The Mercy of the Sky: The Story of a Tornado by Holly Bailey

Author:Holly Bailey [Bailey, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Disaster, History, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9780525427490
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

3:15 P.M., MAY 20

Lando Hite was inside one of the barns at Celestial Acres, a horse-training facility on the grounds of the 160-acre Orr Family Farm just off 149th Street and Western Avenue, when he noticed the horses were starting to act a little spooked. Outside the wind was picking up, but Hite, a twenty-four-year-old Oklahoma native, didn’t think much of it. There had been bad weather the day before and the day before that. It was a typical spring day in Oklahoma and he was used to the afternoon storms, even if the horses weren’t.

Tall and skinny with a gentle drawl, Hite was a self-described cowboy, or at least that’s what he said when people asked him what he did for a living. He slept on a bunk inside a tiny tack room at the farm, where he worked as a caretaker and exercise rider for more than a dozen Thoroughbred racehorses. As they often were at this time of year, the stables were almost full—packed with some sixty-five other Thoroughbreds and quarter horses in town to compete in the spring races at Remington Park, on the north side of Oklahoma City.

There were no meets that Monday, and Hite spent the day as he usually did, grooming and riding the horses around Celestial Acres’ training track. It sat alongside the agriculture theme park operated by the Orr family, which featured pony rides and a petting zoo full of chickens, pigs, rabbits, goats, and sheep. The farm was a popular place in May, often crawling with kids on their end-of-the-school-year field trips, but it was quiet on this Monday as a result of the ominous skies. Soon enough the heavens opened up, pounding the barns with heavy rain, large hail, and blistering winds as loud claps of thunder shook the ground like tiny earthquakes.

Hite stayed inside with the horses until he noticed that the storm had suddenly let up. Walking out into the yard to enjoy the reprieve, he immediately sensed that something was off. It was strangely quiet. There were no birds chirping, no sound of traffic, just an eerie stillness. That’s when he glanced toward the west and saw it in the distance: an angry black vortex on the ground no more than a mile away heading down 149th Street straight for him. He had never seen a tornado before, only on television or in the movies. He stood frozen for a second wondering what to do, until he was hit by a straight-on wind gust that almost blew him to the ground.

Hearing a horse neighing behind him, he booked it back to the stables and began freeing all the animals he could, running from building to building as he herded them from their stalls toward the open pasture behind the farm. He hoped that allowing the horses to run free might give them a better chance of surviving the monster tornado than they would have penned up in buildings that already seemed to be swaying in the terrible winds.

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