What We Chase a Writer Mourns Colleagues Lost in May’S Killer Storms but Knows She’Ll Pursue Tornadoes Once Again

18 TUNING UP What We Chase A writer mourns colleagues lost in May’s killer storms but knows she’ll pursue tornadoes once again JENNIFER HENDERSON On May 31 of this year, Tim Samaras scrambled nebulous mass, hazy and gray, as though the sky along the roads near El Reno, Oklahoma, with his had collapsed onto the earth. His voice sounds adult son Paul and colleague Carl Young, when erratic as he stumbles over words he has to yell what they’d been hoping to intercept caught them. to be heard: “It’s gaining on us!” The national Storm Prediction Center had issued The architecture of this tornado is partly to a “Particularly Dangerous Situation” warning blame. What began as a delicate ballet of two across central Oklahoma. Such cautions should intertwined funnels evolved into an indefin- send people fleeing to shelters and basements, able sheath of dust and debris. The boundary but Tim, like hundreds of other storm chasers on between tornado and not-tornado blurred, the the road that day, pressed on. Later that afternoon, margin undulating as the storm pulled moist air Tim and his companions were unable to outrun into its core. At its peak, the rotation swelled to the winds when one storm’s entire mesocyclone— a record 2.6 miles in diameter and generated the core of its spinning heart—dropped to the winds of nearly 300 miles per hour, the top of the ground. Their car sailed through the air, tossed Enhanced Fujita Scale, the standard for rating and tumbled, and came to rest half a mile away. damage. The excitement of tracking such a mas- They were the first known storm chasers to die sive storm might well have masked the danger. in pursuit of a tornado. I, too, was on the road that day, helping facili- Many veteran chasers felt caught off guard by tate a field studies course for a group of Virginia the behavior of this tornado, by its speed and size, Tech meteorology undergraduates. As a chaser, I and the direction it turned—a sharp left hook at find it difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t the end of its path. They raced along roads per- chased what compels us to seek pleasure from risk. pendicular and parallel to its base, often barely What it’s like to drive 5,000 miles to stand on a dirt escaping the outer circulation of the winds. In road bisecting a green line of prairie and watch a one video, Jeff Piotrowski narrated his experi- rope of water vapor and air scour the ground. Or to ence in real time as the fuzzy wedge spun across feel the texture of the winds behind you whip the an open field toward him, dropping debris on back of your legs, pelting them with fine granules his car. The width of the wedge doubled over of sand and rock as the towering cumulonimbus just a few frames, transforming from a clearly suspended in front of you intensifies its spin. A defined structure with gauzy skirts of rain into a supercell can consume a horizon for miles, its Jennifer Henderson is a Virginia Tech doctoral student top flattening into an anvil against the ceiling of in science and technology studies. the troposphere. Below, a cauliflower body erupts, PHOTOGRAPHY RODRIGUEZ/W.O.T. DANIEL The American Scholar, Autumn 2013 ingesting warm, moist air from the pocket between assist local authorities by providing “ground land and clouds, through the updraft, the column truth” for forecasts or hope to catch a glimpse of violence at the center of the storm. of something rare or are simply curious. They Videos usually document the thrill of a tor- chase out of a sense of adventure, feel compelled nado, providing proof of the chaser’s talent and to discover the mechanisms of tornadogenesis— daring. Those from May 31 instead offer foren- we know surprisingly little about why tornadoes sic evidence, documentation that might piece form. At times, these motives lead to what we together the last moments of a researcher known call chaser convergence, our term for the cha- for his kind demeanor and widely respected for otic assemblage of vehicles jostling for position his meteorological inventions. My group’s reac- on back roads and interstates. In such moments, tion to Tim’s death reflected the tenor of the we are indistinguishable from one another in our larger chase community. We were sobered and urgent rush to safety and in our motives, which stunned by the counterfactual of our own choice: suddenly seem inconsequential. parked near a Walmart in El Reno, scrutinizing Sitting in a parking lot dozens of miles from the radar, we were close to this supercell when it Oklahoma City later that night, I searched Face- developed. We chose more benign routes south book for updates from friends who I thought had of Oklahoma City, but had we decided to join the likely taken shelter. I hoped that they and their fray, we too might have been killed. families were unharmed, that there would be no This realization profoundly affected the lead- casualties. Recalling place names like Greens- ers of our group, all of them fathers. “I can’t imag- burg and Joplin, Saragosa and Hallam, however, ine any storm worth not coming home to my son,” I knew better. As I watched the storms diminish, Dave said. Kevin, about to be a dad for the second I felt guilty and ashamed and generally confused time, continued to ruminate over the details of about my emotions. I didn’t want to be there; Tim’s demise long after we returned to Virginia. none of us should have been there. There is no He wondered if he’d ever chase again. pleasure in the suffering of others. His was a common refrain: Should we continue Still, chasing remains for me a form of religious our pursuit? Ought we create rules that ensure practice, an encounter with the Wordsworthian safety? Who should teach and enforce those rules? sublime. The heavens rend terrifying and beau- Answers to these questions won’t come eas- tiful, evoking a sense of exposure and revelation ily. Chasers journey to the Great Plains each tightly coupled. Almost in spite of myself, I know DANIEL RODRIGUEZ/W.O.T. PHOTOGRAPHY RODRIGUEZ/W.O.T. DANIEL spring with different ambitions: they want to I’ll join the chase again. l Tuning Up.

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