It was a warm sunny Sunday afternoon in the little town of DeWitt, Michigan and the family had gathered for a lunch at Aunt Margaret's farm, and an afternoon of canoeing down the local Looking Glass River.
The cousins spent some time playing tag in the side yard while the men loaded the trucks and cars with the canoes, paddles, life jackets and cushions for the trip. Grandma Everett was going, along with seven children under the age of 12, and four other adults. There were four big old aluminum Grumman 17-foot canoes.
The launch site was at a crossroad, three miles west of Margaret's farm, and the take-out was at the park in downtown DeWitt, two miles east of the farm.
It was early June. The kids may have been out of school, and early haying was just around the corner. After a lunch of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans, with tapioca pudding and hand-cranked homemade ice cream, we all packed up into the cars and went and dropped off the boats and kids and women at the launch site, while the men took the trucks to leave at the take-out. They came back in the station wagon.
It was an incredibly pleasant trip. No mosquitos to speak of, lots of birds, turtles, fish jumping, humming of bees in the trees, and family drifting down the river- at that time, very clean, very clear. Until the sky started getting dark, as we started entering the outskirts of DeWitt. We started hearing distant thunder.
We still had maybe a half mile of river to go to get to the take-out. We started paddling harder.
A few moments later, it started raining. Then big, cold drops of rain turned briefly into hail. The wind came up and the sky got very dark. A couple of the older children had been paddling in the bows, and the adults were putting effort into moving downstream as fast as we could.
The bridge and park came into sight as the rain turned into sheets, and lightning started flashing all around us. We managed to beach the boats, get Grandma Everett and the youngest kids into a truck while the men and the older kids ran around getting the gear and canoes loaded on the trucks. A couple of trees fell as a tornado went through on the other side of the bridge.
The wind, the trees, the sheets of rain, the lightning and constant thunder while we were racing around grabbing stuff and dumping it into trucks, while the men were trying to tie the canoes on, are all one of the most vivid memories of my childhood.
We got into the trucks soaking wet and managed to drive back to the farm and all of us survived.
Back at the farm, the storm had passed as quickly as it came on, and it was back to being a sunny Sunday afternoon in a sleepy little rural Michigan town.