My first chase was a whim, one of those ‘do something every day that scares you’ moves, admittedly bigger than my usual ‘send a status report to a VP.’ I booked a tour and gave myself permission to abort at any time if I didn’t feel safe.
Everyone else on the tour was in the medical field. The adrenaline-producing kind of medical field: ER doctor, ambulance driver, triage nurse. I learned the significance of this throughout the week. Long days of driving through flat landscapes led to these folks swapping horror stories and exposing their own odd relationships with mortality. These were people who faced death every day, adrenaline junkies with respectable titles, unsettling people to join on outings.
There were a few sketchy moments: watching a funnel start to form less than 100 yards away, hearing electricity from a distant lightning bolt crackle and zip through a wire directly above our heads, staying a night at the moth-infested Kansas Country Inn. But our guides were impressive in their skills, and I developed a lot of trust in them.
Then came a defining experience, what Virginia Woolf would call a “moment of being,” when I was acutely aware that this whim had passed through the membrane and embedded someplace deeper. I stood in a field watching as an isolated supercell developed, cranking slowly and heavily out in front of me. I’ve since read that these towering monsters hold millions of kilograms of suspended water and reach heights greater than Everest. It’s both spectral and weighty, like a ghost that can crush you.
I could feel cold wind hit my back, flow around my body, through my hair, under my arms, across the bowing wheat, where it rose up into the mouth of this sucking beast in tendrils of dust ripped from earth. A surge of energy inside me responded.
I’ve considered that it’s not a healthy obsession. It’s a spiky profile of dopamine surges and crashes. There are days of driving and waiting and magical thinking trying to manifest a fleeting high. It’s also competitive to pick your position in a scattering of chasers placing their bets on other storms, other vantages of the same storms, or worst of all piling on the same spot. Convergence creates dangerous traffic conditions and reduces your available time with the storm before you have to bolt for safety.
The real problem is that I can’t, or more honestly won’t, go whole hog on this hobby. I get a week or two each year away from work. I hire a guide to keep me safe and optimize the little time I do have and that gets expensive too. I’m forever a tourist in a life I’m so desperately drawn to.
If I win the lottery, there will be signs. Most notably, living in my car for three months each year, sleeping in Casey’s parking lots across Kansas and Nebraska, subsisting off Little Debbie’s Cherry Pies and bitter coffee from styrofoam cups. Chasing the dream.
Leave a Reply