If you had told
me when I was a kid that I was going to grow up to enjoy thunderstorms and
tornadoes, I would have laughed in your face. I was petrified of storms… along
with everything else. If there was even a slight chance of storms during the
overnight hours, I would drag my sleeping bag down to my parent’s bedroom and
sleep on the floor next to their bed. Until one morning Dad woke up and tripped
over me. Then I graduated to sleeping on the couch in the living room on stormy
nights. There was just something about being further away from the lightning
(my bedroom was upstairs) and in the middle of the house that made it better.
Also, it’s not
like we lived in Tornado Alley. The only tornado I remember hitting our county in
my lifetime wiped out the town approximately 25 miles to our north on a
Saturday night in late August in the mid 90’s. It was the weekend after school
started my 6th grade year. I remember that Dad was at work, Mom was
home with my brother and I and we were watching Walker, Texas Ranger on Channel
7 when the storm warnings started coming across the scroller. At about 9:40 p.m. we went into the
basement with the radio and police scanner, listening to the local radio
station that always thought their listeners had a sense of humor because they
would always play Garth Brooks’ song “The Thunder Rolls” during a storm. They
were talking to the firefighters who had set up spotting along the river for
the best view of the western sky and then we heard a deputy say on the scanner
that a water heater just landed on the highway in front of his squad car. I was
terrified, because that’s when I started hearing noises upstairs and thought
the tornado was ripping our house apart, but it was just Dad coming home from
work and joining us in the basement. An elderly couple died in that tornado,
and to this day, the foundation where their house stood is still there. I do
remember being upset because my brother got out of school for two days to go
assist with the cleanup, but only the high school kids got to do that. Back
then, us 6th graders were still in the elementary school so we were considered
“too little” to help with cleanup.
Our neighbor was
a single Mom of one, and did not like being home alone during storms, so she
would always send her son over when a storm was imminent and ask if we wanted
to take cover in her basement. We usually would go over there; her basement was
much nicer, less scary, and had fewer creepy crawly things than ours did.
I do not recall
what piqued my interest. I know it had to be sometime between the Big Flats
tornado in the mid-90’s and summer of 2003, when I lived in downtown Dells. I
got caught in a nice storm in the early a.m. hours and instead of taking cover,
ran inside to fetch my video camera and stood under the overhang while the sky
turned green, the wind whipped the trees, and the rain deluged. I remember
telling my Dad in the truck one day that I would like to watch a tornado from a
distance once, just to say I had seen one, and then run in and help with search
and rescue or cleanup. That never happened. Our church association had a
Disaster Relief team that I wanted to get involved with, but again, adolescence
and funding prevented that.
Even the movie
“Twister” scared me. I still cannot watch it alone after dark. It’s not like I
saw that movie and was like “cool… let’s go chase tornadoes!” I was along the
lines of everyone else thinking those people were insane.
I started going
to National Weather Service (NWS) Storm Spotter training around 2002 or 2003. I
seriously do not remember what made me go from being terrified of storms to
chasing them, but I’m kind of a weird chaser. I don’t even really consider
myself a chaser. I’m definitely a spotter. I look at the radar or out the
window and say “yep…it’s gonna storm…” I know how to read radar and the
hazardous weather outlooks but not all the other weather data put out by the
Storm Prediction Center (SPC).
It may have been
the invention of digital photography that did it for me… the capability to view
pictures immediately and delete them if they don’t turn out, instead of waiting
until they’re developed to discover I wasted an entire roll of film on crappy
pictures. Because I would definitely say that I’m a weather photographer. I
take more pictures of sunsets, cloud formations, and scenery than of anything
else. Yet I will still be the one running for cover when a storm is
approaching, or planning ahead and grabbing Squeex and my laptop and driving 45
miles north to the safety of my parent’s basement. Even my Mom will tell you
that she’ll drive while I take pictures if we were able to chase storms, and
Dad is trying to figure out how to make the motorcycle safe for chasing. It
costs money for gas and food on the road to chase and I definitely don’t have
an armored tank I drive right into the heart of the storm like Sean Casey or
Reed Timmer or like the movie “Into the Storm.” I spot and chase locally and
refer what I see back to the NWS and my neighbors, who constantly ask me how
bad the storms are going to be. I always get a good laugh out of that… but I’m
usually pretty close to accurate, except for this last time, which I’ll
elaborate on in my next post.
