Palm Sunday Tornado Memorial Park

This is the view to the west of the Palm Sunday Tornado memorial in Dunlap, Indiana. With the little cedar tree spotlighting itself in the foreground, the photo may be lacking compositionally, but it”s true to what you actually see as you walk down Cole Street.

At 6:45 on April 11, 1965, the view was much darker. One hundred feet away, in a place now occupied by a large commemorative stone, seven-year-old Debbie Forsythe huddled in the basement with her mother and brother Stevie as F5 winds swept away her home and her neighborhood.

In the golden sunlight of a late August afternoon, it’s hard to fathom the horror that visited this area on that fateful Palm Sunday forty-three years ago. Debbie lost her brother in the storm. Entire families perished.

Life continued after the disaster, as life must. Yet over four decades later, the wounds still persist deep in the hearts of those who lost loved ones in the storms. Located south of Elkhart, the tiny park was created by Debbie on the site of her childhood home, not only in loving memory of the dead, but also, in particular, as a place of healing for the living.

I have made several visits to the park since 2004. The place exerts a strange pull on me. Both geographically and spiritually, it is the epicenter of that terrible day. Stories are etched into the soil of this little community; voices whisper from the earth, and here is where they find their expression. The memorial is an altar of faith and hope that endure the very worst life can inflict. I know this not only because of what I experience when I visit the memorial, but also because Debbie Forsythe, today Debbie Watters, is my friend. She is an amazing woman, gifted with a heart of gold and an earthy, very real faith in God’s love and wisdom in the face of things that make no sense. Through Debbie, I have a personal understanding of how deep the roots of this tiny parcel in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Dunlap, Indiana, really go.

At the eastern edge of the park stands a plaque bearing the image of the infamous twin funnels that became the icon of the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak. While I”ve heard one story that insisted this freakish tornado was in fact the Dunlap F5, the eyewitness account of the actual photographer, Elkhart Truth reporter Paul Huffman, places it in the Midway Trailer Court south of town down US 33.

It was here that another friend of mine, Pat McIntosh, lost her toddler, Chris. This is the other location I always feel compelled to visit whenever I make a pilgrimage to the area–for that is what it is: a pilgrimage. Over the months, the elastic bands of Dunlap begin to pull on me, and I sense that it is time for me to make the trip.

The old trailer park is now no more than a shady grove of large trees and overgrown tarmac, bordered to the south by a new overpass. On previous occasions, I was never quite certain that I had the right location. All I had to go by were a general sense of the area and a few visual clues, including a scattered handful of old utility hookups which suggested the prior existence of a mobile home community. Pulling into the site last Saturday evening, I discovered that now even these were gone. But this time I wasn’t alone. Pat was on the cell phone with me, and with her serving as my guide, I walked at length through the long-gone trailer park, strolling down rows of mature shade trees that lined the vanishing remnants of old drives. I explored the boundaries of the site, poked around the woods edge to the north, and managed to locate a crumbling cement foundation near the center that had to have belonged to the cellar where a number of residents took life-saving shelter.

Sorry, I have no pictures of the old Midway Trailer Park. The sun was setting, and the light had grown too dim for photos. Perhaps another time. For now, I”m left with my thoughts, gleaned from my thorough exploration of the site with Pat on the phone. Being uniquely linked with her story, I find it hard to describe how this place affects me, and I won”t attempt it here.

I will say, though, that the tale of how I came to know Pat, and through her, Debbie, is a most unusual one. God is real, prayer is powerful, and the results of prayer, while unpredictable, can occasionally be mind-boggling and wonderful. My friendships with Pat and Debbie are an example. They remind me that, when the winds of circumstance turn our lives into a desolation, an even greater, life-giving wind will visit our souls if we will let it. It is the wind of God”s Spirit, which in its own time causes wildflowers to grow on blasted landscapes and beckons us to look upward into the face of hope. That is at least a part of the message of the memorial park, and one of the reasons why Midway and Dunlap call to me over the miles and across the years.