Twisted Twister Tale

When I first moved to Kansas ten years ago, one of the things I really wanted to see was a real, live tornado.

Yes, I confess, the desire to be entertained by destruction is a bit gruesome. It’s like what Eliab told young David in 1 Samuel 17, when David came to the battlefield of Goliath and the Phillistines: “I know how conceited you are and how wicked your heart is; you came down only to watch the battle.”

I’ve yet to see a tornado. But 19 year-old Matt Suter of Missouri sure has seen one--up close and real personal. This from the Kansas City Star:

Every time a late-night freight train thunders past, Suter wakes up and remembers the vicious twister that pulled him from his home March 12 and landed him in a pasture — a quarter-mile away…

On the night of the tornado, Suter said, he was watching television news in only his boxer shorts when he heard a jetlike roar approaching the trailer he shared with his grandmother and uncle.

He was trying to shut a window in the living room, and his grandmother was in the kitchen, when the tornado struck, he said.

“The window busted, and the door got sucked out,” Suter said. “I looked at my grandmother, and the walls were like Jell-O. The trailer was rocking back and forth. I jumped between the coffee table and couch, and I remember the trailer tipping.”

His grandmother, Linda Kelley, said Suter had hollered at her in the trailer, and when she came into the kitchen “I turned around to look at where he was, and that whole end of the trailer was just gone.”

A large heavy glass lamp struck Suter on the top of his head, knocking him unconscious, he said.

When he came to, Suter found himself in a soft, grassy pasture. Last week a global positioning satellite device used by National Weather Service meteorologist Dave Gaede measured the distance at 1,307 feet from the trailer site.

After reading that, I'm rethinking my desire to see a tornado.