Tornadoes and Twisted Chainlocks

 “I really wanna go to Amarillo,” I said to Amber as I picked her up in Denver. She looked puzzled. “Why?” 

“I don’t know. I just have this feeling about it. There’s that George Strait song, and it just looks enticing on the map. I like how it’s right in the middle of the top of the state.”

It made sense in my head.

We looked it up on the GPS. It’d be about 6 hours off course. We had three days to head east because she had work, and I was already planning on missing the first couple days of college.

“I will go to Amarillo with you some other time,” she said.

I love Amber. She has this voice of reason without the condescension which makes for a good road trip partner. 

I’d just finished my summer job in Wyoming. Amber had gotten a flight to Denver so she could ride back to North Carolina with me. We figured we’d get into something; we just didn’t know what.

Well, the Good Lord must have known what. We were on the edge of Colorado (the part that might as well be Kansas) when the hail started to beat down like a BB Gun attack from the heavens. We felt the wind sweeping against the Subaru. 

We parked under a bridge, alongside a few other vehicles, and a bald fellow with a tobacco-stained wife beater and sleeves of tattoos motioned for us to roll down the windows.

“Listen, now”, he hollered over the wind, “When this shit hits the fan, you ladies better be ready to run underneath the bridge!”

“What’s the shit,” we asked, “and why is it hitting the fan?”

“TORNADO!!!”

He didn’t have to say another word. We ran out of the car, which shook in the midst of the wind, booked it to the bridge, and huddled underneath. We reacted like a couple of mountain people who’d never driven through a tornado warning: wide-eyed, holding hands and praying. We reminded ourselves that Jesus was right there with us under that bridge. Amber was almost crying while I was laughing to keep from crying, so it evened out. 

I can’t remember how long we’d sat under the bridge for, but we saw some of the cars leaving, so we decided to keep driving till we found somewhere to hunker down.

We were about 20 minutes from the I-70 Diner. If you’ve ever done a road trip driving through Flagler, Colorado, and you got hungry, you’ve probably eaten there. It’s in the midst of a desolate highway, the only thing around in the middle of flat nothingness, adorned with checkered floors, neon lights, and scuffed red booths.

Amber got what most vegans would, a plate of fries. I got pancakes. The waitress was not amused by the worried looks on our faces. Surely we were just a few of the many inexperienced travelers who’d wound up at that table, paranoid and sopping with rain water for her to wipe up later.

“Do ya’ll get tornados a lot here?”

“Yep,” she said dryly, smacking her gum.

We’d found this barn with a bed in it that someone had put on Airbnb. I’d reserved it a few hours before.

“You think we can make it?” I asked. I looked up the mileage while she looked up the weather.

“We’re a couple hours away…”

“And we’ll be driving in the midst of the tornado zone.”

My heart sank as I threw $75 down the drain and cancelled the Airbnb, but based on the leaning of my gut and the look on Amber’s face at the mention of keeping on, we weren’t leaving Flagler, CO this evening.

To the chagrin of the waitress, we hung out in the diner petting an old lady's puppies and calling our families until closing time. Then we drove 50 feet to the Little England Motel.

We walked into an office with carpeted walls, decorations that your grandmama loved in the 80s, and buckets along the floor to catch the water from the leaking ceilings. 

A couple of men sat in the back of the dark room spitting dip into styrofoam and watching TV. A lady with reddened skin and a blank expression wandered towards the counter. We told her about our situation and asked for a room.

“Yeeaaaahhh….best not drive in this, uh...weather,” she said. “That’ll be $66. And, uh...if the tornado comes this way, you girls, uh...sit in the bathtub.”

We were greeted by cigarette fumes and dog hair on the carpet. 

Word of advice: if you are traveling in the midst of a tornado warning and there’s nowhere else to go but the sketchy hotel off the interstate, please don’t read the reviews as you’re in the room, about to try and sleep.

We learned from experience. The first review was just, “BED BUGS!” One person said they had a hard time sleeping because of the all-night shenanigans that went on in the parking lot, and another said they got so sketched that they left before morning. “This is where you go to get robbed or murdered.” Nice. 

On top of this, at the time, I was reading this historical account of outlaw women in the American west. One of the chapters was about Kate Bender, the hostess of the Bender Inn, an inn in 1870s Kansas that doubled as a serial killer scheme. We were near Kansas... 

But what do you do when there’s nowhere else to go and you don’t want to drive into a tornado? You try to forget that chapter you read, keep your knife and a can of Alaskan bear spray on you, watch some funny videos of cats, and pray a lot.

Our next Google search was “how to spot bed bugs.” We took all our stuff from the car. We were locking the door, and as we went to lock the door chain, we discovered that it was nailed on backwards. “It’ll still work, right?” I asked. “Watch,” said Amber, her eyebrows raised. She demonstrated that it did not work as she slammed the door open and the chain swung free. “I’m going to open the window,” she said, paranoia on her face, “So that way if we hear bad guys at the door we can escape through the window.” That sounded good to me, as the words “robbed” and “murdered” floated around in my head.

 

In the meantime, I rigged the backwards door chain with a piece of wadded up paper in the lock. Somehow, it seemed to work. Never before has a wad of paper given me more assurance.

After following some YouTube instructions on how to spot bed bugs and finding that the sheets and mattress were void of black spots, we sank into bed, a knife and a can of bear spray between us. We prayed, reminded that Jesus goes with you from underneath the highway’s bridges to the sketchy hotel rooms of America, and tried to sleep.

The parking lot wasn’t too noisy, bad guys didn’t knock, the tornado didn’t creep around, and despite the itchy feeling I had all night, I did not awake to bed bug bites. So we packed up and drove towards Kansas, forgetting our paranoia and laughing at the pansies on TripAdvisor.