went back to bed. Tornadoes seldom turn around and come back. I was safe. For now.

In the morning I found two things that were odd: the feed can lid had been taken off and deposited smack dab the middle of the north pasture, and the horse gate had been taken off its hinges and then dropped. I knew this because the lowest hinge was now on the highest peg, and the highest hinge was on nothing. With much effort I wrestled it back down to where it should be, and the gate was none the worse.

As a teen I always went out at the crack of dawn to feed my livestock.  This particular dawn, however, the sky was completely covered from one horizon to the other with what looked like a mass of up-side-down whipped cream dollops, shaded gray.

"Go ahead and feed them," suggested someone.  "I'll keep watch out this door till you come back."

The winds were unusually strong and my instincts told me no, but the animals didn't deserve to go hungry, so out I went.

"This is not so bad," I thought to myself.  Inside the barn one felt sheltered from whatever was going on out there.

All of a sudden I heard my name yelled frantically.  I ran to the barn door and looked out.  I could see nothing whatsoever, so I shrugged it off and went back to milking.

Less than a minute later I heard my name yelled again, this time in a shriek.  Again I went to the door and looked out, and again I saw nothing, so I began doling out some hay.

Chores done, bucket in hand, I stepped out of the barn to return to the house.  Again, the sky looked the same as before, odd but still, so I made no particular hurry to clamber up the hill and back inside.

"Why did you take so long?" I was chided.

"Why, what was the matter?" I asked.

Turns out the clouds were playing games with me.  Every time I was inside the barn, one of those points started to descend, and every time I opened the door, they went back up again.  The person who tried to warn me was afraid they were turning into a tornado.  Maybe they were.

Fifteen years old, home alone, thunderstorms all day long.  All day.  And there was a huge, empty yard to cross to get to the chicken house, an empty yard in which I was the tallest object. The lightning was nonstop and it thundered for hours without letup.  Storms came and went one right after the other, and the breaks were too short to have a safe space to get up to reach the chickens.

I had good reason to try and reach them.  Overnight the opossums had been killing them by twos and threes.  The opossums seemed not to be doing this for hunger, either, because they wouldn't eat one chicken before killing another, but would leave a trail of meaningless destruction night after night.

So I waited and watched and hoped and prayed for a break.  Finally, about three o'clock in the afternoon, all the thunder suddenly stopped.  Not a raindrop was falling.  Everything got quiet.

I went out.  I scurried down to the dog pen to loose my trusty border collie, and I should have taken a clue from this: the dog refused to come out.  She cowered in her doghouse.  This was unlike her.  She had been knocked flat by a large billy goat with horns, and she had gotten right back up again and had made sure he knew that sheep dogs are the boss and that when she says it's time to go, it's time to go.  And he went.

No, that dog was not a coward, and there wasn't a lazy bone in her body. She loved to run at all times.  So this time, when she refused to come out of her doghouse, that should have been a clue.  Animals have instincts that people don't have.

Out I went.  The wind knocked me to my knees.  Beyond the south pasture I saw a huge, billowing black pillar of cloud that reached from sky to earth.  It was rotating very, very slowly.

"Hmph.  That's not a tornado. Tornadoes move faster than that.  They come down from the clouds and look pointy and make noise."  (My ideas were largely shaped from what I had seen on TV, and those few examples I had seen did not nearly cover the spectrum of oddities I would later discover.)

I struggled from fence post to fence post, barely able to stand but laughing in the wind, reached the chicken pen, penned the chickens for the night, and returned to the house.  The billowy black pillar moved across the sky to the northeast and missed my farm completely, and there was a splendid and peaceful sunset that evening.  Only later did I find out what sort of weather I had been out in!

Heading toward work one morning in a minivan, my mom was driving and I was seated in the front passenger side.  I was a young adult, but I still had a lot to learn about weather.

"I don't like the color of the sky," said my mom.  "Turn the radio on."

"Slight chance of rain, high of 85..." said the radio.

What I was to learn later is that when tornadoes come in very low, the radar cannot see them.  There were no watches or warnings issued for this occurrence.

First I saw a point come down.  Then it came down lower.  This cannot be happening, I thought to myself.  I didn't distract my mom from driving, and I figured she saw what I saw.  Come to find out she didn't, and I would have done well to point it out.

We rounded a bend, and the wind picked up enormously.  All of a sudden that faraway point was right upon the bluff at the side of the road.  Trees on the bluff were bending down as far as they could till they looked like all the branches were going to break, and large sticks from the highway below us (Hmm...how'd they get there?  Sticks on the interstate?) were flying straight upward. 

"Pray," my mom said, and I was already doing so.

The winds became so violent they were trying to push us off the road, onto the shoulder, and over the ledge.  My mom put both knees on the wheel to help hold onto it, and she just about couldn't.  We slowed way down.  Then we stopped.  She was still stepping on the gas, and the speedometer read 40, but we were going no where because the front wheels of the front-wheel-drive van were no longer in contact with the ground.  The engine revved uselessly.

And then as suddenly as it had come upon us, it moved away without harming us.  We continued on to work, where the other people we met said the sky had looked very black to them that morning in the east.

As nearly as I can figure from researching various weather sites, what I saw down the state highway was called a roll cloud.  We drove under it, not a pleasant experience.  It was horizontal, black, billowy, and rolled like a tornado, but it did not appear to be attached to any other cloud.  It was out there in the middle of no where, rolling along by itself.  Driving under it to go home was difficult, but there was no other way home, and it only took a few seconds to get past it.  The winds were rough, but not as rough as the ones from the funnel on the interstate.

As nearly as I can find in my research, what I saw here was a very unusual scud cloud.  Many clouds had moved in at varying levels with this storm, but it hadn't rained yet.  The storm was still building and growing, and the sky grew increasingly dark.  Many small fingers of non-rotating cloud came down and went back up again as the storm gained strength and refused to rain.  Then, as I watched (feeling rather sick) from the patio window, a black finger of cloud extended down in a curly cue, very slowly and deliberately, like the black snakes you light on the Fourth of July.  It stayed that way after it completed a few circles, and moved off somewhere to the east.  I always wondered what became of it.

Someone had just come and had purchased a mule from me.

"Well, I'd better get home.  There's a storm brewing," he said, and indeed there was.

The sky west was exactly black, and thunder was getting louder.  No sooner had he left, no sooner had I set foot in my living room, than the trees 200 feet from my house began to sway, and a large, clear whirlwind pulled loose leaves into an updraft.  It left after being there only seconds, and did little more than spin the leaves.

The house I lived in for many years was a well built mobile home tied to a concrete foundation with hurricane strap.  That may have been the only reason I survived so many strange weather occurrences.  Mobile homes that are not tied down are dangerous.  I learned that on one of the first nights I spent in it before it was moved from the temporary park and set up properly.  In the middle of the night it rocked violently back and forth, back and forth, a most unsettling feeling.  But that was all it did, and in the morning some cinder blocks had to be put back where they belonged underneath it.

Now then, years later, it was properly set up and tied down.  Another storm was upon us, and horizontal rain pelted its introduction.  I took shelter in the doorway of the bathroom and held on for dear life.  The floor vibrated like an earthquake beneath my feet as I felt the wind push under the crawlspace, but it never flinched or rocked an inch.

Years later I was able to move to a stick built house with a basement, but here's the thing: the basement's only good if you're in it, and if a tornado alarm doesn't wake you up, you'll likely not be in it (that is, unless you sleep in your basement every night during storm season).  I was too far from the alarm to hear it.  A groaning creak followed by a crash woke me out of a sound sleep.  I looked out the window, and amid the flashes of lightning I was able to see rain whipping across the ground in undulating horizontal sheets.  A tree limb right outside my window was on the ground.  Morning light revealed that the limb was actually a large part of the tree, and that where it had somehow gotten separated from the rest of the tree, its end was twisted like a massive pencil.

I don't know why all the worst of the storms go out to Etterville, but I know that they do.  Many times after experiencing wickedly dangerous storms, other folks would say, "Yeah, it rained here a little bit, but it was no big deal."  Whatever is bad goes to Etterville time after time, leaving most of the surrounding towns with just plain old regular thunderstorms and rain.  If you know a storm chaser, I would definitely recommend Etterville.  The stories in this hub are some of the strangest, but I know of many more that are still odd to one degree or another.  I will not bore you with the ground lightning, how you can be standing on the iron rich ground when lightning strikes less than a mile away, and you can feel the charge run up your spine.  I will not bore you with the fact that lightning often rings the phones, but that you don't dare answer because you know it's the Grim Reaper calling.  I will not bore you with how you must not touch the sink or cook on the stove at the wrong times, or how I heard that well known tornadic buzz on many more occasions.  I will not bore you with how often the power goes out down there, or with how the creeks flash flood at a half second's notice.  I will not bore you with the exploded tree on the tree line that was struck by a powerful bolt, or with how unattached whirlwinds seemed to follow you and chase you on a sunny day.

If you want to see these things, visit Etterville yourself.  There's nothing there but a tiny post office and some farm houses, but the weather behaves like you're visiting the Bermuda Triangle of Missouri's rural landscape.

Go there and find out.  I dare ya!