Barbara Garcia, Her Dog, and Life Under the Oklahoma Sky: The New Yorker Barbara Garcia had been living in her neighborhood in Moore, Oklahoma, for forty-five years before yesterday's tornado flattened her house. She was interviewed by a TV news crew while standing on top of the rubble of her home. She is covered in dust and has some scratches, but she describes the experience calmly - she took shelter in a bathroom, sitting on the toilet with her dog on her lap. She felt the stool lift up out of the floor. "I rolled around a little bit," she says, and then found herself lying in the debris. She never lost consciousness, but she lost her little dog. She looks over the pile of wood and metal scrap behind her. I know he's in here somewhere. There is much about Garcia that is very Oklahoman - her accent, her turns of phrase, her resilience, and the fact that she knew what she would do if a tornado came: "This was the game plan all through the years - to go in that little bathroom." All Oklahomans have a place in their house that they think will be the safest. Basements are best, but otherwise you want a spot without many windows and near sturdy walls, preferably. Everyone knows where they will take refuge when the skies are bad and the sirens are sounding, but very few ever find out if their plans are any good. There's a sense in Oklahoma that life on the ground is lived at the mercy of the sky. You can see a glimpse of this in the videos of Moore that show the slab-flat earth under the deep-gray expanse above. When it gets hot in Oklahoma, it gets so hot and so muggy that it's difficult to breathe. Cold comes in the form of ice storms that coat everything in an inch of ice and paralyze the world like a witch's curse. The early summer is tornado season, and, even when there's not a storm, the sun sets orange and the clouds billow till the sky appears as if it's erupting out of itself. When conditions are right for a tornado, the air above turns the sickly gray-green color of an old bruise and everything goes quiet. Tornadoes aren't like hurricanes, which rise up slowly and hulk across the ocean. Tornadoes whisk around somewhere above the clouds until they dart down, sometimes for just a few minutes, then leave behind a frayed earth and a sunny day. I lived in Oklahoma for only four years; I went to college in Norman, about half an hour south of Oklahoma City on I-35 and ten minutes south of Moore. People used to say that tornadoes had an uncanny way of dodging Norman because of an old Native American blessing on the area, or maybe because of a dip in the ground. Moore, on the other hand, has been the site of some of the state's most significant tornado damage - in 1999, 2003, and now in 2013 - but if there's a curse on Moore, I never heard about it. I didn't take tornadoes seriously. They were always threatening, but they always seemed to hit out in the open plains, where nobody lived, if they actually formed at all. Warnings would go out, plans would get derailed, and nothing ever happened. But people who are from Oklahoma, or who have lived there for a long time, have a healthier respect for tornadoes. Usually, nothing happens, but once in ten years is enough. And so Barbara Garcia went into that little bathroom, as she had probably done dozens of times before, but this time the tornado hit and, irrespective of forty-five years of experience, tore her house apart, as she knew it might. The reporter asks Garcia, "Are you able to comprehend what happened here?" "I know exactly what happened here," she replies. Off-camera, a member of the film crew sees something in the rubble: the dusty little nose of a terrier is poking out from under the panel of a washing machine. Tornadoes, for all their vicious bulk, are capricious. You often hear stories of half a house being reduced to toothpicks, while in the other half the knickknacks sit undisturbed on the shelf. They can rip a building out of the ground and leave a little dog dusty and dazed, but otherwise unscathed. Garcia rushes to help him out. "Oh, Bazzie," she calls to this small creature whose world has fallen in. Oh, Bazzie. Bless your little bitty heart.