The older I got, and the more time I spent ignoring the outdoors, the more my distaste for nature evolved into genuine fear. Do I wish I could’ve grown into one of those burly men from the Discovery Channel who can make his own venison jerky and chase hurricanes and put out forest fires? Sure. But only because they get to spend a lot of very intimate time with other burly men in scant clothing, and I’m about that life. But alas, I grew into a true nature sissy, terrified not only by being outside but by what nature could do to me while I was indoors.

The very earliest dream I can remember was a nightmare I had when I couldn’t have been more than a few years old. I was playing outside when, in seconds, the sky turned violently gray and then pitch-black and I woke up in a pile of snot and tears and probably urine if we’re being honest, and it took a few packages of frozen waffles to console me.

There were no tall buildings in the suburbs where I grew up, so anytime there was bad weather, you could see the angry dark sky for miles and miles and it always made me feel so small and defenseless. We lived on the periphery of the tornado belt, after all. Every year at school, we’d have tornado drills, where we’d crawl into the hallways and roll into balls against the wall, and sometimes, if you didn’t get into the hallway quick enough, you’d have to start forming a row behind the kids who were already against the wall, so your tiny face was up in some other kid’s butt—but that was the price we paid for staying safe. I’d seen The Wizard of Oz enough times to know that tornadoes weren’t fucking around. I mean, sure, a tornado flung Dorothy to a land of tiny dancing homosexuals, which I wouldn’t have been opposed to, but also, her house literally killed someone! I wasn’t about to be the next person with fabulous shoes to get killed in a tornado.

And yes, that’s an entirely normal fear to have. Long before I was born, my mother’s cousin was killed in a tornado in the next town over, and perhaps it was my mother’s constant repetition of that story, or perhaps it was something deeper, but every summer, my fear of storms got worse and worse.