Loretta opens her journal and begins to recount the day of June 24, 2003, on her family’s twenty-four-acre farm near Manchester, South Dakota. Her grandchildren had been splashing around in a small plastic swimming pool on the west side of their rambling, nearly hundred-year-old home. One of her grandsons, four-year-old Jacob, was reclining in a lounge chair near the pool as though he were at the lapping edge of the ocean, and not on the high South Dakotan plains. The place was surrounded by elm, spruce, and cottonwood trees so thick that the house could scarcely be seen from the dirt road.
At around six thirty that evening, Harold, Loretta, their sons, daughters, and grandchildren all loaded into the pickup and drove over to dinner at the Unruh farm, on the other side of Manchester. They brought their wooden ice-cream maker with them to prepare dessert. By the time they arrived, Mike Unruh’s weather radio was wailing. A tornado had been spotted a hundred miles southwest, between Fort Thompson and Woonsocket. “A long ways away, we thought. Did Mike turn the weather radio off? I don’t remember hearing it anymore that evening,” Loretta later wrote in her journal.
Liz Unruh made a pizza, and they followed dinner with ice cream, complete with strawberries and chocolate syrup. It was during dessert that the phone rang. Mike Unruh’s brother was on the line. “If you look east,” he said, “you’ll see a tornado.”
They filed out of the house and gathered in the yard. Off in the east, they saw it, “a short, fat, gray tornado. I don’t remember being scared,” Loretta wrote. “We kind of walked down the road going east, children and all. Above, big clouds were building. We scattered out on the road looking east, feeling quite a bit of excitement. Bill Fox came by in his pickup and said he’d heard there was a storm in Manchester, and said he was going over. ‘That’s where we live,’ I exclaimed.”
As Loretta spoke, insulation began to flutter down around them like snow. They walked back to the Unruh house. Harold, Mike Unruh, and Loretta’s son Ace prepared to leave and see about the farm. Loretta’s daughter Eva called their house, but the answering machine never picked up.
The phone rang again at the Unruhs’. This time, it was Harold’s brother on the line. He asked Liz, “Are they there?”
“Yes,” Liz said. “They’re all here.”
“Their place is gone.”
Loretta ran out of the house. Harold, Mike, and Ace were about to pull away. She caught up to them and relayed the bitter news.
It was their basement into which Kingsbury County sheriff Charlie Smith had called, “Harold? Harold?” The mud-coated basset hound found wandering around the wood and cinder blocks was their dog, Bailey. It was the destruction of their home that shed turbulence into the pressure profile sampled by Tim Samaras’s turtle. The defining moment of Tim’s life is theirs, too.
Their new brick home was the last big project of Harold’s life; he died in 2008 at the age of seventy. Loretta and her son Lockwood offer to take me on a drive. We pile into their minivan and head into Manchester. The old sign still stands, battered, bowed in at the center, its edges curling around the wooden posts. We step into the kind of bitter prairie cold that makes skin sting and bones ache, and we walk toward the monument to a ghost town. Harold had laid its flagstone foundation, and at the center is a marble plaque with raised bronze lettering that tells the story of Manchester’s end: JUST PAST SUPPERTIME, AT ABOUT 7:30 P.M., TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2003, THE SKY VIRTUALLY FELL ON MANCHESTER. It goes on to say that though the F4 destroyed the artifacts of the township’s 122-year history, the neighbors banded together to help each other just the same. As a coda, the last line is a quote: “THAT’S THE BIGGEST DROP EVER RECORDED,” SAID TORNADO RESEARCHER TIM SAMARAS, “LIKE STEPPING INTO AN ELEVATOR AND HURTLING UP 4,000 FEET IN TEN SECONDS.”
We climb back into the minivan, and Lockwood steers over dirt roads hummocked with snowdrifts. A John Deere tractor mechanic, he wears tan leather gloves and a canvas jacket that smells of diesel. He brakes at an empty field near Redstone Creek, and he and Loretta look out over what had once been their home.
“The foundation of the garage is still there,” Loretta observes.
“The house was east and south of that slab,” Lockwood says. “It’s been cleaned up, pushed in. The barn was right there. The hog barn was behind it.”
“Every time I come out here in the summertime,” Loretta says, “I hear the birds sing, the meadowlarks.”
“We had a row of poplars clear to the ditch to the north, and maples to the east.”
The weak winter sun hangs low in the sky, a dying coal through the haze. I walk away from the car to a spot on the dirt road near the intersection of 206th Street and 425th Avenue. To the east, in a field of nubbed corn, the slouching hulk of a steel granary remains where it had been deposited nearly twelve years before.
I look to the west and try to imagine a minivan fishtailing down a rain-slicked road, its gravel the consistency of cake batter. Tim is behind the wheel, and he’s barreling east with an eye on the tornado to his right, intuiting the location where two trajectories will converge. He picks this patch of dirt road, hurriedly deploys the turtle, and speeds away, perhaps watching in the rearview mirror.
He doesn’t know it yet, but even as the Yost farm fails, even as the
