I was just driving along through some wide open country. Initially I was by myself but I'd run across a young woman hitch-hiking so I gave her a lift. I'd like to point out at this stage that I'm not a lecher and all I was doing was offering her a lift to the next town. If it hadn't been threatening to rain I might not have bothered, but I didn't like to think of her stranded in a storm.
The skies were getting very dark now and I was feeling a little concerned. The storm looked like it was going to be quite bad and I had a nasty suspicion that this was going to be tornado weather.
I explained my suspicions to my passengers and told her that as soon as possible I intended to pull up where we could take proper shelter. I asked her if she knew anywhere in the area that we could head for, but she was a stranger here as well.
Then wouldn't you know it, I saw a damned funnel start down from the clouds a couple of miles in front of us and then go back up. That potential shelter just went screaming up to the top of my to-do list but we were still stuck out in the middle of nowhere. If there were any convenient farms around with nice strong storm cellars they were very inconveniently hiding.
That was the situation when I ran out of time. That funnel came down again and this time it touched down on the road ahead of us and started strolling towards us. It seemed to me my options were few. I could try to turn and outrun it, pile out of the car and head off across the fields and hope to get out of its path or pile out of the car and dive into a handy ditch and pray.
I'd noticed that there was a ditch paralleling the road and from what I'd read that was probably my best bet for getting out of this.
So here I go, piling out of the car and dragging the hiker with me. I helped her into the ditch and told her to lie as flat as possible and to cover her head in case of flying debris. (That sounds so much better than saying I pushed into the ditch and yelled "lie down, you idiot", which is probably what I really did.)
So there we were, lying down, covering our heads, hoping for the best and praying. It's amazing how fast you can become a Christian in certain circumstances.
Next thing I knew there was a lot of noise and wind and objects hitting us. This went on for about half a minute, but seemed from my perspective to last an hour or so, and then it was over.
We were OK. I could hear the funnel drawing steadily away from us and good riddance to it. We stayed low for a couple of minutes and then we both sort of stuck our heads up and looked around.