He pulled into Salt Lake City four weeks ago, after driving all night across the plains and then across the Wasatch. Tornadoes can't come through mountains, Lance Blaylock says, explaining one of the reasons why he lives in Utah now and not, say, Indiana.
He arrived with his girlfriend and two children in mid-August, a few days after the 10th anniversary of Salt Lake's deadly twister, which is to say he missed the news coverage.
So, he's feeling safe.
He has come here for a fresh start, hoping that Utahns will buy his pencil portraits — pictures of children and mothers and sometimes whole families, drawn from photographs that people send him. They grin at him from his drafting table, a daily reminder of both what he lost and why he has finally decided not to drink himself to death.
"Celebrate your loved ones," begins the pitch on his Web site, portraitartistdrawings.net. Blaylock, 33, lost his own loved ones in the early morning hours of a late fall day nearly four years ago.
The Evansville, Ind., tornado of 2005 struck the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park at 2 a.m. on Nov. 6. Blaylock was living in North Carolina at the time, but later he learned that his mom had pulled his older brother, Brandon, and his brother's 4-year-old son into the bedroom closet with her, right before the twister blew apart that part of the house. His dad, who was walking across the room, was pulled straight up out of the house and thrown into a lake. Only a younger brother, Chad, and the family dog survived. In all, 25 people in Evansville died that night.
"Me and my mom have a lot in common. We worry a lot," Blaylock says, adding that many of the things they worry about actually happen, and then adding that "it's because we worry about so many things, so one of them is bound to happen."
One of the things his mother worried about was tornadoes. She listened to the weather channel all the time, he says, and he remembers her pushing him and his two brothers into a closet when he was 7, putting her arms around them and praying that a funnel cloud would pass over without killing them.
For the next two decades, both mom and son had constant nightmares of twisters, weekly dreams that left him panicked.
Five months after his family died, Blaylock himself was in a tornado while he was standing outside a hotel in Tennessee. It was coming toward the hotel, and as soon as he saw it, he started running straight for it.
"I wanted to die the way they did," he says about his family. By then, he was depressed and drinking heavily. But as he ran, he saw a woman in the parking lot, and before he could think, he was picking her up and carrying her toward a nearby laundromat, and once inside, he made everyone crouch next to the far wall.
Thirty-five other people were killed by the tornado that day, including a mother who had sought refuge in a closet with her son; he held onto her as long as he could before she was pulled up and away.
Blaylock moved around a lot after that. And kept drinking. And then, last Halloween, his son Spencer was born, and he realized he wanted to keep living.
And last winter, at the urging of his girlfriend, Phaedra, he started drawing again.
"Each drawing to me is like luck," he says about his portraits. He is untrained but also clearly talented; his pencil drawings, from photographs, have both a softness and a clarity, despite the fact that before last winter, he hadn't drawn anything since he was a teenager.
Right now, he and Phaedra and their two kids, 9-year-old Chandler and 10-month old Spencer, are living in one small room at a residence hotel in Midvale. The room contains two beds, two chairs, a baby walker and a drafting table.
"I think about them a lot when I'm drawing," he says of the family he lost. "It reminds me of how we used to be."
He has one photo of his parents. But he has never drawn their portrait. "It's hard for me to sit and stare at them," he says.
e-mail: jarvik@desnews.com