I hail from Oklahoma, which is Choctaw for “land God sends tornadoes upon in blustery wrath.” This happens every year around May or June, presumably to inflict maximum damage on recently graduated drunken college students. There are even tornado trails, which tend to hit the same places, over and over again.

Moore, Oklahoma, for instance, has been hit several times. I won’t make any jokes about that, because last year was terrible. If you’re from Moore, I hope everything is okay and you guys have rebuilt. Ditto to the most recent folks afflicted in the Ozarks.

Other places tornadoes always hit are: trailer parks. I don’t know why. You would think that tornadoes would really try to pick on mansions or mountains or something, but they love trailer parks. Trailer parks will instinctively migrate every few years to try to throw off tornadoes, but tornadoes haven’t survived millions of years of evolution without figuring out how to track down trailer parks to eat. It’s science.

For whatever reason, tornadoes like to form over my parent’s house. Imagine a big funnel of wind, like Thor holding a glass sideways over the roof. It will spin and slowly turn vertical and then careen into one of two towns further East when it touches down. This means that we’ve never actually been hit by a tornado, but we often lose tree limbs and occasionally find golf balls, parts of cows, etc. strewn all over the lawn.

For this reason, quite sensibly, my parents built a storm shelter years ago. Because of flooding issues it’s above ground, so it’s effectively a closet in our garage with reinforced cement and steel. Overall it’s a very solid unit, and unless a bunch of trailer homes hide in our backyard during a thunder storm (thereby attracting an F-5), we could probably survive a tempest’s flurry in it.

There are two basic problems, however. First, it being attached to our garage, it has spent an inordinate amount of time full of crap we don’t want. I don’t mean boxes of things we might actually need, I mean large rolls of carpet, buckets of paint, and other bits left over from the original construction of the house which, even if we needed it, my mother would now be tired of aesthetically and update anyway.

In the past we’ve been able to cram into the storm cellar as a twister reaches its embryonic state above our chimney, and it only involves a little bit of nudging miscellaneous junk around to fit in the entire family and a full-grown Labrador retriever. Definitely cozy, but doable.

The second structural problem is that the door, while metal, is hollow. This means it could repel most of the other junk in our garage, such as the pet cats we would not allow inside with us, but if a steel beam managed to float into our garage during a tornado it could puncture through the steel and give my father an appendectomy.

The chances of this happening are, of course, quite marginal. All the same, my mother has been insisting for years now that we replace the current metal door with a heavy-duty, “mutants can’t get through here” type of behemoth titanium slab.

Dad genuinely considered upgrading to an anti-mutant door, but it turns out that in Oklahoma some jackass got a law passed requiring door installation companies to replace the entire frame (at much greater expense) rather than just adding a new door. This is because said jackass probably got lobbied by door jam contractors looking to make more money, and the result is of course that fewer people will get their doors fixed and will thus be killed by mutants during tornadoes. Well done, Oklahoma State Legislature.

Thus, Dad took up the position that we should just keep the old mostly satisfactory metal door, whereas Mom has maintained that it will be worth the several extra thousand dollars to upgrade the shelter if we ever actually use it. This puts Dad in a very strange position, because it pits the “cheap” part of his brain (the left hemisphere) against the “don’t die” part of his brain (the right hemisphere).

Ultimately Dad’s thrifty instincts won out.

For a while, anyway. I don’t know quite what happened because I’m up in New York, but apparently my mother hired a firm to build an entirely new, different, subterranean shelter in our backyard. Built out of scrapped battleship parts or something. This means that we have not one, but two tornado shelters on our property. The “mega shelter” for my mother to cower in, and the “classic shelter” for my dad to hunker in. On principle.

Thus, when the apocalypse happens, my parents will sit separately in their respective shelters, brooding about the great “Metal Door Fight of ’14” until the cats they won’t let in quit whining and they realize it’s safe to come outside. I haven’t seen the new shelter, but I’m kind of hoping that my parents will decorate their respective fortresses along gender lines, so that the backyard facility includes tea cups and weirdly-shaped pillows, and the one in the garage has an emergency supply of beer and maybe some old Playboys.

The lesson from this, I think, is that whenever you’re having relationship troubles you should just go and build a bunker somewhere behind your house. It might save your life and your marriage.

His and Hers Tornado Shelters