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The skies were a confused soupy gray on a summer evening almost twenty-five years ago. The air was drunk, the atmosphere darkening, drama beckoning. Subtle breezes turned rude.
In the small town of Harvard, Illinois, population 6000, the tornado siren shrieked of impending disaster, blaring through the premature dark to every home within shouting distance. Louder and softer as it turned; louder and softer.
The threat bore down. The winds became God's whip. Trees didn't know which way to go-jumping, bending, slashing, dancing. Homes groaned and creaked under the onslaught. Tornadoes were near and hovering.
Families gathered in basements, as I did with mine. Huddled we were, feet touching feet, and next to us a small radio...and on the radio a voice.
Mary was a salesperson for the local radio station I ran. She had done some on-air work in her time, but not much, mostly jumping in when we needed another voice for a commercial we were cutting.
Through an odd confluence of events she was the only person at the radio station that night.
When storms come people need information, and it's the radio station's job as long as it can broadcast, to bring that information to them. With no one else around, Mary slipped into the broadcast seat, switched off the station's automation and began to speak.
I could not physically get there. Minutes earlier, when I tried to open the back door of my house for that very purpose, the winds blew it back in my face stumbling me backwards. So I did the next best thing. I called Mary and she put me on the air with her by phone.
I was in the relative security of my basement on a cordless phone, she was at the station manning the controls and we tag-teamed. When she would go to rip off the latest updates from the wires I would fill in with safety advice and a recap of the latest we knew.
The cozy one story, six-roomed radio station sat right on the main drag in the middle of town. To the left of where Mary broadcast was a large plate glass window in which the night played out before her better than HD.
When I first called I told her in no uncertain terms that if at any point she felt the need to get off the air and find a safe place that she should. I said it several times. She said no each time...that she would be fine.
I see Mary with my mind's eye. I see her in that small studio that glowed like Paul Revere's lamp in the pitch dark of doom. The walls rattling, the window thumping, the roar of the ruthless winds rushing down the streets and alleyways around her.
I see her in the midst of chaos, her heart speeding with every lash of the storm. I see her leaning into her microphone. I hear her calm voice, informing and comforting her community on the brink.
Do you see her?
I saw Mary again last week. Her visage leapt to mind when a ferry carrying over four hundred mostly high school students capsized on its way to the island of Jeju.
Details are still unwinding for what happened to that unhappy ship. This much we do know: the captain was one of the first to be rescued...that can never be...and he's been arrested for it.
All significance is lost to the leader who commands in the calm sea, but runs from the rough, just when those he leads need him most. There is no worse leadership sin.
Of course positionally and by title, Mary was no leader. She was a saleslady. But in action, this thirty-three year old inexperienced wisp of a woman was more of a leader than the sixty year old uniformed seasoned captain of a Korean ferry.
In the first light of morning the day after the storm, we saw signs of its uncaring.
Tornadoes had indeed been close by, peaking at Harvard but never trouncing it. Wind shears struck too, like the back of a cruel hand.
The storm tossed its way through town leaving streets strewn with tree salad, but saved its worst severity for the outskirts.
There, barns were flattened. Proud old oaks, maples and pines were yanked from their moorings, trees whose gnarled roots exposed their march toward a slow death.
Gladly, there was no loss of human life...and that includes Mary, the light in the dark, the calm in the insanity, the voice of comfort, the strong voice heard over the storm.
If a certain captain had just a thimble full of her courage.
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