Kendall Stanley: The winds of spring

It was amazing, really, that only two residents of Gaylord lost their lives to the EF-3 tornado that roared down M-32 into the heart of the city on Friday, May 20.

Here’s how the National Weather Service catalogued it:

• EF-3 rating with maximum winds of 150 mph
• Path length / time: 16.6 miles / 20 minutes
• Maximum width: 200 yards

Seems so clinical — just the facts ma’am. But the facts don’t tell the story of a small community that found itself staring down a massive recovery effort, piles of debris everywhere, trucks and mobile homes flipped and upended, 44 of their neighbors injured and two of their neighbors deceased.

It’s hard to fathom mostly because we just don’t get tornadoes here.

It is so rare the story of the tornado has been shared near and far on television and in newspapers.

The clashing weather systems that give rise to the dozens of tornadoes that roam Tornado Alley each year are normally not present here and many times our tornadoes are weak and non-destructive totally unlike the monsters that make it to the ground in other areas.

We are not strangers to the vagaries of tornadoes.

Driving, as we do, to Arizona and back every year, the first time we encountered a tornado was in Rolla, Mo., as we were packing up to hit the road on New Year’s Eve! Talk about way out of tornado season.

But the wonderful staffer at the front desk was most helpful when I asked what to do because “we don’t get tornadoes where we live.”

Thus the two of us and our two cats found ourselves sharing the (tiny) bathroom. The twister passed to the east of town, killing two farmers working their farms.

Each spring when we head home I start to pay particular attention to the weather in the days ahead. If you see a slow moving cold front heading west to east you’re looking at possible bad weather.

This spring we were under two tornado warnings on the way home, one in the Oklahoma City area where a tornado had actually touched down and Tulsa, where no tornadoes formed.

The message boards on the Oklahoma turnpikes were good at alerting motorists to the danger and to listen to their local radio station for information. Which is great if you live around those parts and know which counties are where.

As a traveler telling me a tornado has touched down in XYZ county doesn’t do me a bit of good. So when we checked in that night, the first thing I asked the desk clerk was what county am I in and what are the surrounding counties. I didn’t need the info at that point, but it was good to have it.

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I can’t imagine what it is like to live somewhere that has frequent and deadly tornadoes. While there is a lot of open farmland across the Midwest there are plenty of towns and cities scattered about to be in harm’s way especially at this time of the year.

Gaylord was fortunate in one sense — the twister rolled mostly through the business district west of town. With the exception of Nottingham Forest manufactured home park the twister didn’t go through the bulk of the neighborhoods in town, and community centers like the schools went untouched.

And as is typical of Northern Michiganders, a church opened up as a shelter, motels offered up rooms and come Saturday people from surrounding communities headed to the town to help with the cleanup and removing debris that was scattered up and down M-32.

Neighbors here doesn’t just mean the people who live down the street from you.

Ah, Oklahoma

And now, for the third time this year, an anti-transgender bill makes its way from the Oklahoma legislature to the governor’s desk! What a great state.

It’s not that Oklahoma is alone.

According to The Washington Post, “Over the last two years, state legislatures across the country have brought forward an unprecedented amount of anti-LGBTQ bills, most of them affecting trans youth. More than 240 of these bills have been introduced so far in 2022. And they’re getting increasingly restrictive.

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“This spring, Alabama and Texas put forward the most aggressive restrictions on trans youth and their families in U.S. history. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered child welfare officials to investigate gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” though the Texas Supreme Court recently ruled the governor had no authority to give that order. More recently, Alabama passed a total ban on gender-affirming care, which made providing these treatments to trans youth a felony, punishable with up to 10 years in prison and up to a $15,000 fine. That law has been blocked from being enforced as it makes its way through the courts.”

Still it seems like Oklahoma is joining the race to the bottom to see which state can impose the most onerous restrictions on their LGBTQ citizens.

If you believe this is morally wrong and should be overturned by the courts, feel free to support that effort in any way you can.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.