Lori Nelson

One humid day in the summer of 2008, as I was painting in my studio in Brooklyn, the Emergency Alert System kicked in.  A stuttering, belching alarm cut into the afternoon radio programming and I froze at the easel while my two kids started up from their reading/gaming on the sofa.  I turned up the radio; a funnel cloud had been spotted over Manhattan and we were being instructed to go underground.  Electrified, we grabbed our backpacks, shut off the power, and locked up. The air was yellow and thick in Brooklyn, bruised over the East River, charcoal over Manhattan and going into the subway was our best guess as to how to do this emergency.  We headed down into the York St. station, a fairly deep subway stop. My children and I took shelter in the subway for about ten minutes and then decided to just go on home.  We guessed we should watch the TV.

No tornado touched down in New York City that day, only a vindictive rain, but as we had clambered down into the subway for safety, I thought about how like animals we are in a crisis, burrowing underground.  These thoughts were with me when we got home and watched the news about the nasty weather and failed tornado when an even more startling news item came up:  a real Yeti had been found in the South, its body preserved in a block of ice in somebody’s deepfreeze! both obvious and frightening because he does indeed inhabit our same space.