When I see pictures of local seniors in caps and gowns, I think about tornadoes.

Twelve years ago, several tornadoes took a dip in my hometown two days before me and the rest of the class of ’96 were scheduled to walk through graduation.

One of the main casualties of the tornadoes was Beatrice High School’s football field — the scheduled graduation site.

Ironically, before the tornadoes even hit, my hometown was already ripped apart over a twice-failed bond issue to construct a new high school. (Fruita, you thought things were heated with the recreation center. Try building a new school by increasing property taxes in a farming community.)

The day after the twisters, I examined the school’s damage with one of my teachers.

“Rumor has it, the superintendent was spotted on the roof with a crowbar trying to finish the job this morning,” he joked.

In other words, if the tornado didn’t total the old school ensuring construction of a new one, the head of the school district would.

A new school was discussion for a later date. The immediate concern was where the senior class would graduate — unless they wanted to set up chairs around fallen telephone poles and twisted railings littering the field.

They didn’t, so the Beatrice High School class of ’96 was the first, and so far only class, to walk through graduation on the stock car race track at the Gage County Fairgrounds.

It’s appropriate. If there’s a close second to almighty football that rules the state of Nebraska, it’s probably racing. I’m just glad it was an afternoon ceremony and they didn’t try to cancel a night of racing. That’s unless you want to call in the National Guard to maintain the peace.

One more tornado tale, this one a few years later.

It was a stifling hot, sunny, muggy, windy Nebraska afternoon — conditions that aren’t ideal for tinning a barn roof. But my two buddies and I were doing it anyway. We’d scored enough of these jobs to know how to adjust to the wind and were nearing completion of the project as the sun began to set late one Saturday.

Then the wind stopped. It got dead silent and the air cooled.

We stopped. It was beautiful — like we’d stepped into a photograph in which the colors and contrast had been stretched in Photoshop to a point that you couldn’t tell if what you were seeing was real or a painting. It’s something you don’t forget. (And we weren’t on anything.)

The silence didn’t last long. In an instant, the wind started blowing — twice as hard as it had been blowing before it stopped a few minutes before.

We’d just experienced the silence before the storm — literally. The big black cloud in the not-so-distant sky was growing a tail.

We assessed the situation:

• Barn in the middle of nowhere.

• Large pieces of tin/human decapitators strewn about on the roof and all over the ground.

• A daunting black cloud with a tail bearing down on us.

Our first instinct: Scream profanities.

Then we sprung into action. I’ve never moved so fast or worked so hard in my life.

We made sure the tin on the roof was secure and piled the remaining pieces on the ground in the barn. While the barn provided good shelter for the tin, we didn’t trust it with our lives.

We tore out of the driveway and sped down the county road in the opposite direction of the tail-growing cloud, riding in a truck that my buddy had conveniently forgotten to fill up that morning. (Couldn’t blame him, gas had to be pushing $1.50 that summer. It was painful going to the pump.)

A tornado was bearing down — we were in the middle of nowhere trying to outrun it in a truck that was pretty much out of gas.

Is this suspenseful — or what?

Well, that’s the climax.

The big black cloud in the rearview mirror sucked its tail back up, and within a few miles, the wind died down — just another hot summer night.

We stopped at a farmhouse of some people we knew, and they let us put gas in the truck. Of course, they refused to take our money.

And of course, they gave us a beer for taking their gas.

I can’t remember exactly what my buddies and I did that night, but I know the story I just wrote was told over, and over and over again. And I’m guessing the funnel cloud’s tail grew each time the story was told.

And whoever said Nebraska isn’t an exciting place to live?

<i>Josh Nichols, managing editor of the Grand Junction Free Press, is known to tell the joke, “You know you’re a redneck when you graduate on a stock car racetrack.” Reach him at editor@gjfreepress.com.</i>