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‘Oh my God!’ Of course I hadn’t known she was engaged. What an amazing story. ‘I’m going to touch it for luck.’

‘It had travelled about seventy-five feet, so it’s definitely one of the luckiest pieces of jewellery I know. And my wedding dress survived, too. It has a little bit of mud on it, and a small hole in one of the seams on the side, but all that can be fixed before I get married.’

I told Bridget that I thought her community’s optimism was extraordinary.

‘In the first few days my parents were very upset. But now my mum’s talking about wanting a new big front porch. She’s already designing the new place. This was just a one-storey home and they’re discussing whether to make it taller instead of having it so long. They might go for a two-storey home.’ Apparently, she was also planning a whole new deck area and a veranda.

‘You’re all insured, aren’t you?’ I asked.

‘We had full coverage on the house.’

‘I love thinking about your mother redesigning.’ It made me laugh.

‘The first thing she said was “I want that big front porch.” She likes the big country style.’

‘I know what she means. I’m married to a woman like that.’

It’s such an American thing to be so pragmatic and optimistic, always looking at what the future might bring, rather than reflecting on what has been lost in the past.

‘This was our party place for all our friends,’ said Bridget. ‘There was a pool and a hot tub in the yard, and a trampoline. So they’re planning somewhere to continue having parties.’

Remarkably, no one was killed by the tornado. In fact, not so much as a pet had been reported missing. But I wondered what it must be like to live in a place where tornadoes are a permanent threat.

‘Have you had tornadoes here before?’ I said.

‘Not anything like this,’ said Bridget.

‘About 1967 was the last one that was equal to this,’ added Bridget’s friend. ‘And it was two miles down the road. I was a kid and I remember that one; it was on my fifth birthday. I spent it in the basement waiting for a tornado to pass.’

‘You wouldn’t need to blow your own candles out that time!’ I said.

‘No, I didn’t even have a cake that day. And people died in that one. It was really severe.’

She told me that they got lots of tornadoes, but their routes were unpredictable, so the outcome was always a bit of a lottery. In fact, St Louis is one of the most active urban areas for tornadoes in the United States. Every April, on average, 163 tornadoes will strike America, most of them in Tornado Alley. In this zone cold, dry air from Canada and the Rocky Mountains meets warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and hot, dry air from the Sonoran Desert. When they collide, the air streams create rotations, like the swirl of cream being stirred into coffee. In storms, when the air streams are fast and powerful, the rotations can turn into tornados. Tornado alley stretches from the Eastern Plain of Colorado and the Texas Panhandle, through Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri, and up to Nebraska and South Dakota. But this year, by 25 April, they had already experienced 292 tornadoes. And everyone was nervous, because May usually has twice as many as April.

They were right to be worried. A fortnight after I’d visited Bridgeton, one of the worst tornadoes in American history, a mile-wide whirlwind, struck Joplin, Missouri, killing 138 people. At the same time, Arizonans were fighting some of the largest wildfires they had ever known; and the greatest flood in US history was spreading down the Missouri River. Meanwhile, Texas was suffering its eighth year of ‘exceptional’ drought in the past twelve years. Something very weird was happening to the weather.

The next day, we took the trike to a garage to get the throttle fixed. It was now so stiff that it made my thumb and forefinger ache. It was all I could think about when I was riding along, and that was dangerous. My mind ought to have been on the road, not my throbbing thumb, when I was flying up an interstate or bumping along Route 66. With the bike