We arrived at our campsite late this afternoon. We had trash duty today, Carrie, Kathleen and I along with a few other folks. We do it every ten days or so...a different group goes out and follows behind the walkers, cleaning up roadside trash.
Oddly enough, every time our trash duty comes up we've been on a rest day, so we've never really had to do it. And today, we had to shuttle Larry up to Tulsa...about 80 or so miles away from our previous camp..so we ended up doing trash duty away from the walkers at tonight's camp.
It had been raining hard all day...wasn't too sad to miss walking the 18 miles, but sometimes those blowout weather days have sort of a fun, sick challenge to them. Anyway, when we headed back to camp to get ready to set up our tents, Kathleen and I decided that tonight would be a motel night. Everything in her truck, clotheswise, had gotten soaking wet and I needed internet access to work on my street roots article. As we were asking P.J. and Carrie if they wanted to rent a room next to us, the rain started dumping. Serious torrential downpour.
Carrie came over to the truck and said, "I'm not going to go...they just announced tornado warnings for Tulsa...you shouldn't go either, I just have this feeling it wouldn't be safe, I just...I'm gonna stay here with P.J., you should stay too." She was dead serious and Carrie has an uncanny intuition about certain things. P.J. had decided earlier that he wouldn't come to the motel, but that Carrie should join us.
I had just been inside while she was having that conversation with Kathleen and saw everyone glued to the t.v. -- all they were showing was a weather map of Tulsa and these two big yellow swirling dot sort of things hovering above two different sections of the city. The announcer was saying something about two tornadoes have touched down, one of the locals said they were about twenty minutes south of our camp area.
Okay.
I went back out to the truck. The rain wasn't even rain anymore, it was like walking through a waterfall, the sky was black, lightening was spiking all over the place and thunder was literally shaking the ground. It was wild.
"I think we should listen to Carrie," Kathleen said, "when she has these senses...and..I don't want to drive in this."
I looked at the windshield and there was nothing to see but gray..nothing to hear but the sound of water on the steel roof of the cab.
"Um...yeah," I said, "good call."
And then we just started to laugh. We turned on the radio and every voice on the dial was talking about winds at x number miles per hour, possible hail storms, guys reporting from different hot spots in the city. We fleetingly wondered if Carrie didn't want to leave P.J. for the motel because she thought he was in danger at camp and she wanted to be with him...or if she meant we would be in danger if we drove off...and possibly get sucked up by the twisters. It didn't matter, we weren't going anywhere and just decided to stay with the family and stick it out together. Kathleen called her mom to let her know she was okay (my phone fried out two days ago during a thunder and lightening ballyhoo in Somewhere, OK - I'll be getting that fixed tomorrow).
And then..the reports from the radio started talking about the storm dissipating. And then the tornado warnings stopped. The rain let up. The lightening calmed down. Within a span of 30 minutes, it was over and there was Carrie's face at the truck window.
"They called off the tornado warnings. I want to go now."
And she walked off; Kathleen and I looked at each other. We were resigned to staying and bunking down at the camp, but this sort of changed things. I suppose if Carrie was okay with it....
Next thing, she's walking over with her backpack..we made room on the seat for her..Kathleen asked me to drive us and we were off.
Okay, the rain hadn't stopped completely and the windows were pretty foggy..but we made it down the road a piece to this Super 8 and here we are. Carrie started washing clothes, Kathleen took a bath, I made a run for Mexican food.
It's now close to midnight. The girls are sacked out on one of the beds...looking pretty clumpy and sweet really...Kathleen's still got her boots on..don't know how she sleeps like that.
I won't be doing much street roots writing tonight. Too tired. I'll try to write in the morning while Kathleen does laundry and Carrie goes to pick up her husband. We have a lot of errands to run on tomorrow's rest day. Gotta go to A.T.T., find Whole Foods, find a place that sells camp fuel, hit the post office, etc. etc.
But we are safe and sound and will sleep well tonight. Those guys are off to a good start and I won't be too far behind them.
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