Lloyd Wilson spent a melancholy afternoon and evening cleaning up the farm he was leaving forever.
He used a rented payloader to bury rock piles and other rubbish he’d promised to get rid of before the buyer took over the property. He was feeling a bit blue as he worked, thinking about the last few years, in which his wife left him and he decided he had to shut down the farm.
Then two tornadoes struck.
“I didn’t know which way to go,” said Wilson about the June tornado strike at his former farm in Crane Valley, 100 kilometres south of Moose Jaw, Sask.
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Wilson caught sight of a big, black scary thing across the valley, about a half-kilometre away from his farmyard. It was heading straight for him.
He made a quick call from his cell phone to the man who had rented him the payloader, asking him what to do with a payloader caught in the path of a twister.
“He said ‘Put down the bucket and hold on’,” which is what Wilson did.
The tornado tore across the land and ripped into the yard, almost knocking the 25-tonne payloader over. Jarred for a moment, Wilson soon recovered his wits and saw what few people ever see and live to tell – the inside of a cyclone.
“Everything was just going in a big circle,” said Wilson.
“It mesmerized me.”
The jolt occurred when the spinning blade of the tornado’s front hit the payloader, but inside the swirling storm Wilson was in a strangely small sea of calm.
He watched plywood boards corkscrew around and up, and wondered where they came from. He saw the shingles fly off the roof of the 1919 farmhouse, and saw the chimney disintegrate one brick at a time as it was sucked spiralling up into the storm.
But where he was, it was calm.
Then the payloader was jolted again when the eye of the storm passed on and the back end of the tornado hit.
Wilson was still there, if a little shaken, watching the tempest pass from sight. It had been in the farmyard for less than a minute, Wilson estimates.
He sat in the cab, looking out on the devastation, scared to wander into the yard, where live electrical cables were lying where the storm had tossed them.
While in the payloader he was called by the RCMP, who had been contacted by the man Wilson had called, and then by Environment Canada tornado watchers in Edmonton.
They asked him where he was, and after finding out informed him that there was another tornado almost right on top of him. Wilson looked out and noticed the trees were twisting and rocking in all directions.
The first twister came from the southwest going northeast. This came from the southeast going northwest.
This tornado was not as hard hitting, but lasted much longer, taking about 20 minutes to crawl through the yard. And Wilson couldn’t see much from the inside of this tornado because rain was flooding down too hard and it was black as night. He hoped the twister didn’t hit his scrap iron pile and begin throwing around quarter-inch thick sheets.
Eventually, when this twister passed, Wilson sat safe in the payloader yet again, surveying the devastation.
Five outbuildings had been leveled. The roof had been torn off his garage. An old threshing machine had been thrown up a hill. The siding on the walls of the house were pockmarked with impact craters.
Wilson felt a little unsettled by the experience, so he called a neighbor and asked if he could sleep over. He got to his truck and gingerly crossed the yard, trying to avoid the huge wood splinters, nails and spikes that had been randomly thrown around.
In the days after the tornado strike, Wilson noticed some eerie phenomena.
All of the blackbirds that usually made a playground of the yard were gone. None returned for three weeks.
And the farmyard became infested with hundreds of horseflies, which had never been a problem before.
Some things were just gone.
“I never did see the old tomcat again,” said Wilson.
And some new things, such as a big deep freeze, had arrived, origin unknown.
Wilson isn’t upset about what happened. He reckons few people get directly hit by a tornado and walk away from it. He doesn’t know if anyone has ever been hit by two tornadoes in the same day, within one hour.
He feels lucky.
And though giving up the farm and seeing his marriage end has been difficult, he says the tornadoes closed a door on that part of his life, and let him get on with the next part.
“In a sense, it brought closure,” said Wilson.
