Tornado hit without warning
From a shack in Alabama to selling startups in Silicon Valley.
I grew up poor in Joppa, Alabama. We lived in a trailer, then in a two-story shack where the living room and the bed fit in one tiny room and the shower was a makeshift setup next to an old sink. For a while we lived in a camper. It was all on the same piece of land, on a hill that rolled down to a tiny lake full of logs, snakes and frogs. I ran through the woods barefoot with my Doberman. Some days I felt like I was a dog too.
My dad was a carpenter, and my mom did soldering work at a factory in Huntsville. Because of how we'd been living, my dad decided to build us a real house. He dug out the basement and piled the dirt into a big mound, and that mound became our battlefield. My friends and I fought on it with sticks. My dad made us a real sword and shield. On weekends I helped him sand, paint and measure. When we poured the foundation, my dad, my mom and I pressed our hands into the wet cement.
I was ten the morning a tornado came for the house my dad built. He had hurt his back and wasn't home. My mother picked me up and ran. She says God told her where to run.
I watched the walls shake like Jell-O. Then they popped, and everything went black.
We landed beside a huge old steel refrigerator and woke up in a pocket of space barely big enough for two people crouched over, barefoot on broken glass. Everything above us creaked like it was about to come down. We thought we were going to die. We were in there for hours. Then firefighters got us out.
Neither of us had a cut. The firefighters said the spot where we landed was the only place we could have survived. It was a miracle.
There was no warning. Lightning had knocked out the weather radar in Huntsville half an hour before the tornado touched down at 4:59 a.m., and no tornado warning was issued for Cullman County, where it began. It tore through Joppa Elementary School and destroyed 157 homes. Six people were killed. One was the uncle of one of my best friends. A Christian church helped rebuild our home for free.
Our handprints are still in the cement.
Afterward, I stood up with the firefighters and gave a speech to the town. For almost a year I couldn't take a shower, and for a year or two I panicked every time it rained. My dad not being home probably saved him. It was also hard on us, because he never fully understood what happened.
Then I found football. I played peewee in Arab, near Joppa, where I went to school. I was a middle linebacker and captain of the defense, known for hitting harder than anyone else and for forcing fumbles, and I got picked for all-star games around Alabama. I quit around 13 because of my height. I topped out at 5'6¾".
