Scamp Season

It is Scamp Season once again. The beginning of the oppressive South Georgia summer season sends us scampering (pun intended) toward cooler, balmier locales: down to the Gulf Coast, up to New England, or, maybe this year, even up into the Canadian wilderness.

The Scamp is our 13 foot, fiberglass eggshell camper. It houses a dinette that converts to a bed, a couch which converts to bunk beds, a sink, some cabinets, and a two burner stove. It has an icebox which doesn’t always keep things cold enough, and an air conditioner that sometimes keeps things too cold.

We sometimes complain about the meager living space, the lack of privacy, and the tendency to bust your head on the door if you don’t duck; but, if you suggest to any of us the possibility of moving to a more spacious trailer, we protest loudly. We adore our Scamp.

While on the Gulf Coast this weekend, we bought a Jolly Roger flag for the Scamp: 3’ x 5’ black and white skull and crossbones. It flew high atop the Scamp, popping in the wind at our beachside campsite.

This is the latest and greatest decoration to adorn the Scamp. It also boasts three different strings of lights (flamingoes with palm trees, stars, and white twinkling ones), a Mickey Mouse garden gnome, and a pair of pink plastic lawn flamingoes. The effect is pretty cheesy, but we like it that way. The Scamp attracts attention wherever it goes, regardless. Strangers stop by, asking if they can have the Grand Tour of the place. “Stick your head in the door,” we say.

It’s our little play house, our little tree fort. We hide out in it away from the rest of the world, decorate it in whatever suits our fancy, and then use it as home base for our adventures. One week it’s a beach house on the shore of a white, sandy beach; then, it’s a cabin in the woods, surrounded by tall pine trees. Quite often, it is our hideaway in The Happiest Place on Earth, in the Old West Fantasyland of Ft. Wilderness at Walt Disney World. Spending the weekend there is probably the best bargain, and the most fun, in the entire resort.

We’ll be on the move again this summer. The work week will end, and we’ll have the Scamp ready to roll to… wherever. We have it down to a science: we pull into a campsite, and down go the supports, up go the awning and the lights and the Mickey gnome and the lawn flamingoes and the pirate flag and the chairs and the lanterns and the barbeque grill and the picnic table. We’re back in our clubhouse, ready for adventure.

We’ll send you postcards from the road. Stay tuned.

If You Play Your Cards Right....

I decided not to do the flower thing this year. Flowers wilt eventually, and then you throw them away and they only live in your memory — unless you are my grandmother, and you take a picture of them, and then they live on for all eternity in a photo album, along with the pictures of you opening every single present at your wedding shower, and every birthday cake you ever had.


So, I’m here on the Internet to give you your Mother’s Day present—where everything, good or bad, exists here in perpetuity, like Grandma’s pictures ( I suggest that you don’t look too hard at my Facebook albums, because I think you’d probably rather not see what I was up to my senior year in high school). Nothing is private here on the Internet, which is fine; for Mother’s Day 2010 I am writing your present, and I will happy to share this post with the with everyone.

Welcome to my blog. The name’s a little weird, I know, and I have been thinking about changing it—I ate a lot more Chinese food when I started it, but, now that my figure getting a bit too… “womanly”, I’ve backed way off. Have a look around if you want—I don’t think that I’ve skewered our family too badly here (yet).

But enough introduction. On to your Mother’s Day present.

If You Play Your Cards Right….

“If you play your cards right….” Now that I am grown up, and have been to Las Vegas, I understand the meaning of this term: it means, when you play blackjack “if you stand on, like, a fifteen, or sixteen, you have a pretty good chance of beating the house, because they have to draw to at least seventeen and, because of this fact, they have a pretty good chance of busting.” Or something like that.

When I was a kid, “if you play your cards right….” had a completely different meaning. “If you play your cards right” meant “we are on our way to somewhere awesome unless World War III breaks out in the back seat and I can’t take this car ride anymore.” But, either Armageddon did not occur, or you were very tolerant of our sibling squabbles, because you never did turn the car around.

We were adventurers, you, me, Kate and Bill.

We loved our road trips. We took short jaunts to neighboring New Haven to The Yale Peabody Museum. We looked way up at the Brontosaurus skeleton in the Hall of Dinosaurs, years before it became an Apatosaurus skeleton. We climbed the huge stone stairs. I remember that the museum smelled as ancient as it looked. I love that smell (When Ben and Libby visited last year, they weren’t as impressed. “It smells weird in here,” they said. “But it’s the Peabody smell--don’t you get it?” I answered. You know what I mean. They didn’t get it).

Then there was the epic trip to New Orleans one summer, the one when we turned onto Bourbon Street, which was not the only slightly naughty tourist attraction that it became years later, and you realized that we may not have landed in a very “appropriate” part of town. Didn’t you try to cover my brother’s eyes when the strippers started swinging out of the windows on the second floor of the clubs?

But the best road trip of all was to The Magic Kingdom, in Walt Disney World. We would get up before dawn to make the drive to the park, so that we could be there when the gate opened. Over breakfast at the Crystal Palace Restaurant, on Main Street U.S.A., we pulled out the park map and planned our day like a military campaign. We marked the guidebook up with checks to mark our “must see” rides, and plotted our route through the park. We rationed the “E” tickets to make sure that we had enough to ride The Jungle Cruise; we reconnoitered possible parade-watching positions, and predetermined which horse we were going to ride on Cinderella’s Golden Carousel (mine will always be the circus pony with the red, white and blue headdress) . We stayed until the very last possible second when the park closed, and then you drove us home, in the middle of the night, down the deserted Florida Turnpike. I’m sure that you were exhausted, but you didn’t have the luxury of sharing the driving with any other adult back then.

I’ve come to realize a couple of things after all of these years:

We really didn’t have a lot of money. Our epic vacations were financed with a shoestring budget. We rationed those “E” tickets because extra “E” tickets cost a bundle, and we didn’t head to a hotel at night after leaving Disney because it was expensive. I never considered that thought when I was a kid: how difficult it must have been to find the money for even a single day at Walt Disney World. But, trust me, when I look at my credit card bill at the end of a trip down there, I am even more appreciative of what you had to do to get us there.

And, even more, you not only single handedly financed our epic adventures—you planned and executed them by yourself. Driving home in the dark after 18 hours at The Magic Kingdom couldn’t have been much fun by yourself—but you did it. And trying to keep your kids safe in a pretty rough part of the French Quarter, or after accidentally taking a wrong turn in New York City—that couldn’t have been much fun either. But you did it.

Nowadays, no matter what happens in the back seat, I don’t turn the car around, either. I don’t want to miss a thing. Sometimes, I think I get more excited than the kids about the adventures that are down the road.

As when I was a kid, my own family has its epic adventures: up to Long Island Sound, down to the Gulf of Mexico. We ride inner tubes, kayaks, surfboards, paddleboards and mountain bikes—always looking for somewhere to go, somewhere new to explore.

We still take those trips to the Magic Kingdom, and it’s the same as it always has been with us: the map, the plan. Ben likes to be in charge of the map now. Ben likes to be in charge of the map everywhere, actually. And, even though I have a partner to share the driving, and even though we can afford to sleep at a Disney hotel now, and even though we don’t have to worry about rationing “E” tickets anymore, those trips with the four of us- to Walt Disney World and beyond- will always be some of my favorite memories; memories made all the better by understanding what you did to make it all possible.

I know that “I’ve played my cards right….” For sure.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you.

A Dispatch From Behind the Microscope

Hi-


I am not hunched over a murder victim at the moment, the glare from the overhead lamp revealing some important clue about the perpetrator. Yes, I am a pathologist; no, that is not how my day goes. I suppose that solving murders all day would be cool, but I also like what I do here at the hospital. I thought that I’d share my day with you so far:

8:00 a.m. Arrive at work. Talk with my associate about what’s been going on in his absence; the interesting cases, and a little hospital gossip.

8:30 a.m. An oncologist (cancer doctor) calls, and is interested in knowing about one of his patients, a person who has a colon cancer that has recurred after treatment. The surgeons just took out a portion of the colon with the new tumor; the oncologist wants to know if the tumor has spread to the lymph nodes and the tissue around the colon. I tell him that I will call him back once the pathology slides are ready for me to read, so that I can look under the microscope at the lymph nodes and the tissue and give him that answer. He’ll have to decide what to do next: whether he’ll give chemotherapy and, if so, what kind and how much.

8:40 a.m. A fax comes through with a report on special studies done on a woman’s breast cancer. The test helps determine what type of treatment the woman is going to receive, and also can help tell how aggressive the tumor will behave. I dictate a report to send to the doctors, and give them this additional information

9:00 a.m. Time to get ready to present cases at Tumor Board. I have taken pictures through the microscope of some interesting cancers; I put these pictures and additional information into a Power Point presentation for the noon conference. I also head to the textbooks to find out some additional information about the cancers that I am going to present at the conference; I like to teach the audience some stuff, occasionally.

9:45 a.m. I get to look at the first microscope slides for the day. The first case is one that we are especially interested: a gentleman with a large mass in the middle of his chest. He’s having a lot of trouble breathing, so it’s very important that we find out what’s wrong with him so that we can treat him appropriately. The surgeon removed one of his lymph nodes for us to look at. He definitely has some kind of cancer, and, from looking at the slides, it looks like he may have a very aggressive lung cancer. We are waiting for a couple more outside studies to be done to be sure, but we are pretty sure that we can tell the doctors what it is for sure today.

10:00 a.m. Making up clues for a scavenger hunt here in the lab. It’s a fun way to take a break.

10:30 a.m. A surgeon sends some tissue samples from the operating room. He needs a frozen section, which is a special procedure where we freeze the tissue, cut it, stain it, and put it on a microscope slide quickly so we can put the slide under the microscope and give him a diagnosis. This sample is a lymph node from under the arm of a woman with breast cancer. He needs to know if the tumor has spread to the lymph node; if it has, he will need to take out all of the lymph nodes in her axilla, both to find out how far the cancer has spread, and to take out as much tumor as possible. If the tumor hasn’t spread to the lymph node, he won’t have to take out all of the nodes (do an axillary dissection); this is a very good thing, because oftentimes women who have an axillary dissection have problems with swelling in the same arm after the surgery, which is very uncomfortable (lymphedema).

11:00 a.m. It’s time to look at more slides (tissue samples) under the microscope. Essentially, the pathologist is supposed to look at every piece of tissue that’s removed from a person when they have surgery. For the most part, that’s true. So I look at skin biopsies, and make sure that skin cancers have been completely removed; I look at gallbladders that were taken out because they had gallstones and caused a lot of pain in the patient; I look at pieces of fallopian tubes from women who had their tubes tied (it’s important to make sure that the doctor cut all the way through the tube, so that the woman can’t get pregnant again, which is exactly what she wants). I look at the slides, then dictate a pathology report that I will sign later.

12:00 p.m. It’s time for Tumor Board. Technically Tumor Board is called a “Multidisciplinary Cancer Conference.” In English, the primary care physicians, surgeons, radiologists, oncologists and pathologists all get together to discuss their patients with cancer. We hear their histories, look at their x-rays, and I show the pictures of their tumors, that I took from the microscope. Then all of the doctors put their heads together and decide what the best treatment for the patient is (this is all confidential, by the way; we don’t use the patient’s names). Things can get a little heated in there, by the way, when all of the doctors don’t agree on the best course of treatment.

1:00 p.m. Tumor Board is over. Whew! I’m a little nervous about public speaking, so I am always happy when I am finished. I take a break and eat pizza with the lab employees. It’s National Medical Laboratory Professional Week, so we’re celebrating and having a party. Since pathologists are lab professionals, too, I get to party too!

1:15 p.m. And on we go. We talk to a few more doctors about their patient’s pathology reports; I call a doctor for more information on his patient, which will help me make a diagnosis on his biopsy; we talk to a surgeon, whose patient is in the examination room, waiting to hear if her breast tumor is benign or malignant (it’s most likely malignant, but we have to do some additional studies to confirm that; it’s not always a matter of looking at a slide and diagnosing a cancer— oftentimes, there are a lot of grey areas between benign and malignant, and even after all of the tests, you may not be able to tell—but, of course, try to tell that to a malpractice lawyer).

2:15 p.m. And our report is back on the very sick guy with the respiratory problems: it is indeed a very aggressive lung tumor. Fortunately, chemotherapy and radiation can shrink the tumor quickly, so he may be feeling better soon. Unfortunately, the long term prognosis is not so good.

2:30 p.m. My fourth Diet Coke of the day.

2:35 p.m. Looking at a particularly hideous tumor under the microscope: a malignant blood vessel tumor. The surgeon couldn’t get the whole thing out. He took a large piece of skin and fat, but there is still tumor at the edge. It looks like he may have to go back and get more; luckily, he was very careful to mark the skin, so I can tell him exactly where he has to go back and take more tissue. Surgeons rock.

2:55 p.m. I am signing reports now, on the computer. We used to have to manually sign the typed reports, not so long ago, but now that we have electronic medical records it’s a lot better. These reports will all go onto the patients’ medical charts, and copies will be sent to their doctors.

3:00 p.m. A little down time. It’s not my turn to gross today: that’s when you look at all of the tissue that comes out of the operating room, with your eyeballs, not your microscope. You can tell a lot just by looking with your eyes, and feeling the tissue. Breast cancer will look like a crab and feels very hard when you touch it, for example. After we look, and touch, and measure, and describe the tissue in a report, we take little pieces of it that our techs will make into slides that we will look at the next day. I will take a little piece of the hard area that feels like a breast cancer; I will take a little piece of tissue from the edge of the specimen to make sure that the tumor has all been taken out. Not everything that we examine is cancer; we look at tonsils from little kids, and appendixes; we look at tissue when a woman has a miscarriage, and try to find out why her pregnancy failed.

3:30 p.m. The slides from the colon cancer are here, the one the oncologist and I discussed this morning. Her tumor has gone through the whole colon; the cancer has spread to most of the lymph nodes around the tumor. The oncologist has to figure out what to do now.

4:00 p.m. Things start winding down for the day, in my office, anyways. I finish signing my reports, check my email, check my snail mail, check my inbox, and check my list of pending cases, to see what I’m going to need to do tomorrow.

5:00 p.m. Outta here. I wear a pager, and carry the phone at all times in case a doctor has a question, or a surgeon needs us in the OR, or there is an autopsy that may need to be done. So it’s never really done here- I am still pretty much tethered to the hospital. We take turns taking call, though, so each of us can have a break, or go out of town- as per our contract, we have to be within 20 minutes of the hospital if we are needed.

I will post, eventually, on the thing that makes us pathologists notorious: The Autopsy. I think it’s not quite what most people envision, and maybe I can dispel some myths.

Feeding the Critters: A Poem (of sorts)

Feeding the critters

One of the dogs is eating the cat food that I threw out for the chickens.

The chickens are eating the dog food that I set out for the dog.

The cat got chased under the house, so he cannot eat anyone's food.

The other dog is eating everyone’s food- except the chicken food.

No one is eating the chicken food.

From Nowhere to Somewhere to Here

Growing up in Florida, I felt like I was from Nowhere.


I envy my husband’s family- we live in the house that his grandfather built. We can drive down the road to the little cemetery next to the little church and see great-grandparents and great aunts and great uncles.

In Florida, you were usually transplanted from New York. Or New Jersey. Or Cuba. Or, in my case, Connecticut. So I’ve always glommed onto any evidence that I was “from” somewhere, where generations of my family once lived in the same place, that there was some place in the world where I originally “came from.”

When I was a kid, I would tell people that I was “Three quarters German and one-quarter English.” I believe that this was the simplified view that was explained to me, because the truth is somewhat more complex. Like this:

“Well, on your Dad’s side, his dad’s family traces back to one little tiny part of pre-Revolutionary Maine— a big huge branch of the family tree. His mom’s family emigrated from Germany and Austria a few generations ago.

And on your Mom’s side, a big chunk of her dad’s family is from New York State, from way back, along with a few representatives from Germany (as well as an alleged member of the Seneca tribe). On her mom’s side, there’s a contingent from the town of Czervenka, which used to be part of the empire of Austria-Hungary and subsequently was absorbed into Yugoslavia and then Serbia (I think) and appears now to be located somewhere in the Czech Republic. But the Arvays and the Roths- that side of the family- identify themselves as Hungarian, not Austro-Hungarian or Yugoslavian or Serbian or Czechoslovakian.”

I can see why they just told me that I was three-quarters German and one-quarter English.

This week, containing two of the alleged birthdays of my late Grandma (the birth certificate says one day; the baptismal record lists another), I thought that I’d remember her experience.

Like I have done many times before, I went back to Ellis Island’s website and searched for my grandmother and her family: Elizabeth Aranka Roth. And, like the other times before, I found her name in the database and pulled it up. There she is, her name typed on the S.S. Rochambeau’s manifest: Roth, Elizabeth. Age 6. Last residence: Cervenke, Yougo-Slavia. Traveling with her parents, August and Aranka, sister Mary and brothers August and Willy, whose name was somehow entered as “Nigly”. A big rubber stamp over the family, with the words “admitted.” It was a close call, I have been told: sister Mary apparently was about to be quarantined in the infirmary with some unknown ailment; my grandma rubbed off the “X” chalked on Mary’s coat, the one that would keep her from being admitted to the country, and off they all went. That’s how the story goes, anyways.

It’s gratifying to know that I’m not from Nowhere- I’m from lots of Somewheres. And to see the evidence there, in black and white, on a ship’s manifest, in July 1920, of that part of my family coming to America from Somewhere—it makes me happy.

My kids love their Hungarian heritage- it makes them feel exotic. They have done their research, and probably know more about Hungarian culture than I do. For Lib’s school cookbook- you know, the ones where every child contributes a recipe that reflects their family’s heritage- she wrote a recipe for Ischl cookies, a Hungarian sandwich cookie filled with apricot jam and covered with chocolate. I laughed when I saw it. In between the recipes for peas and rice, and lasagna, was her contribution. It was three pages long.

I plan on visiting all of the Somewheres. Our first stop will be this summer, to that teeny tiny part of Maine which produced my father’s family. We’ll visit New York, and see the family that still lives there. Someday, to Germany, to Köln. And, hopefully, to Czervenka, in whatever country it will be in the future. And, Ellis Island, of course. All Somewheres became Here at Ellis Island. Because that’s probably the most important thing: you may think that you’re from Nowhere, or you may have come from Somewhere, but we all end up from Here.

I wish people would remember that: with bigotry and prejudice and anti-choose-your-own-group-to-hate, we still all from Here, all of us. And I know that Grandma, who I'm thinking about today, was damned proud to be Here.

The Great Miami Tornado of 1997

I was a fourth year medical student at the University of Miami. We lived on the hospital campus, on the top floor of a large pink high rise which housed numerous hospital staff and medical students. It was convenient: it only took me five minutes to walk to the hospital for my clinical rotations. There was a grocery store and a restaurant. The building also housed my one year old daughter’s day care center. It had a swimming pool on the roof, and stunning views of the Miami skyline and Biscayne Bay behind it.


I had finished my internal medicine rotation for the day: my patients were all signed out to the resident on call. I came back to the apartment for a few minutes, and kicked back in the easy chair while I waited for Libby to finish her nap, and I could pick her up. I flipped the television over to the afternoon soap operas.

All My Children was unexpectedly pre-empted by a special report. The station was broadcasting the view from the TowerCam at the top of the SunTrust Tower, downtown on Brickell Avenue. High-rise office buildings were in the picture- as well as a large black funnel cloud. The funnel stretched down to the street below, and was as tall as the high-rises which it stood next to.

It had to be some kind of joke. It looked like those stupid emails that get forwarded around the internet: giant tornadoes threatening to engulf some weird place or another. You know the ones I’m talking about: the ones with the heading “Unbelievable!!! You have to see this!!!”

But this was indeed a live picture from downtown Miami, and that was indeed a tornado. It was not a little wispy funnel like we sometimes see associated with our summer thunderstorms, nor was it a waterspout, spinning harmlessly offshore. This was a tornado which most definitely did not belong in downtown Miami, on a fairly sunny day, no less. If it were in Oklahoma, I could believe what I was seeing. But this was almost beyond comprehension.

Anticipating our disbelief, the weatherman came on the air. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is for real. This is an extremely dangerous situation. You must take cover immediately!”

I went cold. Being fascinated by tornadoes in books and television shows was one thing; having a real tornado actually bearing down on you was quite another. I was terrified.

Even though, from my study of tornadoes, the last thing you want to do is to run outside and check it out, I headed down the hall to the fire escape balcony, and looked over to the east. There it was, just like on the TowerCam. It was quiet outside, but I thought that I heard a roar in the distance. I was frozen in place for a moment.

But then I thought of Libby and all of her little baby friends, downstairs, napping next to a wall of plate glass windows.

I completely panicked. I was eighteen floors above her, and I needed to get there. In my state of panic, I decided that the elevator would be too risky- what if the power suddenly went out and I couldn’t get down there?

I flew eighteen floors down the fire escape stairs.

I am sure the teachers thought I was a little whacked when I burst into the school and told them that there was a tornado heading toward us, but still agreed to come with me and to take all of the babies into the ground floor hallway of the apartment building, away from the plate glass windows of the day care.

We stayed there for a few minutes, waiting. Someone finally told us that the threat had passed, that the tornado had crossed the bay and was now moving over the hotels on Collins Avenue. In reality, the tornado was actually moving away from us rather than towards us, but I was too scared to stop and decide which way it was moving at the time. I felt like an idiot when I heard that, but I still think that I would have done the same thing over again. We brought the babies back to the school, and my daughter and I took the elevator home.

Later, we learned that the tornado appeared out of a fairly unassuming thunderstorm west of Little Havana. It pulled a few roofs off some old apartment buildings near Calle Ocho, and proceeded downtown, where it basically scared the pants off the corporate executives in their 23rd floor offices. It caused surprisingly little damage to the skyscrapers, and only caused minor damage, flipping a single car, I believe, once it crossed the bay.

Needless to say, the story made the national news. The picture was on the cover of The Miami Herald the next morning.

The 1997 Miami tornado- from the Miami Herald (our apartment was off to the left of this picture, more toward the northwest)

The information for this post, by the way, was a little hard to find. If this had happened in 2010, there would have been innumerable pictures, videos and eyewitness reports submitted instantly to The Weather Channel, by tornado junkies like me. But in honor of Tornado Week, I thought I’d share this story.

Confessions of a Tornado Junkie

It is finally Tornado Week on The Weather Channel. I went home last night and spent a couple of hours in front of the TV, watching Storm Stories: episodes about storm chasers, about tour groups which specialize in following severe weather, and about people with way too close encounters with tornadoes.

Confession: I am a secret tornado junkie.

I watch The Weather Channel especially for the severe weather updates.

I secretly long to be a NOAA spotter.

I know the Storm Prediction Center’s web address by heart (http://spc.noaa.gov/ ). I actually read the Mesoscale Discussions on the website.

I can tell you the Latin name of the strange clouds that sometimes precede a tornado (cumulonimbus mammatus).

I can tell you that the southeast corner of a thunderstorm is most likely to produce tornadoes.

I am familiar with both the Fugita and Enhanced Fugita Scale.

I can spot a hook echo on Doppler radar.

I actually own a weather radio.

I realize that this obsession is a little weird. I didn’t grow up in a tornado-plagued part of the country. Connecticut isn’t exactly in Tornado Alley. I am both terrified and fascinated by tornadoes.

I blame it on The Wizard of Oz, which was broadcast on network television at least once a year when I was a kid. Forget the flying monkeys; it was that tornado in the black and white portion of the movie, at the beginning, that would send me scurrying to hide behind the couch in the living room. I would have nightmares in which, like Dorothy, I struggled to get somewhere safe, away from the twister, but couldn’t (I still occasionally have that nightmare. I’ve researched the hidden implications of that dream scenario- more on that in a later post).

In elementary school, I checked out the same book over and over: Hurricanes and Tornadoes. I skipped past the hurricane descriptions and pictures- those were boring. I had already been through a hurricane: my neighborhood was struck by what my parents said was the tail end of Hurricane Belle. I imagined it as some kind of big dragon with a big tail that whipped around and smacked North Haven. It uprooted a tiny sapling on the side of the house, but that was about it (Sixteen years later, my encounter with Hurricane Andrew was not so benign).

My real interest, in Hurricanes and Tornadoes, were the black and white plates in the center of the book. I pored over the pictures of the monster funnels and of their aftermath: two by fours driven through trees, upside down houses and cars. I imagined my own house, flattened to bits.

Florida, where we relocated in the late 1970s, is more of a hotbed for tornado activity. Actually, it’s pretty much right up there with the Midwest in the number and intensity of tornadoes. As the years went by, I became a little less frightened of bad weather. Tornado watches and warnings were common, but I only witnessed a rare, harmless funnel cloud or two, F0 storms, and a few benign waterspouts.

I saw my first real tornado at the age of 27, in a very unlikely place: downtown Miami, FL. The infamous Miami Tornado of 1997.