When I was growing up, the word "tornado" brought to mind just one thing: Dorothy and her red shoes. But as I sat watching video of some of the twisters that claimed untold lives as it blew through Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, and left serious damage behind in the tourist hot spot city of Branson, Missouri last night, we all got a sad reminder that you can only put a nice face on something awful for so long.
Branson is one of those tourist towns that seems perfect when you're on vacation. But footage of it today shows the reality of life in an area prone to devastating weather. Likewise, the movies paint tornadoes as these romantic gusts of wind that blow into town and change things for the better. But real tornadoes don't wander around looking for scary witches and suddenly drop houses on them. Real tornadoes look more like this:
See this video on The Stir by CafeMom.
That didn't look like some fun kid's movie, did it? Maybe because that video, shot by storm chasers, show some of the tornadoes in a series of storms that killed three people in Harrisburg, Illinois right before dawn when most of us were cuddled up under the covers. The tornadoes killed someone's loved one in a trailer park in Buffalo, Missouri. They left three people seriously injured in Harveyville, Kansas. And those are just the figures we have now -- each time I read a new news story, the death toll seems to rise.
And of course there's the damage as far as the eye can see. Branson seems to be getting the most attention today because people who don't live in the area have at least heard of it and its amusement park. They may even have vacationed there. The town is a mess. The roof of the Wal-Mart's blown in, there are cars on their tops with the wheels in the air, the famous Variety Theatre took a hard hit, and if you ever stayed at the Best Western Hotel, well, never again ... it's gone.
These are all cold hard facts that shake us out of our "aww, it's so twee" Hollywood view of these horrific weather incidents. Ironically the first term that comes to mind when I think of something shocking us out of complacency is from The Wizard of Oz itself: "Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore."
Have you visited Branson on a nice day? Is it a shock to remember your pleasant vacation in this awful context?
Image via doug_wertman/Flickr