• Originally published April 30, 2009 at 5:06 p.m., updated April 30, 2009 at 10:33 p.m.

"There was just a pile of rubble where the buildings had stood, and my mind did not want to accept that image. I walked up towards the rubble with fear rising in my throat, because I didn't see how anyone could have survived the destruction visible."

Catherine Plaisant,

tornado survivor,

Maryland, April 20, 2008

Those ugly, charcoal-gray clouds that rumbled over Victoria last Monday were the most fearsome I've seen in a long time.

I use the word fearsome because fear is the emotion they seemed to bring out in most people.

"This is so scary," my wife said as incredibly heavy rain poured outside. "I thought for sure a tornado was going to come down out of that squall line," a friend said later. And my little dog, well, she just hid behind my legs and waited it out.

Was there fear at your house, or your workplace? I assume there was, in many cases. I had driven home as the most ominous of the clouds rolled in and the first rain began to fall on our northeast side of town. I swear this one big globule of a storm cloud, dark and moving as if it were actually rolling, seemed to have a lifeforce within it.

Yes, I admit it, that got to me.

I had two close brushes with tornadoes as a boy, both of them at our little summer cottage on Galveston Bay.

The first was a waterspout, swirling straight for us from a couple of miles out in the water. Luckily, it broke off and trailed back into the overhead clouds before it got to us.

The second time was even scarier, partly because it came in the middle of the night. I was awakened by high winds and rain, and my father yelling for all us kids to get in the station wagon.

That was a mistake, but he was doing what he thought was right. As I ran the few yards from the cottage door to the station wagon, I saw a blurry object pass in front of me at such a high speed that I couldn't tell what it was, at first.

But then, as I looked to my right, where it had gone, I could see it was the picnic table from off our pier. Had it hit me, well, that would have been all she wrote. The next morning, when we returned to the bay house, our neighbor's roof was gone, but there was virtually no damage to ours. Another flying object did break a window out of the station wagon, however.

Storm chasers that I've read about always say they think March is the worst month for tornadoes, or best, if you're crazy enough to chase them.

But those frightening clouds of last Monday, April 27, they could have easily produced a twister, like the one that lady wrote about in Maryland in April a year ago.

And we may not be out of the woods yet, as we go into May. In fact, the deadliest twisters in Texas history all came in May. It was May 11, 1953, when one hit Waco, and May 18, 1902, when another devastated Goliad. Each of those monsters claimed 114 lives.

And the giant twister that hit Jarrell and killed 27 people set down on May 27, 1997.

May has been a killer month for twisters.

So, the moral to this story is to do like the guy says at the end of the 1950s movie, "The Thing from Another World." He warned people everywhere to, "Watch the skies. Keep watching the skies."

And let's all pray the toll won't be added to this year.

Jim Bishop is a senior editor for the Advocate. Leave him a message at 361-574-1210 or jbishop@vicad.com or comment on this column at www.VictoriaAdvocate.com.

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