Grow­ing up in north-central Ohio, we had plenty of hot days, humid from so much corn grow­ing next to our house on the edge of town. That corn­field some­times was allowed to lie fal­low, or was planted with a crop of soy­beans to re-fix the nitro­gen in the soil. The farmer had loaned our neigh­bor­hood a piece of his field, on the agree­ment that we wouldn’t run through his corn any more, and we kept the grass mowed and used it to play base­ball and foot­ball and fly kites. Out there one could get away from the houses and see a long ways toward the horizon.

We had fresh pro­duce in seem­ingly unlim­ited quan­ti­ties, toma­toes as big as a baby’s head, and green beans to die for, espe­cially cooked the West Vir­ginia way with bacon or ham until they were nearly soft. Cucum­bers, green-onions and melon arrived at our front door, car­ried by door-to-door sales­man from a place called Cel­eryville, a huge pro­duce farm that employed young­sters to sell their stuff in the sum­mer, going from house to house. Sum­mer was good in north-central Ohio, not least for the fre­quent tornadoes.

My mother’s favorite movie was Wiz­ard of Oz, and she was ter­ri­fied by the word tor­nado. The very idea of one would send her into a panic and she’d yell, “Every­one, run to the base­ment, there’s a tor­nado!” Didn’t mat­ter if the local AM radio sta­tion said the tor­nado was in the next county, or the next town over, she’d always announce that every­one should head for the base­ment until the “all clear.” Dad would groan, because he didn’t have a choice, he had to go down there with her. Not my brother and me – one word of a tor­nado and we went out the back door like the two young ter­rors we were, because we wanted to see the tor­nado. We were pretty sure we were faster than any tor­nado on Earth, and we didn’t know any­one who’d actu­ally been injured by one, much less taken up and floated about.

My older brother and I often spot­ted fun­nel clouds off in the dis­tance while we stood in t-shirts, sum­mer shorts and ten­nis shoes in the July or August heat, out there on the ball field. That part of Ohio was kind of flat, with some rolling hills, and from the van­tage point on the edge of town we could see the fun­nels form as the cloud dropped down and turned tri­an­gu­lar, and then at the last minute a bit of cloud would seem to come up from the ground to join it and the tor­nado was in busi­ness. One day we saw a cow come fly­ing up with the dirt and stuff, and get jet­ti­soned out of the fun­nel, and we knew some farm fam­ily would be hav­ing steak that night. Mom would be ‘fit-to-be-tied,” as she called it, that we’d have the nerve to go out­side when such a ter­ri­ble dan­ger was in the off­ing, but we were never pun­ished for it. And who wouldn’t want to see a cow fly?

A num­ber of years later I was work­ing car­pen­try in Colum­bus, Ohio, one of the many jobs I worded to pay for my col­lege edu­ca­tion. I had learned to swing a ham­mer, could mea­sure accu­rately, was well-balanced, and much to my hor­ror, able to calm my fears enough for “walk­ing walls.” Walk­ing walls is a rare expe­ri­ence in a young man’s life. When a wooden framed house is built of 2x4’s and 2x10’s, there is usu­ally a stage when the fram­ing walls have been built and raised, with some light insu­lated sheath­ing attached to the out­side frames, and the floors decked in with ply­wood. The tri­an­gu­lar roof trusses have not been added, so it looks like an open framed box. For a two-story house with a base­ment, that means from the top of the house, before the trusses and joists have been added, it is a drop of 30 or more feet to the ground. If you hap­pen to be stand­ing on the 10-inch wide top of the wall above the open­ing to the poured con­crete base­ment when you fall, it’s a bit far­ther and a lot harder when you land.

So there I was that sum­mer, walk­ing the tops of walls of a partially-built new house. Bobby, the lead car­pen­ter had decided I would be good as the sec­ond man in the truss-hanging oper­a­tion. A rented crane arrived, along with the truck­load of pre-made trusses – they are those tri­an­gu­lar things you see on top of houses, with a beam at the bot­tom called the joist, and they are heavy and big. The crane lifts the truss and places it approx­i­mately where the boss tells him to place it, sus­pended a few inches off the top of the wall, and the two lucky car­pen­ters who are walk­ing the walls try not to get bumped off by any sway of the truss, and using their ham­mers to kind of prod it into stop­ping, they wait until the right moment, the truss is low­ered to the top of the wall, and — bam, bam, bam, wham! You drive in a spike with a 20-ounce fram­ing ham­mer, and then pound in a cou­ple of more nails, and attach that truss to the top of the wall. You have to kneel down at the last minute, or bend over from the waist, all the while just stand­ing on a 10-inch wide beam with no safety net and noth­ing to hold onto. What­ever you do, you can’t hold onto the truss to catch your bal­ance because it’ll move if you do, or fall over and bring the rest of the trusses down like triangular-framed domi­noes, and prob­a­bly take you with them.

One morn­ing, hot and humid with threats of rain for later in the day, we were hang­ing trusses on a two-story mon­stros­ity of a house in a new sub­di­vi­sion. We were halfway through with the trusses when I noticed the sky was dark­en­ing into that famil­iar deep blue and pur­ple mass in the dis­tance that meant a major storm com­ing. Zip, some light­ning started appear­ing in the dis­tant hori­zon. We were non-union and didn’t get paid if we got sent home, and that sum­mer we’d already been sent home a lot because of thun­der­storms. I looked over at Bobby, the lead car­pen­ter, stand­ing on the oppo­site wall from me, and he shrugged and motioned for the crane to bring up the next truss.

Pretty soon the wind was kick­ing up, and I was wor­ried about being blown off the top of the wall, and the sky became more defined as the storm drew closer. I could see the angry, boil­ing clouds grow heavy and start to droop, not all that far away it seemed. When you are on the top of a wall in a partially-built sub-division on the out­skirts of a city you have a scope of vision to the hori­zon that is rather sweep­ing. So I wasn’t sur­prised that I could see the for­ma­tion of a tor­nado off in the dis­tance. Mean­while, we kept hang­ing trusses with the wind swirling and mak­ing the trusses sway on the end of the crane’s cable as they came up and were low­ered into posi­tion, prompt­ing no end of four-letter words and oaths and impre­ca­tions at the unwieldy mass of wood we were try­ing to man­han­dle into position.

We’d already been up on the walls a cou­ple of hours by then, and the ten­sion of mus­cles keep­ing bal­ance, of bend­ing down on one knee and nail­ing the truss to the wall cap, of then stand­ing up unas­sisted, like an acro­bat in work-boots, was start­ing to get to me. The one tor­nado had become two in the dis­tance, and then look­ing around, I spot­ted one com­ing down in some other part of the city, and all the while light­ning strik­ing where it wanted down from the sky, and the booms of thun­der rip­ping the air. Shortly before noon, we fin­ished hang­ing the last truss and I slid down the lad­der to the ground with legs like rub­ber a-tremble. The rest of the crew were wait­ing to go home, every piece of equip­ment loaded in the pickup trucks. “You two are crazy,” they said, and Bobby and I shook hands, aware of the slight under­state­ment of that fact, and I headed for my old Blue Buick with 100,000 miles on the odome­ter and the blue and white seats faded and stained from all kinds of unmen­tion­ables, includ­ing too many trips to the drive-in movies with my girl­friend of sum­mers long-past.

I don’t walk walls any­more, or hang trusses: my body is not nim­ble enough for that, and tri­fo­cals play hell with one’s aim with a ham­mer. But to this day, I don’t fear tor­na­does. I don’t per­son­ally know any­one who has died from one, or been swept up in the air like that cow I saw as a young­ster, so long ago on a hot, sum­mer, Ohio day. I don’t really enjoy Wiz­ard of Oz, all that much, though. I think it’s the fly­ing mon­keys that scare me the most.

DWW