Another spin with the tornado

NOTES ON A PULITZER

It’s not the first time I’ve seen the ‘what they would have seen’ construction in a nonfiction narrative. It is a useful form, as it works an author’s image into their characters lives, though it can seem forced. But Keller’s effort here is a fine example. She not only puts the image in physical space where it is now in time—behind us—but tops it off with an apt simile:

Had she happened to lift her pale blue eyes to the rear view mirror as she left the city limits, she would have seen, poised there like a tableau in a snow globe just before it's shaken up, her last intact view of the little town she loved.

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As an excellently reported narrative piece often does, Keller’s piece more than once left me wondering: “How the hell did she get that?” Two examples:

To check the screens, Pietrycha, a slender man with short sandy hair and the preoccupied air of someone who's always working out a math problem in his head, quickly rolled his chair back and forth, back and forth, screen to screen to screen, taking frequent swigs from a Coke can.

The specials at Duffy's Tavern that night, according to the green felt-tip lettering on the white board above the bar, were: "All You Can Eat Spaghetti w/garlic breadsticks, $4.99" and "Cajun NY Strip w/onions and peppers and potato salad, $16.99" and "2 stuffed walleye, $13.99." The soup was cheesy broccoli.

How does she know he rolled back and fourth in his chair, swigging from his Coke can? Did she watch a video of the place? Did she ask him exactly how he watched the screens? Was he doing that the day she was there and she asked him? I’ve got to ask her. (Her description of him, by the way, is quite elegant).

And why did she jot down the specials from the board? In other words, if she jotted down that, how much else did she jot down? On the rare occasions I’ve had the opportunity to do a narrative-style piece, I wrote down everything I notice. But menu boards, until now, might have been overlooked.

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While from the headline on you know what is coming, you know the story is about a tornado, Keller still manages to drum up tension within her story. A simple, but well-done example:

At 5:58 p.m., Dena Mallie saw it from her driveway in Peru.

As it blossomed darkly, a huge batwing erasing the sky around it, a Utica contractor named Buck Bierbom saw it from his back yard.

Rona Burrows saw it. She leaned out the front door at Mill Street Market, where she worked as a cashier, and looked up at the sky.

Lisle Elsbury saw it from the alley behind Duffy's.

It was a great black mass, a swirling coil some 200 yards wide at the ground--it was wider in the sky--heading northeast at about 30 m.p.h. They looked up and saw it but they thought: No. Couldn't be. Could it?

I know what “it” is from the start, but I can still feel the tension building as I read that passage. Positioning the tornado within all those lives, names her readers might know, towns and streets others might identify, also personalizes.