Storm Chasing

 For a kid who dropped out of college, I've done ok for myself.  I've had two good careers.  I loved working in the airline business (Ozark/TWA/SeaPort), I had a nice 15-year career as a journalist, met some famous people, even won a few awards for my writing and picture taking.  Even working in radio was fun.  In fact, I will go far as to say radio never really seemed like work.  It was just fun.

But despite having those careers, if I had it all to do over, I would be a meteorologist or storm chaser.  I don't know what it is, but storms and tornadoes and hurricanes just fascinate the daylights out of me.  

Let me quickly add I am fully aware of the destruction and loss of life storms can cause.  I am not minimizing that at all.  Unfortunately, when you have severe storms, those things will happen.

I am usually up by six or so every morning.  At that hour, M is usually still asleep, so I make the coffee, and sit in my recliner and watch the Weather Channel.  Not only do I get the forecast for my region, I am also educated by all the features they have on during the course of the morning.  I know the elements needed for tornadoes, I know a trough is not just something for pigs, and that high pressure generally means calm weather, while low pressure means makes sure there are fresh batteries in the weather radio.

It used to be 30-40 years ago, like many Americans, I would go to bed with Johnny Carson.  Nowadays, I wake up with Jim Cantore, Stephanie Abrams, Kelly Cass, Reynolds Wolf, Jordan Steele and others.  For an hour or so every morning, they are my constant companions.  I feel like I should be sending them Christmas cards are something.  I should also add one of the Weather Channel on-camera meteorologists, Molly McCollum, is the daughter of one of my buddies (Malcolm McCollum) from Harding.  Small world.

When I was younger, so much younger than today, the house I grew up in, in the St. Louis suburb of Overland, faced west.  There was an attached single-car garage to the house, and dad kept it neat enough he could get a car in there.  But one thing I remember about that garage was storms.  Anytime storms were eminent, by that I mean thunderstorms, I would open the garage door, get a lawn chair, and sit a foot or so inside the garage and watch the approaching storm.  Dad might join me at times, and occasionally my brother Barry watched as well, but generally speaking, he did not have the affinity for storms that I had.

So there I would sit, usually alone, scanning the clouds, watching for rotation, watching the clouds dance across the sky.  I remember being fascinated when multiple levels of clouds were visible.  You might have some scattered clouds at say, 800 feet moving rapidly to the northeast, then a layer of overcast at about 1,500 feet moving just as fast in an opposite direction.  To a 14-year-old kid, this was fascinating.  If the sirens I went off, I knew it was time to put away the lawn chair, close the garage door and head to the basement.  I may have been enthralled, but I wasn't stupid.

Fast forward 25 years or so.  I'm working for the Pocahontas Star Herald in Pocahontas, Arkansas, a weekly newspaper with a circulation of about 5,000.  I started with them on Valentine's Day, 2000 and left in the fall of 2014.  In addition to writing, I also took pictures.  As much as I loved writing (and I still do) I got a great deal of satisfaction out of a well taken picture, one where the lighting, the focus, the subject, everything was just right.

Of course I took some feature pics as well, in addition to the news and sports pictures.  I had decided early on, I had a two-item bucket list for my picture taking.  One, I wanted to get a picture of a lightning bolt striking the ground.  One afternoon I got not one but two.  I was parked near the Randolph;/Lawrence County line looking back toward Pocahontas.  I watched the sky for a bit and determined where the most lightning was and focused on that area.  My finger already to snap, as soon as lightning appeared, I snapped.  With the gazillionth of a second shutter speed, on two occasions I captured the bolt.  No, it was not luck as some said.  The great baseball general manager Branch Rickey had a sign on his desk.  It read, "luck is the residue of design."  I was prepared.

Secondly, I wanted to get a picture of a real funnel cloud.  A tornado that was touching terra firma.  One afternoon in early October, I forget the year, it was storming big time.  There were warnings and alerts all over northeast Arkansas.  I had a nice vantage point sitting in my car on top of a hill on Engelberg Road.  Scanning the skies, there it was, a rotation funnel, maybe a half mile in front of me, maybe 1,000 feet up.  I watched it for several minutes and started slowly following it.  As it headed towards the gas plant south of Biggers, I pulled down a dirt road, it might have been Gazaway Road.  My patience was rewarded a minute or two later.  The funnel, now a mile or so to my east, started to lower to the ground.  My Nikon camera was ready, I had a new roll of Fuji film in it.  I started taking pics, getting a number of good shots.

I remember as soon as the tornado dissipated, driving to Walmart and dropping my film off at the photo center.  I picked the pics up an hour or so later and feeling a sense of pride as the second picture item had been checked.

It made the front page of the paper that week.  I was so proud of the pic, i emailed it to everyone I knew.  It was really funny because about half wrote back and said, "what a cool pic."  While the other half wrote back saying, "Are you nuts?"  I quickly dismissed them, they obviously did not understand.

M and I watched Twisters and I loved it.  Even though it was a movie, I was a tad jealous, wishing I were chasing storms and EF-4's across the plains.

Oh well.  Maybe in my next life.

Thanks for stopping by.  Take care of yourself and be kind to each other.