I remember I was living in Stilwater about 4 miles from where the tornado took down the smoke stacks in the old paper mill. It was a weekend and I was sleeping in. We didn't have AC, so the windows were open and the fans were on full blast. I remember waking up because my sister-in-law was calling me from her work. She worked at the video rental store in the Price Chopper plaza. I was annoyed to be woken and she started rambling about a tornado warning. We live in New York, not Kansas. We don't get tornados here I groused in an unspoken complaint about being woke up to hear this. I thanked her as politely as I could and got off the phone.
Looking out the window, I saw that the sky was dark. A funny type of dark. Being young and foolish, I shrugged it off as nonsense. Then I got dressed, got in my car and drove to McDonalds because they were selling beanie baby collectibles and releasing a new one each week. I drove the 5 miles or so to mcDonalds happy that I collected my beanie baby.
I was driving home on Route 4 & 32 along the river when I noticed the sky in my rear view mirror had taken on a darker greenish-black hue that I've never seen before. That's when I thought I might be in trouble. I stepped on the gas not really worrying about a traffic ticket as much as I was worried about that greenish-black sky closing in on me like something from a Stephen King movie.
I got home and raced into the empty house. The air inside and out was so heavy and moist, it was like some omnipresent entity that was impossible to ignore. I ran around closing the windows and trying to remember what people were supposed to do in the event of a tornado. Literally the only things I really knew were learned watching the movie Twister a few years before. Eventually, I stood in the house and my mind just went blank. I knew I was panicked, yet I was also calm in a way. It was the calmness of knowing that there was not all that much you really could do if the tornado was going to hit directly where you were.
About 5 minutes later, my parents pulled into the driveway. I was in the yard removing clothes from the clothes line. The wind had picked up and it was almost hard to walk from one point to another. My father grabbed a bunch of lawn chairs and told us we had exactly 5 minutes to gather anything of necessity or value in a bag - medication, ID and important documents or possessions, food, water, and meet in the basement. I can't remember how I got up to my upstairs bedroom, but I remember standing there trying to figure out what was important and how I could be expected to gather a lifetime of memories and valuable items in the space of 5 minutes in a small plastic bag. I think I grabbed some heirloom items and photo albums.
It seemed like only seconds had passed before I heard my father loudly telling us to get down into the basement now. We ran down into the damp basement and sat in lawn chairs listening to a police scanner and small am radio. It seemed like an eternity, but only a few minutes passed before we heard sirens and the police scanner was playing its tones loudly with so many voices and different calls that it was nearly impossible to follow. The only thing that was clear is that the tornado had been spotted and possibly touched down in Mechanicville. A very short time later, we heard rain and hail hitting our house so hard that it sounded like a thousand tiny hammers on the attack. Almost at the same time, there was a boom that shook the house and all of us. It almost sounded like an explosion. Suddenly everything went dark.
We heard on the scanner that was still running on battery that the tornado had hit the old paper mill on 4 & 32 and taken down the large smoke stacks. One of those hit a transformer in the power plant substation nearby hence taking out the power to most of the local area. We sat down there in the dark, saving our flashlights, for what felt like forever. Eventually the rain let up and the sun peaked out. My father told us we could go upstairs and gather more things if we needed to but be ready to come back down immediately.
I was standing in my bedroom looking north and the sky in that direction was still greenish-black in the distance. The sun was out on the other side of the house peeking around some dark clouds and an occasional rumble of thunder warned that this was not over. In the greenish black part of the sky, a bright flash of light caught my eye so I kept watching. Then I saw large pink balls of lightning with streaks coming out of them in all directions. The sky seemed to grow larger and darker and my father started to yell for us to come back down into the basement snapping me out of my trance-like state just staring at that lightning. The wind and rain began again and I hurried back into the basement for round 2.
I can't remember much about day after that point except that we eventually came out of the basement. Our house hadn't been damaged. We were without power for several days but nothing too severe. I remember a few days later driving into Mechanicville and seeing the wreckage. Houses flattened, with entire lifetimes' worth of valuables and memories strewed across the land like a garbage dump. Insulation pulled from the walls of homes that were left half-standing waving in the breeze like some type of creepy giant doll houses. Huge trees with snapped branches and the bark completely stripped off on one side of their stout trunks. I saw that the huge orange and white floats in the river near the lock that were one a heavy chain and anchored into the river had been pulled up and thrown up on the shore and into the trees.
Driving into Schatighoke across the bridge, many of the roads were nearly impassible due to downed wires and trees. Near the fairgrounds, large trees had been ripped up by their rooted and tossed like tangled jackstraws on people's laws and houses and cars. Even sacred ground was not exempt from mother natures wrath. A local graveyard had headstones even some caskets ripped from the ground.
It was truly devastating for the entire area and took a long time to recover. It was 20 years ago and I will never forget it even though I was not personally affect as much as many for whom it was life-changing.
