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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
I wish to live in exciting times simply for the sake of column material. Despite the odds, exciting times occasionally come along in Water Valley and I immediately remember that one should be careful what she wishes for.
Take for instance when at 5:51 pm this past Saturday I saw the tallest oak on Wood Street fly across my backyard, heading directly toward my husband, who had just bolted from his car to run into our house. What had just been an expansive kitchen window view of dark, horizontal winds slicing through the long distance of the Wood Street kudzu gully — in less than a single second — became an all-encompassing, jungle-thick mass of bright green tree top foliage. It was as if somebody flipped the slide on a viewfinder. A wildly abrupt new scene appeared outside of my window. And my husband wasn’t in the new picture. Not to be morbid in a light-hearted column, but I very much I assumed he was dead.
Like all of us Southerners who held textbooks over our heads in school hallways since we were five-years-old, I’m accustomed to tornado weather. As if dictating a dress code on a party invitation, we like to believe we innately know when tornado weather goes from Front-Porch Casual to Formally Hitting-the-Fan. But the fact of the matter is that, I’ve never seen anything like what I saw on Saturday.
I have zero doubt that there was rotation above our neighborhood and no set of scientific numbers can convince me otherwise. For all I know, the scientific numbers back me up. I haven’t checked. I’ve been busy being thankful that, in the undisputed Move of the Year, my husband Wil – for the first time — went to the front door instead of the back door in coming home from work. I didn’t see him after the backyard tree fell not because he was under it, but because he was on the front porch!
For the rest of the night I watched the Water Valley electric department, linemen and police department work in the raging storms to keep people safe and restore power. For many hours, Wood Street was illuminated only by the blue lights of a police car. I could hear linemen-chain sawing trees up around the bend in what I assume was near pitch dark. While they worked to restore power in an admirable amount of time, I read that giant “History of Yalobusha County” book for fun by flashlight and felt old-timey.
Meanwhile, my 14-year-old child was at the Watermelon Queen Pageant. His recollection just proves that nothing can stop Water Valley from Water Valley-ing! He reports:
The pageant was in the gym at the high school. I sat just behind the basketball goal. Suddenly one person’s phone started to make the tornado alert. This didn’t seem to bother anybody and they kept on with the pageant. After about 10 more tornado alerts, everybody began to line up in the hallway. I watched a family go into the janitor’s closet. It was real noisy with the crying girls and all the dads trying to be weathermen. Then the power went out. It got very quiet for about three seconds. And then back on with the crying and the weathermen. At some point someone opened up the doors to the outside and a big ole gust of wind came all the way down the hall.
Once the tornado was gone and we were back in the gym a lot of people avoided sitting next to the windows. The poor lady announcing the girls on stage had to talk real loud because her microphone didn’t work. I had to wait for my buddy’s little sister to finish her category in which she got 1st place. After some family photos we bolted outta there. If it was up to me Id’a put that pageant any other day.
