An incredibly strong and violent line of storms passed through the Southeast yesterday, spawning tornadoes left and right. The temperature dropped almost 40 degrees, from a balmy 75 degrees to a more normal January temperature of 37 degrees. The news stations made their meteorologists earn this month’s pay by broadcasting continuously whenever their was an active tornado warning in the viewing area, which was the case from noon to midnight, at least.
It’s hard to call people who have lost their homes and all of their belongings lucky, but from all reports thus far, everyone who was in the wake of a tornado in the Southeast yesterday did manage to walk away with their lives, if nothing else. News crews were on the scene at one such location following a twister, and spoke to a family who, at the last minute, decided to bail out of their mobile home in favor of a ditch, and, almost immediately after, watched the trailer disintegrate in the winds of a tornado.
This family was in shock; thankful for their lives as they stood in front of television cameras amidst the rubble that used to be their home. And then, as TV viewers everywhere anticipated, it happened: The mother described the tornado’s deafening noise in words that are all to familiar, “It sounded like a freight train.”
Apparently, Southern tornadoes sound like nothing else. As far back as the news media chronicles, individuals across all of the southern states use the same description. Tornadoes never sound like passenger trains, like AmTrak speeding through your home, but like freight trains. They are similar in sound to nothing else, whether transportation vessel, machinery or other loud phenomena. And that’s not the only running theme that you see on the 6 o’clock report: it is also an uncanny coincidence that the interviewee who has just witnessed one of nature’s most destructive forces is missing one or more visible teeth.
(See “Storm Damage” video at http://cfc.abc3340.com/videoondemand.cfm. The “freight train” line was omitted; locals don’t want to see that behavior reinforced on web clips.)
“You might be a redneck if…you’ve been on TV more than five times describing the sound of a tornado.”
Jeff Foxworthy, comedian and author of the You Might Be a Redneck If…books, has also taken note, and built a career on comedy stylings that feature tornado survivors’ accounts of the carnage. It normally wouldn’t be a laughing matter, but the freight train description is inescapable, supported by the toothless country drawl of its narrator. Other Southerners I have talked to agree: just when you think that you have risen above the stereotype placed on you by the rest of the nation (think dirt roads, barefoot children, outhouses, inbreeding and slow thinkers), national media broadcasts Joe Bob or Billy Rae mourning the loss of their double-wide. So the typecast continues.
