Live Oak Blues What happens.

If you ask any Louisvillian of a certain age–“Where were you during The Tornado?”–they will tell you without asking which tornado you mean. In a city where tornadoes are a way of life, this is pretty significant when you consider the one in question happened some 42 years ago, destroying numerous neighborhoods, schools, and nearly all the old-growth trees in Cherokee Park. There are entire websites dedicated to this tornado and the others that made up the 1974 Super Outbreak. It was a defining event.

I certainly know where my father was. He was watching this tornado pass within two miles of our house from the top of a tall maple tree in our front yard. A compulsive and gifted photographer, this tornado was simply an opportunity he could not pass up. I also know where my mother was. She was on the ground yelling at my father to get his ass down from the tree, a detail prudently omitted from her published account of the tornado.

None of us knew for sure where my youngest brother Collyn was, but my father could see from his vantage point that the tornado went right through where his nursery school was supposed to be. He also knew that most of the city was likely without electricity, as he had seen the main power plant explode when the tornado ripped through it. So off he went to find my brother where there were no longer roads.

Many hours later, he returned with my brother and reports of surreal devastation: roofing shingles embedded in trees, live power lines hopping in the street, houses moved intact hundreds of feet from their foundations.

In his last years, bent double with the ravages of a life spent not treating his body all that well, I had to remind myself this was still the same man who would not even question whether or not it was a sound idea to shoot up a tree during a tornado. After I moved to Florida for grad school, I remember telling him how I wanted to experience the full force of a hurricane (wish granted, by the way). He thought that was the craziest thing he had ever heard.