looking for injured people. As they approached my niece's house, I joined them. One of the firemen and I went to the front door and started to call out. It was very dark. I didn't realize that he had decided to break in the door. He swung his axe with both hands - underhanded as you would in order to ram the door with the top of the axe. Neither of us had taken into account the proximity of my face with the arc of his axe's swing. So his backswing ended on my lips. He was really embarrassed; I suffered from both pain and embarrassment, the embarrassment from getting in his way. Right then, another fireman called out from the side of the house, saying that a side door was unlocked. Since this relieved us of the need to break in the door, I was later to tell my niece that she owed me her front door.

We found no one in the house. The house itself suffered from the earlier-mentioned effect of the tornado sneaking in through a window, in this case the kitchen windows, and wreaking havoc. I'll tell you more about the havoc in tomorrow's account, including a really weird phenomenon that occurred just inside the recently saved front door.

I was able to leave the bicycle in the garage for later return to its owner, to whom I will always be grateful. Anyway, since no one was home, and I surmised - correctly, as it turned out - that everyone in the family had been off at work when the tornado hit.

Though they didn't know at the time that I was even in the area, the Irvins would know that Mark had been with Deanna, in the heart of the tornado’s path, and would therefore be looking for him. Since they were out of the tornado area, they’d have better communication than I - all forms of communication in the tornado area being completely dead, including cell phones. So they were more likely to find him first. Therefore, I reasoned that by finding Mark I might also find the others.

So, as this great group of young firemen prepared to head east on Little River Circle (11th street) clearing houses, I told them of my plan to find my nephew, Mark, and they contacted the police asking them to send a patrolman to assist me. I hadn't ask them to do this, and I'll tell you, I was skeptical of that idea. They told me the police had said they'd be there in 30 minutes. I noted the time and decided I'd wait an hour, no more. (I’d already been down that trail.)

As I waited, the only light in the area was a helicopter flying around. I don't know if it was a police helicopter, news helicopter, or whatever, but I heard one of the firemen say, "They actually have a camera with an infrared detector on the helicopter which can find victims in the rubble." Oh, boy. In a disastrous catastrophe such as this, you can believe about a tenth of what you hear. Here's what puts the lie to this one: have you ever heard a tornado news story headline "Victim Rescued by Helicopter Infrared"? I haven't. And what's more, I think they'd do better by sticking with a dog and a flashlight.

After waiting the hour, I felt silly for wasting it on the thought that the police might actually show up and take me to the Norman hospital, which I thought to be the most likely location of my injured nephew. And, I figured, that if nothing else, from the Norman hospital I would be out of the disaster zone so that they would have communications with other hospitals in order to find out where he was. So I headed east up 11th street to Telephone Road, from which I intended to hitchhike to I35 and then On southward to Norman.

But at the first 11th street intersection I crossed paths with another group of fireman, who like the first group, was from a town south of Moore, but unlike the first group was far less than great. In the darkness I didn't initially realize they were a totally different group than the first. They were moving north-south rather than east-west. Not knowing that they were a totally new group, I shared with them my frustration with waiting for the police. One of them disagreed with my summation of the waste of time my wait had been, and I, in return, disagreed with his thoughts on the matter. I did this in the vocabulary I had learned in the Marines, which turned out to be his vocabulary also. He came at me. At this point, my rolled-up towel and gym clothes came in handy as I used the roll to block his punch. Lucky for me, his colleagues pulled him off while making some remarks to him about his lack of professionalism. I added some of my own remarks to theirs, at the same time hoping he wouldn't continue. (Did I mention that I'm a heart patient who's over twice the young fireman's age?) So, with a little more bluster back and forth, I gladly parted with this second group of firemen, they going north and me east. It was only at this juncture that I fully realized that I was dealing with a different group of firemen than the first. Oh, well, I guess it takes all kinds.