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May 22, 2008

Early afternoon and the Tempest caravan is in southcentral Kansas, where there ain’t nothin’ but Supercells. We’re aligned on a dirt road, watching storms inflate, when Kinney draws me aside.

“You’re a good driver,” he tells me, “but this is major league stuff. You’re going to be playing a fine line today between being safe and being in a situation you can’t get out of. It can change in seconds. Understand?”

I nod. Receiving such a warning from the usually laid-back Kinney is a little scary. I feel like young Luke Skywalker being scolded for brashness as he confronts real danger for the first time.

Which is precisely what we do. While we gas up at a Sunoco, Bill checks the radar to target one of many Supercells surrounding us. I’ve never seen anything like this. In all directions the sky boils with huge gray cloud towers, shooting upwards and gaining strength. I’ve been jumped-up on chases before, but now I feel hunted.

“What’s that?” Marcia yells over the screaming wind and points to the Laredo’s rear right tire.

It’s a spike. A quarter-inch spike topped by a nickel-sized washer. With teeth in it. Firmly embedded.

I summon the Tempest guys. They assess the situation thoroughly but quickly. Time is of the essence. If we don’t hurry we could miss a tornado. If we don’t hurry we could get hit.

“I think it’ll hold,” guide Chris Gullickson shouts.

“But it could blow, right?” I yell back. “Bill, what should I do?”

Bill shakes his head. “It’s your call.”

The sirens start wailing. I’m responsible for not only my life but for my passengers, Marcia and British chaser chick Kirstie, and in five seconds I have to decide whether to stay here and risk getting killed by an EF5—a very real possibility—or follow these guys into a tornadic storm with a spike in my tire.

“Let’s go,” I shout.

As we jounce out of town the girls reassure me. “They have Threat-Net,” Marcia says.

“They won’t let anything bad happen to us,” says Kirstie.

My NOAA weather radio emits the emergency signal—blatt-blatt-blatt—indicating a tornado forming in our area. I look up and see a mesocyclone—the storm’s rotating updraft, the eye from which the funnel will drop. Mesos can be six miles wide; this one’s tight, its edges churning. “Hey, that’s right overhead!” I say, and then, “What’s that sound?”

The tire’s just popped.

What happens next transpires in what I now think of as fear-time: both so fast that you can’t do anything but act, yet so intense that—in some psychic dimension—it’s still happening.

I drive on the rim to an abandoned farmhouse.

Two of the tour vans stop. Bill’s lead van goes on.

All the men rush over and throw our suitcases out into the rain and hail to get the spare tire.

I scream at them to go rejoin the tour. We’ll be fine. I’ll break a window and we’ll shelter in the farmhouse basement.

The men go spontaneously deaf. As the wind whips us with mud they change the tire in five minutes.

We get back on the road.

Over the ham radio Bill’s tourists are screaming they see a tornado.
We see it too, a ghostly white rope stretching miles into the sky.
We pull off on another dirt road as the overhead Supercell becomes a carousel, spinning tornadoes off one after the other: cone, rope, wedge, elephant tusk.

“Cool!” yells Kirstie, so thrilled she’s crying.
“Hooray!” says Marcia, setting up her cameras.
Kinney runs around to everyone saying, “Thank you for chasing with Tempest.”
I take pictures. My hair is wet and muddy. I do not look like Helen Hunt. I’m happy to see the tornadoes, but it’s an abstract emotion, as if I’m telling myself I’m happy.

May 23, 2008

But true weather weenies have great resilience. I’ve recovered by the next day, which is predicted to be equally active. The Boys of Tempest head back to OKC with the tourists, their chase is technically over. Marcia, Kirstie and I—the chaser chicks—decide to stay in Kansas and meet guides Bill and Chris later, after they’ve made their airport drop and come back out.

Um, wait. That means we’re chasing by ourselves. We have no radar, no Baron ThreatNet, no GPS. All we have is a Jeep Laredo riding on a spare, our NOAA weather radio—nicknamed “Sven” because the robot voice on it sounds oddly Norwegian—and what we can see of the sky with our own eyes.

In other words, we’re chasing old-school.

It’s a little unnerving, but I’m game. Especially since Bill and Chris will be zooming back up to Kansas this afternoon. Meanwhile, the chaser chicks stop in Salina to buy the Laredo a brand-new spare, check the latest predictions on the Storm Prediction Center website in Salina’s beautiful old library, buy a couple of maps and a rootbeer float for Jenna, and get back on the road. Our target: Dodge City, KS.

By the time we get there, Dodge City is already surrounded by Supercells. One is hanging directly over the town, menacing it with the edge of its anvil with lots of mammatus clouds on its underside, signifying imminent severe weather.

and our trusty Sven is issuing tor-na-DO warn-INGS for our immediate area. As Kirstie says, “Cool.” But where are the Tempest Boys?

We call them: they’re stuck down on the Oklahoma Panhandle, separated from us by a line of tornadic storms.

“Just go west,” Bill Reid says. “Don’t miss your storm. It looks to be the best one of the day.”

We get the heck out of Dodge, driving west and north into rural farmland—straight toward the heart of the Supercell. We pass see spotters, sheriffs’ prowlers, emergency management, other chasers parked with their cameras rolling and hazards flashing. Marcia’s struggling to get radar on her cell phone and read the map at the same time. She directs me onto a dirt road.

“Are you sure?” I say. I don’t want to sound like, you know, a girl, but if we hit a rain core and the road turns to mud—we’re toast. We could be mired in the tornado’s path.

“It looks well-defined on the map,” Marcia says.

We jounce onto the road, keeping an eye on the Supercell, which is now rotating and producing funnels over a lonesome farm:

…and whomp! The Laredo slaloms over a pothole. Our dirt road turns to ruts full of red water that flies up in wings. Obviously our Supercell’s precipitation core has already flooded these roads. It’s like driving in thick grease.

“I’m sorry, but this is too dangerous. I think we have to go back,” I say.

“I agree,” says Marcia.

“Cool,” says Kirstie.

I turn the Laredo around and see what we’re going to be driving into: another Supercell.

“Crap,” I say.

“GO,” says Marcia.

I drive as fast as I dare through the slurry. “Wait, stop!” says Kirstie, when we reach the paved road. She jumps out and rummages in the drainage ditch, then holds something out to us.

The amazing thing is, this hail has been melting for a while. Originally, it was probably softball-sized.

We skirt the Supercell and drive back toward Dodge City to intercept the Tempest Boys, pausing to check out the remains of the Santa Fe Trail. From the monument marker atop a hill, Kansas looks like this:

You’d never know there were Supercells to the north, south, west and east.

But there are. By the time we catch up to the Tempest boys, there’s a Supercell headed for tiny Greensburg, Kansas—totally destroyed a year ago on May 5, 2007 and still struggling to rebuild. Earlier today, we drove through Greensburg, and I cried a bit looking at the bare streets, the twisted trees snapped off at my height, the signs saying, “Thanks, FEMA!” and “Greensburg, the New Cancun!” Now, Sven is saying, “A LARGE and DANgerous tornaDO is on the GROUND, 5 miles south and headed toward GreensBURG.” We drive back past the plucky little town, trapped under the black lid of this new tornadic storm. What light remains is green, so the stunted trees look like they’re underwater. It is a unique vision of hell. The wind starts to punch the Jeep and I say a prayer both for us and for Greensburg, then follow Tempest’s white van into the storm.

~ Jenna Blum

(Author’s note: according to spotters, the huge wedge tornado lifted just as it reached Greensburg, then came down again on the other side.)