A while back, I blogged the question, "Has anyone ever actually seen a tornado?"
Well, had I been at our cabin in Wausaukee Friday evening as planned, I would've.
One touched down maybe a few hundred yards from our little mobile home, just across the lake, at about 5 p.m.
The tornado actually killed a man on the other side of town, after it skipped east on Long Lake Road. I saw the damage myself on Saturday.
It was extensive.
Amazingly, not so much as a lawn chair was tipped over at our cabin, but on the other end of the lake, trees were snapped in half, taking down power lines and sitting on top of propane tanks. A day later, the road was closed, but I drove through, anyway. This was right on my running route. If the tornado would've been any closer, we might've suffered the same fate as the man in his trailer on Mud Lake.
Locals we talked to Saturday said the sky turned a creamy yellow, then black. Some said they heard sirens, others didn't. Of course, we have no basement at the cabin, so I'm not entirely sure where we would've gone had we headed up Friday instead of Saturday.
Kinda scary, isn't it?
I won't make a bigger deal of this near miss than I already have, because the odds of a another tornado hitting our little lake, in our little town, are probably close to zero. But it still gives me pause.
Had things shaken out just a tiny bit differently Friday, I might not be sitting here back in Milwaukee writing this blog.
Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.
Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.
Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.
