By MATTHEW WAITE
Journalism alumnus, 1998
I came face to face with my own death Thursday night, Jan. 21. I blinked. I admit it.
Growing up a Nebraska boy, calling the hills of eastern Nebraska — around Blair — my home, I grew up with a fine appreciation for a good storm.
After being blessed with the power to drive, I even took to chasing tornadoes a bit as an amateur hell bent on just seeing one.
Well, now I can say I saw one. And, as much as I like chasing storms, I can say, without doubt or hesitation, that I do not like it when storms chase me.
That Thursday I was starting my night cops shift for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock at 3 p.m. It was apparent when the first storms blew through at 4 p.m. that that it was going to be a long night. I drove all over central Arkansas just looking for one, any tornado to touch the ground. I saw a funnel cloud pass over an interstate, even got out of my truck to shoot a couple of pictures — but no touchdown. You have to be a news reporter to be disappointed with that.
So after following that line of storms out of the area, I went back to the office and was told a second line was coming. I decided I’d better get dinner before it arrived. So I was in the drive-through lane at Rally’s at 6 p.m., getting a burger for myself and one for my editor. No sooner had I paid for the burgers than reports started coming in from southwest Little Rock police that tornadoes were in the area, moving northeast.
Never fear, Super Matt is here
Blazing down I-30, I hit a long flat stretch after the I-440 and 67/167 interchange and came up on 65th Street when, WHAM, blinding rain and hail hit me. I pushed on to the Scott Hamilton Road exit, about a mile, before I said to hell with this. I’ll just go to the area where reports of tornadoes were popping up.
I got off the exit and was headed toward the stoplight, which was out because there was no electrical power, and suddenly, everything stopped. No rain, no hail. Just wind. Lots of it.
Uh oh.
Ahead of me, an I-30 westbound sign ripped out of the ground and shot back toward my truck. It passed me on the driver’s side, and when I looked left to follow it, what to my wandering eyes should appear …
In the millisecond it took me to realize that the huge gray vortex that was gleefully tearing up trees on the other side of the interstate was a tornado, I saw all 23 years of my life zip past, and it was far, far too short.
I had the two-way radio to the city desk and the photographers in my hand because I was going to warn them about the hail.
To the best of my knowledge, this is what I said into the radio.
“HOLY COW! IT’S RIGHT BEHIND ME!!!!”
Imagine my editor sitting on the other end of the radio hearing that one.
Instinctively — I say that because I can’t explain my thinking any other way — I slammed my truck into first gear and laid rubber around the corner, heading westbound. I watched the tornado cross the interstate in my rearview mirror and realized it was past me, so I turned into a parking lot and toward it, hoping to get a glimpse of it.
I did. Lord, it was huge, tearing power lines out and putting on a show rivaled only by the biggest of Fourth of July shows I have ever seen.
How my truck did not blow away, I will never know.
Mother Nature 1, Matt 0.
I did not know it then, but that twister would keep going. It bounced up into the sky about 500 yards later, later coming down on 33rd and Cross, obliterating that poor neighborhood, then hopping up and coming down at about 17th and Main, right on the Harvest Foods store. A pharmacist, filling prescriptions for neighborhood customers, was killed when the building collapsed.
Bouncing up again, it would come down at 9th and I-30, taking out a Waffle House before crossing the interstate again, destroying industrial buildings awfully close to our presses. Two would die in Little Rock. Seven would die across the state.
I told my mother that I thank the good Lord that I am here today. I guess he does many good things and works in mysterious ways — my job is just spent hanging out at the “mysterious ways” part.
War stories
As war stories go, this one is a marathon. When I get ready to tell this one to my grandkids, they better pack a lunch.
For the next few days, the stuff y’all watched on TV and read wire reports about chewed up 10-12 hours a day for a dozen reporters. Several of us worked without a weekend, starting Thursday night and going through our days off and picked up the regular work week without a break. In one weekend, we nearly used up a year of overtime, with 300 hours of OT being doled out to reporters, copy editors, designers, photographers, whoever.
The more tired we got, the more we started to think the overtime just wasn’t worth it.
The destruction was indescribable, yet we struggled to find new ways to describe it. “Destruction,” “debris,” “swath,” “roared,” “thundered,” and the whole freight train cliché were all informally banned amongst the reporters — to no complaints from the desk. The list got bigger by the day.
We joked that if we wrote too many more stories, we would be writing “the tornado leaped grimly from the heavens, casting its bad deeds upon the idle citizenry below” instead of “lunged from the sky, raining havoc on the residents of this area south of town” or “spun down, wrecking houses and trees in its path.”
Nebraska may get tornadoes, but not like this. Not 37 in one day, as the National Weather Service said we had. This is what I got my degree for, so rest assured it’s getting used.
But, hey, it does the old heart good to pump really fast once in a while, no?
All things being equal, as a cops reporter and loving every minute of it, I would rather have the blood pump from getting shot at or being in the raid van at a SWAT raid, not seeing a swirling mass foreshadowing my own demise. I have decided if I am going to get hurt or killed, may God make it by something small and mostly invisible, not massive and moving towards me, giving me ample time to ponder my death.
Reflections
I have been replaying that sequence of events in my mind, and it is amazing how many fight-or-flight responses I went through. Like vision. I had no peripheral vision at all. It was all straight ahead. I had no internal monologue, either. I was talking out loud the whole time. I also had absolutely no forethought. All words and actions were just done. There was no “Gee, I think I should go back toward the interstate and look at the damage.” I just did it.
I can’t consciously remember thinking, “Run away!” I just did it. I heard very little, if anything at all. My body was turned to purely survival mode. It’s really strange to think about yourself doing that. But then I think that if I had thought
about what I was doing, I wouldn’t be here to write you about it. All heavy, heavy stuff.
But I will tell you that I felt like I could fly for hours on all the adrenaline pumping through my soul. If someone had been trapped under a car nearby, I probably could have lifted it. It was like suddenly dropping a 429 big block V-8 into a Toyota Camry. With all that adrenaline, I felt like I could MOVE, man. You just feel powerful, and alive, so alive. It isn’t until you come down from that high that you realize how damned lucky you are to be on this earth, that God saw fit for you to file that night.
When southern folks ask me about it, I tell them I got a good dose of religion after the Lord decided to humble me some. You won’t find me down at the Pentacostal church speaking in tongues, but I am suddenly very aware of who’s in charge in the world, and it certainly ain’t me.