Wednesday, April 15, 1998

Old storm shelter smart move after all

By Rheta Grimsley Johnson

FISHTRAP HOLLOW, Miss. -- I make several passes with the mower before stopping to think about it. The hole in the side of the hill is as much a part of the landscape as the house, or the hackberry tree.

The tornado shelter here is crude and homemade, concrete blocks lined with galvanized tin. There's a board for a bench. Bearded irises outline the entrance.

The family of six who lived here for decades must have had reason to think the shelter a good idea. The hole would hold six if it had to. I wonder how often the family huddled down there in the dark, hostages in the hollow. And I wonder what particular storm inspired all that digging.

In 10 years, I've never been inside. Once I used a broom handle to drop my ferns into the hole for the winter, retrieving them the same way. A dog named Barney favored the shelter as a doghouse, one that stayed cool in the summer, warm in the winter and dry year-round.

I've joked countless times that I'd rather die in a storm than crawl in a tin hole filled with snakes. A scene from one of those Indiana Jones movies always comes to my mind. I've thought of planting a vine to disguise the gap in the ground.

But I never fill it in.

Mother Nature has a wicked sense of irony. This is the time of the year when the earth looks best, when dogwood bursts into bloom like popcorn cooking, and wild azalea makes a Baptist bridal shower of the creekbank. May apples give the roadsides a rain forest look. Wild sweet william works its way through winter's brown carpet. There is a sense that life goes on, despite our many defeats.

It's this same, optimistic time of year that a funnel is apt to rip through the woods like a comb parting dark hair. In the midst of nature's renewal, there always, always is death.

I cannot remember a Holy Week without a story about a Southern church holding its Easter services in a borrowed sanctuary. More than a dozen Alabama churches suffered damage in the past few weeks. There'll be a bonanza of displaced church stories this year.

And then there are the photographs of stunned victims surveying the rubble. Someone will be holding a photograph, a memento State Farm can't replace. Once they get past the shock of deaths, it's time to consider the loss of a lifetime's accumulations.

There was one fatality near here ; the story, of course, was unbelievably sad.

A teen-age boy died in his house trailer when a water heater landed on his head. His two sisters had left the trailer to go to their grandparents' house; he stayed behind. Richard Sills was 16.

Strangely enough, they all lived in the Pontotoc County community called Hurricane.

In this Land Without Basements, the hillside tornado shelter is a staple. The rural South has no subdivision covenant to say it can't be done. You see them everywhere, every size and shape. I've often thought they'd make a good subject for a coffee-table photo book: Storm Shelters in the South.

Then you read about a tornado system like this one, of maximum strength. If you were in its path, there was almost no way to survive it, experts say. And you see the pictures of victims and vanished homes.

Suddenly the old hole in the hillside is more than a landscaping challenge, or a place to winter ferns, or a regional novelty. Suddenly that old hole makes perfect sense.

King Features Syndicate