It didn't sound like any train I've ever heard.

Below is a recounting of my story of the November 15, 2005 tornado:

I left work at 3:35, a little past my normal time, and headed home to get my wallet because I left it on the bookcase by accident that morning. Then I was going to head to Jasper to meet Wife for dinner and pick up Son, since Wife has school on Tuesday nights. Around 3:50, I turned onto Hwy. 231 and headed south, heard the tornado warnings on the radio, and thought that, according to the current information, whatever tornado that was in the area was going to be north/northwest of me, so I figured I was in the clear - I was not aware of the storms that were still in the immediate vicinity to the southwest of me.

Well ... I wasn't in the clear. As I was continued to drive south, the rain intensified something fierce, and as I cleared this small hill just past Raglesville turnoff, I saw something in the field off to the right (to the west/southwest). The sky was a greenish tint in that direction, and there was this thing in the field .... it didn't really occur to me that it might be a funnel cloud that had touched down, and I'll tell you why I felt this way:

I had kept my eyes peeled for a funnel cloud, and was expecting to see something totally different than what I saw - you see on TV how there are these really dark clouds in the sky, and then a really skinny funnel cloud extending down to the ground from those clouds. That's not what it looked like at all. It looked more like a really thick swarm of bees, about 30 or 40 feet wide. I remember thinking, "Huh .... the rain in that one particular spot must be really intense." It didn't occur to me until after the fact that it was something besides very heavy rain (in spite of the myriad warnings crossing the radio by this time).

The highway (and my path) took me directly past it, roughly 100 yards or so away. The rain picked up even more, and I felt like my truck could take off toward Oz at any time. You know how, in the old Tom and Jerry cartoons when Tom's got the s**t scared out of him, you can see his heart trying to beat out of his chest? That's exactly how I felt - my heart had never beat so hard in my life, and every thump-thump just shook me to my core. I could feel it in every square inch of my body.

I know that they say that if you're in a vehicle during a tornado, it would be wise to abandon it, retire to the nearest ditch and cover your head. Of course, I failed to do so, and continued driving despite being blown all over the road. I got to the house, sprinted in, made a note of the pounding rain, the diagonal nature of the trees and how the power lines were essentially stretched taut in my direction, grabbed my wallet and got the hell out, sprinted back to the vehicle and continued my sojourn to Jasper, never looking back.

Once I got to Loogootee, about 7 miles south of the house, about eight or nine emergency vehicles - ambulances, fire trucks, civil defense vehicles - passed me and were just booking it back north. At that time, the radio said that there was "substantial structural damage in Bramble." This is significant because Bramble is the tiny spot-in-the-road community I call home.

I called Wife and we decided that we would skip dinner, and once I met her in Jasper, we would drive back up to see if we still had a house - chances weren't very good that we did, since there are only about 15 houses here, and odds were that if there was damage, we would be included. However, when we got back to Bramble, we both breathed a sigh of relief as we saw that our house still stood with no damage, and none of our neighbors were hit either.

Its path took it about 3/4 of a mile north of the house - as I later learned, that "thick swarm of bees in the field" I saw was an F-3 tornado. There were four houses just absolutely *leveled* right there, probably but moments after I drove past, but no one was seriously hurt, thank God.

I've never been through anything like it, and don't care to ever again. I thought I was going to die. Not "die," like, "Oh my God, I would just die if she saw me with this awful haircut!" The other kind, where you cash in your chips at the end.

About two hours after the original storm, I saw Wife off to class and went to go see Son at the sitter's in Jasper. We decided to keep him at the sitter's since it wasn't clear as to when power would be back on, and it was going to get cold that night. Just as I was leaving and starting the vehicle back up, the tornado sirens went off - there was a tornado warning in Jasper. Simultaneously - and Hollywood would never accept such a story because it's so far-fetched, but I swear on a stack of Bibles that it is true - they said on the radio that there was another funnel cloud sighted near Bramble, this one to the south of the house. Fortunately, that one did not come to pass.

What did I learn from this experience? Well, I learned what I am prone to do during a tornado or other emergency: panic. Hard.