It was the afternoon of September 3. My group was in ROB550, editing the dynamics so that the arm would pick up a cube by itself and stack it, again and again. Then every phone in the lab went off at once.

A yellow triangle, a black exclamation mark inside it, no siren outside, and one word in capitals that I had never seen before: TORNADO. English is not my first language. I did not recognize it, and I did not pay it much attention.

Five minutes later the noise reached us through the walls of the Ford Motor Company Robotics Building. We went to the window. The sky had gone the color of ink. The trees were shaking. Raindrops the size of beans were coming down, and I decided it was an ordinary rainstorm, perhaps because my tolerance for "ordinary" is fairly high.

Five minutes after that, a woman in a green high-visibility vest came into the lab and told us to get downstairs and take shelter. I still had not recognized the word, or the thing it named. All of us were packed into one classroom, and through the window the rain got heavier, the sky got darker, the trees shook harder. That was the first time I really "saw" a tornado.

After ten minutes it left. A senior student from our apartment building drove us home, since we wanted to get out while there was no tornado. At home we "saw" the tornado again: the whole neighborhood had lost power. Everything around us had lost power, in fact, except the campus.

The steak we had just thawed was lying on the table. Give it a few more hours and it would come back to life.

We waited for the power. Nine o'clock came; the power did not. Our devices had no charge left and would disappear from the world if they were not charged, we still had not eaten, and so we called an emergency ride and fled to campus.

The building was pitch dark on the way out. Without a flashlight you could see nothing at all. With one you could see about a meter.

At McDonald's the lobby was closed, and the staff would take an order only at the drive-thru; everything else had been shut. We did not have a car. So we pretended that we had one: we walked up to the ordering point, placed the order there, and walked our ghost car around to the window to collect the food. Then campus, and Ann Arbor and U-M at night, until three in the morning, when we were too tired to stay awake and went home.

The same corridor was waiting for us at the other end. "Darker than a haunted house," my roommate said. "Anyone timid would be scared to tears."

The next day looked no different. I had hoped to wake up to power; it came back in the afternoon. We took out the steak, half resurrected by then, and the large bag of ice we had bought the night before to save it. The plan was to get it thoroughly into my stomach and sealed there before it revived.

We finished marinating it. We were about to put it in the pan. Then the tornado came to its rescue.

The lights flickered. Someone must be testing the circuit. They went out. It must be a routine inspection. It was not. The power was gone again, and ten minutes later, watching the steak begin to breathe, we knew this was bad. Yesterday's ice had already melted!

We bought another bag. Then the three of us sat up waiting for a power supply that did not come, so that we could eat, somewhere in the middle of the night, a steak that refused to die. We did not dare touch our phones — once the battery was gone we would have to say goodbye to modern time — so we lit the room with our laptops, which is not a thing you see often, and talked until three in the morning: about studying, about family, about ideals, about the past, about the future, and about when this power would be fixed.

The power came back on the third day. The steak was eaten. We did not need ice any more, though that morning we had bought yet another bag, just in case. By then the ice had cost more than three steaks.

Two and a half days without power, and it was over.

It was the first tornado of my life, and the first time I have been cut off from electricity for that long. Still, I would not give it back. I am not likely to get another one like it, and I would rather not.

Going through the photos from those days, I found two that I like: the lightning on the night before the tornado, taken with my iPhone 15 Pro Max. They are not extraordinary photographs, but they caught the moment. The next day the tornado that brought it came for us. Beautiful, and infuriating!

Now please have a look at them. They came straight out of the camera.

A storm cloud lit from within by lightning, with treetops in the foreground. A branched bolt of lightning crossing the underside of the same storm cloud, above treetops.
The same storm on the night of September 2, fourteen seconds apart.