Tree Rings and the 1974 Tornado

This cut tree trunk is a kind of natural calendar. Someone marked its growth rings with the events that happened during each year of the tree's life, with a dividing line at nineteen seventy-four. That year split the trunk in two for a reason.

On the third of April, nineteen seventy-four, this corner of Kentucky lay in the path of what became known as the Super Outbreak, one of the largest tornado outbreaks in American history. In a single afternoon and evening, more than one hundred forty-five tornadoes tore across thirteen states. Just to the south, in Brandenburg, an F five tornado, the most violent rating there is, leveled much of the town and killed thirty-one people.

Across this whole region, families measured time afterward as before the tornado and after. The tree rings here simply put that shared memory into wood.