Storm-Stuff

We sit on the flatbed of the truck, chowing down on beans from a can. Waiting. We’re right in the middle of the road, right in the middle of town. If anyone else was here, we’d be in the way. The windows are all boarded up, the inhabitants driving down the interstate, going Anywhere but Here. It feels like we’re in a zombie movie, alone in this weird emptiness and stillness where there should be people and chatter.

The sky is purple combat, one front piling into another. Electricity arcs across the clouds, as if reflected on the other side of a glass curtain, a world apart from ours.

It should be soon. That’s the word from the DOW trucks, and those boys should know, with their mobile command centres and stocky, spinning radar dishes where the backend of a rig should be. Two air fronts spin about one another, cold around hot, dry against wet, and rotation’s all but inevitable. They’re like magicians, these DOW truck boys, with their apparatus, seeing things we don’t. They predict futures while we just have hunches. Where they go, entire convoys of chasers follow behind, ramshackle shanty towns tramping after prophets all across Tornado Alley.

‘It’s your first time, ain’t it?’ I ask Rusty. He’s a young man, nicknamed for his rust-iron hair. Freckles dot about his face like little flecks of Martian sand. He adjusts his baseball cap at the question, smiling from ear to ear.

‘Yeah.’

‘Should be a good one.’

‘We gotta see something sometime.’

Rusty’s sore to realise that chasing is ninety-nine percent disappointment. There’s no telling how a tornado behaves, at least, not to a certainty. The DOW boys tell us where one’s likely to form, but sometimes they don’t, and – if they do – sometimes they disappear as quickly as they come.

I smile. ‘So why you here, Rusty?’

He shrugs, like chasing tornados is like playing a bit of ball on the weekends. ‘Something to do.’

Jerry laughs at that, taking a swig from his flask. Jerry’s an old buddy of mine. Every storm season, we travel hundreds of miles together, chasing.

Rusty goes a little red and shrugs again.

‘Come on, partner,’ Jerry says. ‘He ain’t trying to trick you.’

‘How about I go first?’ I suggest. I think. ‘Well, the first thing you gotta know is that I ain’t one of those adrenaline junkies. Though there’s plenty of them out here.’

‘Like me,’ Jerry says. ‘Whoo-wee!’

‘First time I saw a storm,’ I say, ‘I must have been five or six: first one I remember, anyway. I had my nose pressed up against the glass. Wasn’t scared or nothing, just fascinated by it. I dunno what to tell you: it just felt like I should be out there, like I was looking at something I recognised in me, my soul, maybe. That God had made me out of storm-stuff.’

I smile. I try not to take myself too seriously. ‘I dunno. I’ve just always wanted to be out there, chasing storms. Soon as I was able, I was at it.’

Jerry passes his flask to Rusty, who takes a good swig. Jerry’s good like that. He's not just Texan swagger.

‘I know what you mean,’ Rusty says. ‘I used to strip naked and run out into lightning storms. I lived on a farm,’ he adds quickly, ‘So it was no bother to people.’

I grin. ‘There’s a power to it,’ I say. ‘Something that makes us all together, takes us back to our ancestors. All those folk staring at those storms, all of us experiencing nature at its heart.’

‘Yeah,’ Rusty says, and I think I’m putting voice to things he’s thought before.

‘You ever know someone to get struck by lightning?’ Jerry asks Rusty. Rusty smiles, and shakes his head.

‘I felt my hairs go up once,’ he says. ‘But I threw myself down and it hit the tree instead.’

‘Jee-sus,’ Jerry says. ‘That didn’t put you off?’

‘Encouraged me,’ Rusty says with a little smile.

Jerry laughs. ‘You’re like the Jerry-Bill,’ he tells Rusty. ‘Spiritual junkie.’

Rusty laughs, but he looks a little embarrassed. I slap him on the shoulder and return to my beans.

That’s the question, ain’t it: why the hell do you chase tornadoes? Way I see it, if you look at the statistics, it ain’t much different from any other extreme sport. Plenty of folks die BMXing or cave diving. Truth is, us storm chasers have a good record. The last guy who died chasing was hit by a drunk driver on the way home. No one’s been thrown up into a twister or anything. Sure, a few of us have died from driving in hazardous conditions, but that's nothing, really.

Anyway, that’s not what puzzles folks. Folks can get their heads around BMXing or cave diving. Maybe it’s the athleticism of it.

Or maybe all those BMXers are fielding the same questions. 

Anyway, the fact that we’re not dying left and right isn’t an answer to why we’d take the risk in the first place. Some of the appeal is the risk, course. We’re all adrenaline junkies to a point. Jerry and I got too close to an eyewall one time. The entire jeep lifted three metres into the air, flew sideways a couple of metres, and clanged back down. That was a hell of a thing. Everyone’s got a story of almost being hit by a piece of metal travelling at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. You’re shocked, then you laugh in that giddy pure way that’s still part shock, but also the sheer fucking joy of still being alive, and then you get scared, but in that weird way you get scared about things that are already done.

That feeling’s not nothing. I’ve never been more aware that I’m alive. Maybe more people need to feel that, let them know just what they’ve got.

Still, that isn’t the reason. It’s as I told Rusty. I’m storm-stuff. Us humans have been finding something in storms since the dawn of time. It’s no surprise to me that we invented gods to explain them. Storms call out for divine explanation: the awe of them, the power of them, the essence of them. Not that I mind the real explanations. That doesn’t ruin it for me. Because even the explanations are out of this world. Two fronts of air locked in combat, soundtracked by thunder and lightning, grappling until the very sky starts spinning apart. Hell of a thing. If you don’t feel anything when you look at a tornado – and I don’t mean fear, I mean feel something deep – then I don’t know what to make of you.

The radio starts crackling and Jerry leaps forward to listen. He throws up his finger and spins it around. It’s time to go. We excitedly pile into the cab, shoulders pressed together.

‘Twenty kilometres south,’ Jerry says. ‘A big one.’

The interstate’s empty but for the other chasers.

‘Seatbelt,’ Jerry tells Rusty, who shrugs before complying. I’m already strapped in. It’s as I told you: if you’re going to die chasing, it’s on the way to the thing. The winds are already up. I feel it through the frame of the vehicle, throwing us back and forth, pushing against the tyres. Jerry doesn’t seem fazed, so I’m not worried.

We start to see the DOW trucks. If you connected them by invisible line, they’d form a wide triangle around where the tornado will appear, almost like they’re summoning it. I don’t know the specifics, but it’s something about their radar dishes needing to point at the thing from different directions. My stomach falls a bit when I see that a small town’s right in the middle of the triangle. It’s tiny: just a hardware store, a garage and a few bars, but still. It’s gonna take a battering.

I hope the owners are insured.

Jerry sees the bright side. ‘See that wall?’ he asks, pointing at the south side of the garage. ‘That’s solid concrete.’

I give him a look, excitement bubbling. ‘You’re saying we can go in?’

He grins. ‘With the way the tornado’s going, it’ll shield us from the eyewall, I reckon.’ He bumps Rusty on the shoulder. ‘Your call, first-timer. Do you wanna be inside a tornado?’

‘Uh… yes!’ Rusty exclaims, gleam in his eye.

We park up behind the wall. It’s raining buckets, the wipers flying left and right across the windshield. The butterflies in my stomach are doing loop-de-loops. We stay in the vehicle, of course. Even with the wall, the DOW boys warn of hundred-and-sixty-mile winds.

And normally, we watch from a distance.

Everyone knows the expression ‘eye of the storm’. Well, the wall of that eye is where all the damage is. It’s what the tornado is, really, where everything is spinning and being chucked in every direction. And it’s gonna pass right through us.

A crack of thunder vibrates through my stomach.

‘Here it comes!’ Jerry shouts. He points directly upwards. With the angle of us to the concrete wall, all we can see is the top of the twister. It’s dark-grey-purple, crackling with a bolt of lightning, spinning like a kaleidoscope made of sheet water and air.

‘Holy shit!’ Rusty yells, but he’s laughing, thrilled by his terror.

The eyewall is on us now. Blankets of rain-foamed wind wash past the wall like ghostly, ocean waves, never retracting, always pushing forwards. Spectral veils wash over each other, alive by some impossible momentum, forwards, forwards, forwards. We see it by the rain and debris. The corrugated roof of the hardware store tears off, flung down the street and scoring deep into the road. A trashcan is flung outwards, its contents hurled about like it’s thrown by some tantruming, infant god. The jeep lurches, but the brakes and the tyres hold steady, locking us in place. Soon, we can barely see but for the rain whipping about us. I don’t hear the thunder over the roar of the wind: I don’t hear it, but I feel it, moving through my bones. A lightning bolt strikes one of the bars: like with the thunder, I don’t hear it, but I feel all my hairs stand on end as it crashes to nothing. I wish I was out there, feeling the whipping winds on my clothes, soaked to the skin in the fury of that rain. I wish I could be out there without being thrown a hundred metres, thrown up and down, up and down as I drown in the sky. I wish I wish I wish.

We’re past the forward eyewall and things start to calm down. The eye is small, and we get the glimpse of a yellow sky before the rearward wall sweeps over us. The jeep shudders and shakes, but the rearward wall ain’t as bad as its forward twin. I close my eyes and breathe in the soul of this thing, let the feeling find every fold and wrinkle of me.

When I open my eyes, the tornado is on the other side, and we get the full view. We watch in silent fascination. It looks like the gnarled index finger of some gigantic ghost, its skin just whirlpool air, pointing down at the ground, pointing at what it wants to destroy. It spins for a few more moments, before the finger lifts, like it’s being sucked into a plug hole in the sky, spinning, spinning, spinning…

… then gone.