Aftermath of a Tornado

All photos in this post courtesy Debby and Mike Kaspari

I'll say one thing about blogging this story: it makes tornadoes and what they do painfully real for me. Tornadoes have gone from a woozy mythical Wizard of Ozzy abstraction to the worst of monsters in my mind. I've been writing these posts for three days now, dawn to well past dark, trying to get the story pulled together and cogent, gathering images from diverse sources, and it has been stormy here in Ohio the whole time. I must glance at the sky a hundred times a day as I write. I eye the clouds, looking for the dirty greenish-brown, the cyclonic rotation that indicates we're all in big trouble. I go outside, hear the birds warblers singing songs of comfort even as I wheel around examining the sky. And I can't stop thinking about what it means to lose everything.

Or perhaps not everything, but to lose one's shelter, one's home, one's garden; one's handmade Eden.

I stop to put my head in my hands and cry several times a day, in the purest of empathy for a dear friend, bereft. I think about what it must be like to have your home be nothing but a pile of wet rubble, from which you're charged with extracting the things still extant, still dear.

And so it began, and Debby sent us her photos of the process. The thing being not to stop to mourn, but to scratch and scrabble to recover what could still be recovered. Put up by friends in Oklahoma City, wearing borrowed clothing and just-bought underwear, they braved the still-violent thunderstorms to try to beat the rain to their possessions.

A grit-spattered photo of one of Debby's early bluegrass bands, Heartland, ca. 1985. There she is, second from right, lookin' real bluegrassy. Big hair has never been a problem for Deb.

The current issue of Bird Watcher's Digest. There's a nice symmetry to her finding that, since it brought us together.
Some of Debby's earlier Cameo Girls. Most people who know her as a natural history artist don't realize that as a designer and sculptor, she's a huge celebrity in the head vase collector's world. Well, she is. Check it out!


Ah ha ha ha ha! The magic of the Tubes of the Interwebs!

Debby, our own Cameo Girl. Nice hat. But where's the hole to put the flowers?

Through it all, Debby and Mike haven't lost their sense of humor.

and another ironic find:
You can see the dreadful conditions they've been working in--storms and rain. The roof collapsed right on top of the house, and actually protected a lot of their belongings.

Here's a beautiful wood flatfile, totaled, but still holding priceless sketchbooks full of tropical animals, birds, plants and insects--the kernel of a book I know Debby will write one day.


Oh yes, when this is all done, she will. Because the sketchbooks survived.

And here they are, drying out on the floor of the home where they were staying.

She's entering a framed painting in the Bennington, VT show this summer. It survived the gallon of water that was sitting in the box without even a drop in the frame. Way to go, Airfloat Box.


Wedding and family photos, drying out.

Each new discovery, an extravagant gift.

Both Deb and Mike found their laptops, asleep in the rubble. Both Macs started right up on being opened.

They've sent a desk computer and some external hard drives off for data recovery. Expensive stuff, that data recovery, but not as expensive as losing it all. Mike had a home office that looked like E.O Wilson's might.

Amidst the joy, there is still great sadness. Debby says what hurts most is the oak trees, the hundred-year-old giants that surrounded the house in quiet and green.
Every last one of them, uprooted or shorn off, every one of them gone.

An aquatic biologist from the university tries to recover the beautiful red comets from the pond. Only two of 15 survived the storm.

A backhoe scoops rubble.

My book, as lasting and undamaged as our forever friendship.



On the night of May 10, one of the first things I thought of, after finding out that Debby and Mike and little Gizmo had survived the storm, was Debby's banjo. Oh, please, let it be in its case, let it be OK. It had been under the stairwell where Mike sometimes went during storms, and it was in its case. The stairwell collapsed completely, but when they excavated down, the banjo was unharmed.

I still weep every time I look at this photo. Musical instruments are not things to be replaced. Musical instruments have history; they have souls. Thank you, tornado gods, for not taking her banjo, too.

Debby and Mike's house and cars were insured, even most of the artwork was insured. Insurance will cover a lot of it. But there is a tremendous amount of outlay for tornado survivors; for instance, insurance will cover only part of the huge cost of demolition and hauling the rubble away. She'll need to replace all her art materials, her paper, brushes, clothing, and kitchen stuff (the first floor was crushed under the top floor, where her studio was). Other tornado survivors have told Debby and Mike that insurance helps, but the cash outlay is still considerable.

Debby and Mike have been assigned a terrible job for which they never applied. Building their lives back after the tornado is what they are going to be doing for a long, long time. Each night, when they collapse exhausted in borrowed lodging wearing borrowed clothes, they hit an emotional wall, and they're struggling to keep working through the grief and bewilderment of being suddenly homeless, rootless, carless, skilletless, gardenless.

I've set up a Paypal page for any contribution you might wish to make. There's a donation button in the blog sidebar.

If you're old-fashioned, checks may be made payable to Deborah Kaspari, and sent to:

Deborah Kaspari c/o
Department of Zoology
University of Oklahoma
730 Van Vleet Oval
Room 314
Norman, OK 73019


I'll wrap up this series with my heartfelt thanks for any help you might be moved to offer. Hug your loved ones, look up in gratitude at the roof over your head, and be sure you have a basement or storm shelter nearby. Be safe, and keep an eye to the sky.

The May 10 Tornado

photo by Rich Thompson, meteorologist and stormchaser, www.chasetolive.com

My friend Debby has lived with her husband Mike Kaspari, a renowned expert on ants (dude hangs with E.O. Wilson!) near Norman, Oklahoma for 15 years. Mike teaches at the University of Oklahoma, and Debby works from a studio at home, drawing and painting and sculpting and illustrating and launching shows of her work. Their arc is somewhat similar to Bill's and mine; they got married about the same time, bought an awesome place in the country, and shaped it into a little Eden for birds, bugs, animals and themselves. Here's the house, a shot best taken in winter, because it was surrounded by magnificent oaks that beautifully hid it in the grove.

They'd lived there several years when they decided to build a storm shelter beneath the floor of the garage. In fact, they built it on May 10, 2001. Remember that date.

Oklahoma, as anyone who reads the news knows, is smack in the middle of Tornado Alley. I just read that the farmer whose picturesque place north of Oklahoma City was used for much of the filming of "Twister" just had most of his buildings leveled by a monster tornado this May.

The Kasparis had had the shelter for nine years, and so far luck had been with them. Debby had spent quite a bit of time there, in fact, but they'd never yet been struck. She doesn't like storms; she doesn't like lightning or thunder and she has always feared tornadoes. Like me, she was marked by the Wizard of Oz as a child, and has never really come to grips with that snaky monster from above. Oklahoma is a tough place to live if you fear tornadoes. And you'd be a damned fool not to fear them.

Storm shelters are no fun to be in. They're dark and windowless, underground and spidery and claustrophobic, and although Debby would retreat to it, Mike never liked it one bit, and he'd often go under a stairwell when threatening clouds piled up. On the afternoon of May 10, 2010, Debby was weeding away in the garden when she decided she didn't much like the look of those clouds--dark, dirty and coppery-colored.
Photo by Rich Thompson, www.chasetolive.com

She headed to the storm shelter, and Mike stayed upstairs, making homemade bagels, and planning to go under the stairwell when it got really ugly.A photo taken the night of May 10, 2010, in another storm cellar. Little Gizmo's bundled in a towel, because there was no time to hunt up the cat carrier. May 10 was a wild, wild day in Oklahoma. Photo by Mike Kaspari.

Meanwhile, Tim Ryan was checking the weather on his computer while on assignment for his work in Barcelona, Spain. He didn't like the looks of the radar, nor did he like what he was picking up on the Twitter feed from his Oklahoma friends and family. His thoughts darted to his dear friend Debby, who would be bumming out and probably already sitting in her storm shelter with Gizmo the cat on her lap. So, being Tim, and always thinking of the ones he loves, he called her up. He's done that for me, too. Not with a tornado, but just because.


He'd talked Debby through a tornado warning before, and he was going to be there for her, whether from Oklahoma City or Barcelona. Yep, she was safely down in there, but she'd been in there a long time and she really wanted to come out NOW. "No, no, stay there! Stay put!!" Tim urged. "And get Mike down there with you! It's hitting Lake Rupert RIGHT NOW. It's right over you!!"
Photo by Rich Thompson, www.chasetolive.com

Debby called Mike down; he grabbed his Kindle, in case it would be a long time, and they shut the door over their heads, and just a few minutes later there was a low humming sound. Not like a freight train, not a roar, just a hum. This hum was the vortex of the tornado passing right through their house. It isn't that noisy in the vortex. But then their ears popped hard.

And when the noise stopped Debby noticed that there was light coming through the cracks in the shelter roof, and that shouldn't be so, because the shelter was under the floor of the garage, and wasn't there a garage roof over them? Tim was still on the phone, talking to Mike, when the humming stopped and Mike tentatively opened the shelter door.

"It's gone. It's gone. Everything is gone. We should be dead! We should be dead! We should be dead!!" Mike said, as Tim listened helplessly from Spain. For there was nothing left of their house, their grove of ancient oaks, their garage and their barn but a huge triangular pile of rubble with giant oaks uprooted and thrown on top of it.

Photo by Debby Kaspari

The iron-framed bed is the one I slept in only three weeks earlier. I think I see the shower, too. It was a great shower.

Photo by Debby Kaspari

The front of the house. Both their cars were totaled, too.

The barn. Photo by Debby Kaspari


Photo by Debby Kaspari

The storm shelter, blown full of debris, that saved Debby, Mike and Gizmo's lives. The stairwell Mike favored was crushed flat under the second floor.

Debby and Mike, wearing borrowed clothes, pause on the first day of assessment at the entrance to the tiny shelter that kept them among the living.


Photo by Debby Kaspari

The backyard, once a grove of noble oaks, now blasted flat. The red stripe, from a can of paint that was carried along by the funnel. The indigo sky, a receding wall cloud from the storm.


Photo by Debby Kaspari

The house, as viewed from the water garden. This is where Gizmo and I took our wonderful nap, where iris and bougainvillea once bloomed.

These are incredible times we live in. To have photos from a storm shelter, to have photos of the immediate aftermath; to receive them via computer and to be able to post them, is humbling, amazing. But stormchasers posted photos of the actual tornado that ate Debby and Mike's home, and I have those, too, even though it makes my stomach squirm to post them.


Photo by Rich Thompson, www.chasetolive.com

It was an F4 tornado, a huge wedge with a funnel a half-mile across. Stormtrackers told Debby and Mike that it was a single F3 tornado until just before it hit them, when a second funnel merged with the first. And 100 yards beyond their house, a third funnel merged with those two, and it became a monster F4 with a path a half-mile wide. And who needs monsters from outer space, who needs myth and legend and horror movies, when things like this can reach right down out of the sky and obliterate everything you hold dear?

Photo by Rich Thompson, www.chasetolive.com


On May 10, 2010, 22 tornadoes touched down across Oklahoma. One had a track of 150 miles. Debby and Mike were square in the path of an F4. Her firsthand account is here, on her blog, Drawing the Motmot. And in this post, Anatomy of a Tornado, Debby figures out just what happened to her and her neighbors.

Right after the tornado, when Tim called to tell me what had happened to our friends, we began scheming about how to help. There was an outpouring on Facebook and in emails of people asking how and where they could donate. It has taken me a month to pull this together, but our hope is that having a single, centralized place--right here on this blog--where people can donate makes the most sense. So here it is. We've put the word out to the great bloggers at the Nature Blog Network and to friends who Debby has touched with her art. Thank you for coming here.

If you would like to reach out and help Debby and Mike, please see the animated mini-story created by my WebWitch, Katherine Koch, on the right sidebar of this blog. Clicking on the DONATE button leads to Debby's PayPal page, with easy instructions for donating.

If you'd prefer to mail a check, please send it to

Deborah Kaspari
Dept. of Zoology
University of Oklahoma
730 Van Vleet Oval
Room 314
Norman, OK 73019

Thank you.

An Oklahoma Eden

Not only does Debby Kaspari create beauty on her drawing board and in her sketchbooks, but she creates it all around. Here's her Oklahoma deck, where she and I shared a bottle of Australian wine and talked about everything and nothing.

The water garden, just off the deck, astounded me. There was a biological filter of iris and other water plants, the roots taking the nitrates out of the water, aided by a recirculating pump. Obviously, it was working perfectly, in stark contrast to the cauldron of pea soup that my little water garden is this spring. Ploop, ploop.

Larkspur all around.


And later in the season, coleus and zinnias in perfect bronzy harmony. Debby is a colorist of the first rank.


Deb's garden was a painting in itself, ever-changing, an outward manifestation of the creativity and beauty within her.

On May 4, Debby posted this photo on Facebook, with the tagline:

Why spring in Oklahoma totally rocks!Lazuli and painted bunting at the feeder at one time. And she also had indigo buntings, plus an indigo x lazuli hybrid.


Her artwork celebrates the beauty of plants as much as it does that of birds and animals.
Irises from her own garden:
A jack in the pulpit found deep in the Harvard Forest:
When I visited in April, we took an evening walk around the circle of her rural subdivision. The honey locusts were in full bloom. It wasn't just the wine--we were drunk on the Oklahoma spring!

People are fond of saying that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes I believe that, and sometimes that platitude just doesn't fit. The tsunami that hit Banda Aceh, Indonesia in January, 2005 is one thing that didn't need a reason, and can't be glorified or justified with a reason anybody could come up with no matter how convoluted their thinking.

But I would like to think that my trip to Oklahoma to appreciate all that Debby and Mike have done to make the world more beautiful had a reason. I feel blessed that I experienced that, blessed to have seen the gardens and listened to the waterfall and slept under their roof, blessed to have nosed around her upstairs studio and peeked into the flat files full of her paintings and drawings.

Blessed to have walked out that evening to put our noses to the honey locust blossoms, blessed to have witnessed it all.

Meet Debby Kaspari

a later DK antbird painting, but you get the idea. Shazzam!

I first became aware of Debby Kaspari (then Debby Cotter) when a bitchin' antbird illustration, lush with color and strong of drawing, showed up in an issue of Bird Watcher's Digest, the magazine my husband edits, and the whole family publishes. I remember, in fact, where I was standing when I opened the issue and saw the double-page spread--in the old production room where there were little waxed lines of type stuck to everything. It was that long ago. Probably 1992, because we weren't married yet. And my head snapped back, because nothing computed. How could I have missed her? Who WAS this woman who could paint antbirds so beautifully, and why didn't I know her name and her work before Bill did? I whirled around and accosted my editor husband-to-be. "Who did this? Who is she? How did you find her?"

He started talking, and I gathered little scraps out of the cascade of words. I remember hearing "painter" and "sculptor" and "bluegrass banjo player" and "she's in a band" and then my eyes rolled back in my head and lemons came up where my eyeballs should be like a cartoon slot machine and I remember thinking, "Oh, great. He's going to fall in love with this fabulous California mystery girl who paints antbirds, just like he fell in love with me when I started painting for BWD and then what??"

Well, that didn't happen, probably because I'd met him in person first, and I gradually got used to the idea that there was this painter/draftsman/sculptor/musician out there and then she sent Bill a CD, "Heart's Desire" of her San Francisco bluegrass band, The All Girl Boys,

and the picture of the beautiful brunette in the middle "all dipped in girl dip," as she put it, set me back another couple months...but I eventually got over it. And despite my Leonine fragility we became friends, fast friends and she came out to visit us in Ohio and we threw a summer music party in her honor and Debby played bitchin' banjo breaks on tunes like "Don't Fear the Reaper." This is a song which, having always made her own music instead of blowing out her ears to rock like the rest of us, she had never heard. Bill and I still marvel at that. And I loved her, as I knew I would.

As the Internet slowly loomed up and infiltrated our lives I could keep up with Debby's doings on her web site. I got to see her every now and then, twice, in fact, at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum's "Birds in Art" show. Here we are, having our pictures taken in Wisconsin with dear friend, pastel artist Cindy House.

She's painted a bunch of covers for Bird Watcher's Digest--a mockingbird in moonlight; a rufous hummingbird staring a long-eared owl in the face; a painted bunting on cannas; three rubythroats in bougainvillea... We invited her out for an Artist's Gathering at our place and she was enfolded into the loving and supportive arms of our bird-painting artist friends. The emails fly thick and fast, with jpegs, and we pass critiques and praise back and forth through the electrons. We are connected, and we share each other's victories and sorrows alike. Debby's drawings and paintings always take my breath away. I would love to be able to draw like that.

So here's a little gallery, because I know it's hard to draw yourself away to another web site. I've dragged these off debbykaspariart.com. Go there for more.

Macaws over a giant ceiba tree. Pastel and graphite.

Orange-chinned parakeets, demolishing mangoes. Pastel and graphite.

Petersham, Massachusetts. Watercolor, plein air (done on the spot).

Did I mention Debby also teaches plein air drawing?Well, she does. Just another thing she does I'd be scared stiff to try.

Get a load of her line.
Wild turkeys, from life.

Furnariids, antbirds, honeycreepers, swallow tanagers...she's drawing so fast and furiously that she draws one bird over another. From life, Peru.

Coati studies. Deb's mammals just blow me away. Has she got the beady-eyed squint down or what?
Buttress roots, drawn on site. Just another of the things that scares me about Deb. She can sit for two days in one spot and produce something like this. We have to be careful when we're hiking because she might plop herself down and pull out her sketchbook and get all lost in tree roots or bark and then we'd have to bring her water and sandwiches until she'd recorded every last beautiful convolution.

Like the bark of this cottonwood in Oklahoma last month. She kind of murmured when she saw it and started walking toward it.
And before Tim and I knew it she was hugging that tree and I grabbed my camera because candid photos of actual tree huggers are rare.

To draw something is to love it. Gotcha!

So now you know just a little bit of why I love Debby Kaspari.