 No one on the radio ever said there was a tornado. The last thing we heard on the radio before the power cut out was that there were straight line winds in St. Peter. Pretty much almost as soon as we turned the radio on, they stopped broadcasting. And we found out later they stopped broadcasting because the antenna had fallen over. Almost as soon as we got down in the basement, the edge of the tornado was already on us. She was looking out of the south facing window in second floor comfort. And just as I got to her, she pointed to me and she says, is that a tornado? And I looked and it was just a white wall. And then I told her yes. And I said, we need to go downstairs now. I remember holding hands with my roommates, sort of praying that whatever this was, it sounded bad. She grabbed ahold of me and I grabbed ahold of her and I started thinking, oh, we're going to die together. We just looked outside and saw trees down. My car was damaged. And part of the roof of Swedish house had been peeled away like a can opener. So you'd find parts of town, a block from us, homes gone damaged. And then next to it would be something that was totally destroyed. You really had to wonder how we were going to make it. It was as surreal as you can imagine. Nothing was where it should be. You go, what is that even? How did that get here? And where's my garage? I remember standing down by the Gustavus sign at the bottom of Old Main Hill and looking up. And it's an entire hill of dirt. It's just dirt. The college that you remember with all the trees on Old Main Hill. It's all gone. None of it was there. It was pretty clear to us the extent of the damage and that the college couldn't recover from us. That was our first thought. I kept waiting for that point, okay, where is the campus not going to be impacted? Where is it not going to be damaged? And I was just so surprised because moving from our home which was a block from campus all the way past the chapel, all I could see was the destruction. And of course, speaking of the chapel was that iconic tower steeple of the chapel being bent in half and falling into the roof. I'll never forget that memory as well. People cried the first time they saw it. Cried several times when they saw it. Officials believed two to three hundred homes were damaged in St. Peter's town of about 10,000 people. The next day, Axel Sluyer had a press conference. He made it absolutely clear. Gustavus was going to recover. Gustavus was going to re-open. We were going to finish this academic year. We're aiming to have an opening after spring break. As you know, we were very fortunate that we had spring break this start last Friday. I foresee a maximum of two weeks and we expect to be closed at least this week. This is a new situation. The whole school is wrecked. It's like somebody dropped a small tactical nuclear weapon on it. But we can open it up in a month. And it was like, well, somebody has to tell them this isn't going to be possible. And Owen Samuelson, who's the Vice President for Administration, could join the meeting a little bit late and said, well, you're not going to convince him. And he pulled out a letter from a prospective student that had just committed to Gustavus to check for $20, something in all her reasons for being convinced that Gustavus was placed for her based on the recovery things that she was hearing on the news in the Twin Cities. He said, you're not going to convince Axol. It's anything but, at the time, three weeks probably. It was, I don't know, just an incredibly point in time, I think. And 20 years later, I think about there were so many people working really hard to make sure that my life went pretty easy, making sure I was fed and a safe place to stay, that I got my mail, that I went to class. And I can only imagine the things that they were going through in their own lives when they would go home, right? And I think I really took that for granted. I think faculty, students, administration, and staff were all determined to make this work. Basically walked around St. Peter with our rakes. So we would just roam from block to block and help people clean up debris and clean up leaves and branches and tree trunks and that sort of thing. We ate our lunches and dinners from the Red Cross van. So you'd kind of keep an eye out for when the Red Cross van was coming by. I found very few students who were checked out. In fact, they checked in. They were doubly engaged. It was no, kind of, oh, my senior year, I'm going to get senioritis. I'll go out drinking and, you know, that kind of stuff. It was, they were checked in and they were very much affected by what was going on. And the person I can't forget is the woman who came whose child hadn't even started Gustavus yet. And she came because she said, I already feel like I'm part of the family of the Gustavus family. I wanted to be here. And we wound up enrolling at that time the largest first-year class in the history of the college. We had 700 and 10, I think. No students come in who would ever have believed that. The biggest thing about the tornado was what happened afterwards because I think the community really, really pulled together. When those crab apples blew them in the spring, it's that they were blooming that first spring. They were large enough that when they were put in the ground a few weeks later, they started blooming and it was almost a cathartic moment for those of us at campus that remember the hill being barren. The tornado and the recovery from the tornado created this sort of culture of together we can do anything, right? This place was nearly wiped out and we rebuilt it in three weeks. It took longer than three weeks, but we patched it up pretty well. It's such a model for Gustavus as a community and when people worked together, it was with such incredible spirit, it brought the community together. There was also a lot of gusty rosters being sung and there was a whole new sort of commonality. In many ways, the campus is much more beautiful because of the decisions that were made afterwards because of the rebuilding. It's not about the trees or the brick and mortar, it was the people that responded so many wonderful ways. This is what Gustavus did, yes, 20 years ago, but these are the same values and same wonderful qualities that are there in Gustavus today.