The wind, the caller said, had come down across a section of county road and blown down a building. It had happened in the early morning, the caller said, and they didn’t know anything else about it, but I should look into it.
I called up the public safety director, who confirmed that wind had taken place, and also that it had blown down a building. I then called up my guy at the National Weather Service, who is always excited to talk about freakish weather.
What it was, he said, was a microburst, or straight-line wind. What happens sometimes, he said, is that under certain atmospheric conditions, the sky will belch out a single gust of wind with the power of a tornado. He didn’t know how fast this particular wind was moving -- there was no monitoring equipment within its path of destruction -- but well over 100 miles per hour was not uncommon for these microbursts.
I asked him if this was rare.
No, not particularly, he said. It happens sometimes, often in the woods where no one knows about it. Occasionally, without any sort of warning, a tremendous blast of crushing wind just rumbles down from the sky and destroys anything in its path. It’s just one of those things.
I hopped in my car and drove out to the site.
When I got there, I discovered that the wind had caused damage on both sides of the county road. On the left side of the road, it had hit a church, blowing out a stained glass window which, according to the gentleman outside the church cleaning up the glass, cost $30,000.
It had then passed across the road and hit the garage.
It was a private garage, perhaps 40’x40’, surrounded by a cyclone fence, which was not aptly named. It had been absolutely obliterated. The fence had been ripped from the earth and tangled. The garage looked as if a C4 charge had gone off within it. Twisted corrugated steel lay in the field surrounding the garage. Only the cinderblock foundation remained. Fiberglass insulation hung from the pine trees like tinsel. Other pine trees lay on the ground, not uprooted, but snapped off at the base. A man, a boy, and a dog wandered the property, surveying the damage.
Bent go-kart frames and small engine parts littered the ground.
I struck up a conversation with the man.
This had been his garage, he said, holding the boy’s shoulders. The boy was young, no older than 9 or 10. He struggled to look unaffected in front of me, but it clearly took effort.
The garage, the man said, had been where he and his son built and tinkered on the boy’s go-karts. The boy had racing in his blood, the man said, and he hit the go-kart track almost every weekend.
The man and the boy’s mother had separated some years before, he said, but they remained friends. In fact, he said, he considered his ex-wife’s new husband to be a great friend as well, and he, the ex, and the new husband often spent time together at the boy’s races.
People think we’re crazy, he said, but it works for us.
They were bound by their love of the boy, who loved his go-karts, or did until God’s finger had ground them into the earth with a destroying wind.
I asked the boy if I could talk to him for a moment. He nodded.
“I’m sorry about this, young man,” I said to him. “I’m sure this has been a rough morning for you.”
The boy said he had wept all morning. He would survive, but it was hard.
“I lost my life today,” he said in a soft southern accent. “Go-karts is my life.”
I have interviewed a governor, three senators, two attorney generals, and countless doctors, lawyers, and theologians.
That remains the most profound artistic statement I have ever heard.