The air in Manchaca, Texas is muggy and grumbling this evening.  Low, dark clouds are shouldering against each other, and the buzzards who sleep on the Dark Tower at the end of the street are coming home to roost early.  The thunder is ominous but tentative, like a foul-tempered old man trying to make up his mind about whether a kid needs to be smacked.

It is on the verge of being Tornado Weather.

Growing up in rural Kansas, I learned how Tornado Weather felt, looked, and smelled.  And there’s a certain tipping point, a certain greenish tint and a certain thick, tense heaviness that the air takes on, when you know that something Big and Bad is going to happen.

The last time I experienced that feeling — when I had the sick, sure sense of inevitable meteorological doom – was on May 27, 1997.  I stepped outside that day, and the air was like atomized lead.

“It’s Tornado Weather,” I thought, and I spent the rest of the day watching the storm clouds, fully expecting them to try to murder my entire community.

But no tornado hit Manchaca that day.  Instead, an F5 monster mauled the town of Jarrell about forty-five miles north of here, killing twenty-seven people and scrubbing an entire subdivision down to the slabs.   (“F5″ was the most powerful storm rating on the old Fujita scale.)

I thought of the Jarrell tornado again three weeks ago, on May 4, 2007, when an EF5 wedge tornado destroyed Greensburg, Kansas, killing ten.  (The Greensburg beast was the first on record to hit the top of the new Enhanced Fujita scale, which had only been in place since February.  Lucky Greensburg!)

Both the Jarrell and Greensburg tornadoes reminded me (as did the 1990 Hesston tornado, the 1991 Andover tornado, the 1999 Moore tornado, and other Big Ones) of my most vivid memory from my pre-teen years:  The June 8, 1966 F5 tornado that devastated Topeka, Kansas.

It was the day after my eighth birthday, and my parents were hauling me and my two younger brothers on a camping vacation through north-central Kansas, with an eventual destination of my mother’s childhood home — the Koci farm near Auburn, just southwest of Topeka.  We had camped two or three nights in a row, but the weather on the evening of June 8 turned so foul that Mom and Dad actually paid for a motel room near Council Grove.  This was unprecedented.

On the morning of June 9, my mother turned on the black-and-white TV in the room and began freaking out at a level I’d never witnessed before.  Because there, on the snowy screen, two of my uncles were among the men digging through the debris of a demolished house.  A huge tornado had struck Topeka and the surrounding area, and this wrecked house was only one of dozens.  Perhaps hundreds.

My mother was convinced that the house was my Aunt Louise’s.  So, in another unprecedented move, she tried to telephone both Aunt Louise and Grandma Koci from the motel.  But of course the phone lines were out of commission.

The drive from Council Grove to Auburn was intense.  As we neared Topeka, storm debris was everywhere.  Dad had to maneuver around fallen trees on the road several times.  I believe we were also stopped by a Kansas Highway Patrol roadblock at one point — but when Mom and Dad explained that we were driving into the devastated area because we had Family there, the troopers waved us on through.

When we finally reached ”Kociville,” we were amazed to discover that all three houses on the property — Uncle Martin’s, Aunt Louise’s, and Grandma Koci’s — were still intact.  The trees were in bad shape, but the houses and people were fine.  I think Mom just about passed out from relief.

As Uncle Martin soon told us, though, it had been a near thing.  He had been working in the south field on the evening of the 8th when the clouds had gathered and the air had suddenly taken on that feeling.  He had looked up and seen the massive funnel begin to form practically over his head.

So he had raced back to the homestead, coming up through the barnyard to Grandma Koci’s house, bellowing for Grandma to go over to Louise’s and get in the basement.

Grandma had come out onto the porch, a little puzzled, and said that she would just go back in and turn off her TV first.

Uncle Martin told her to forget the damn TV and go to Louise’s basement NOW.  He had looked back across the field toward Uncle Short’s property while rushing home, and had seen Uncle Short’s barn explode.

Grandma and Aunt Louise made it into Louise’s basement, and Uncle Martin and Aunt Ruth made it into theirs as well . . . but then the tornado apparently hopped up, passed over them, and touched down again a short distance to the northeast.

Then it proceeded to roar over Burnett’s Mound (which an old legend had said would protect Topeka from tornadoes) and lay waste to the state capital:

[Note:  The demolished house where the TV camera had spotted my uncles belonged to a neighbor a few miles away from Kociville.  My uncles had gone to see if they could help.]

The Topeka Tornado of June 8, 1966 killed sixteen people in Shawnee County.  Yet despite the fact that it had formed right over my mother’s childhood home, no one in her family was harmed.

For years afterward, though, whenever we went for long walks through the pastures, we found pieces of Uncle Short’s barn.

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As large as the 1966 tornado looms in my memory, I believe that I’ve referred to it in fiction only once:  In Chapter 4 of Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede.