Somehow I belonged

Just a highway sign. All I need to see is that there's an exit coming up, and if I take it, I'll get to Hudsonville. With a pile of relatives in west Michigan, it's entirely possible that I have some there, but I don't know who they'd be and I'm not thinking of them when I see the sign. What I think is "tornado."

Amazing, how some synapses fire images the way they do, in this case a memory without line or shape or form. I don't remember seeing any pictures, and the tornado--a huge one, history says--ripped through a couple of small towns east of Lake Michigan. All I need to do is see that highway sign and I think tornado.  

It's not hard to see why. Eighteen people died, hundreds were injured. Houses and businesses were leveled, some totally gone once the storm passed. The Hudsonville tornado has its own Wikipedia page. It was a monster spun out of a storm that left devastation all over the Midwest. 

That's the tornado I remember, even though, as a boy, I lived all the way across the lake. While other twisters were spun from the same storm, in Wisconsin, where I lived, I had--and still have--no idea where they hit. What I remember is that some monster storm hit Hudsonville.

It was April 3, 1956, a time, the paper says, when the Grand Rapids Press cost seven cents. Nationally, the Hudsonville/Standale tornado had to have been big news. Many died. Shocking devastation. 

I'm 71 years old. If my math is any good, in April of 1956, I was eight years old, just a month away from finishing second grade at Oostburg Christian School, where prayer was a very special part of the curriculum. I remember my teacher fondly, but I don't remember her praying for Hudsonville. She must have. Part of the reason I think tornado when I see the exit results from hearing about it from Miss DeVries, who wasn't from Michigan either. 

It had to be a huge story, and I had to be scared. I was a little boy, eight years old. When adults I knew talked about Hudsonville, I'm sure I felt the timber of their voices quake, not because they knew anyone either, but because it was an F-5. That tornado, just across the lake, was a monster. There are good reasons for the instinctive connections my mind manifests every time I'm on 131. 

But there's more. This tornado got talked about, not simply because it was a monster. My parents, like my teacher, must have conveyed the sense that this one hit very, very close to home--not because it hit just 90 miles away, just across Lake Michigan, but because there were people in Hudsonville who were just like us, who talked like we did, who prayed like we did. Those people weren't just Michiganders, they were Michiganders of a peculiar kind, a people I didn't know but was still a part of, not by choice but something more mysterious.

I can't imagine my parents talking about "Dutch" people, but I don't doubt for a moment that when I listened in to their grief and concern they used language like "our people." My mother was fourth generation American, my father was third; but church affiliation made ethnicity huge. Those who were injured, even some who died, were "our people." 

Sketchy scrapbooked memories from sixty-some years ago always appear at a plain old highway sign in western Michigan, memories that remind me of tornado-torn Hudsonville, memories that once taught me something mysterious about tribe, about belonging, about community. 

Somehow the OCS second-grade was part of it. As were the Schaaps. As was I.