“There was a movie about tornado chasing a while back—”
“Twister. 1996. Flying cows and all that bullshit.”
“Yeah. Did that do much for the tour business?” She hoped she wasn’t rubbing salt into an open wound.
Chuck didn’t seem to mind. “Initially it did. But people, except for hard core chasers—those really enamored by big storms—soon discovered that reality and Hollywood’s take on it didn’t mesh. Chasing, as you’ve found out, is mostly sitting on your butt in a vehicle for hours on end, gagging down fast food, and then standing around like lost souls in purgatory waiting for something to happen.”
“Amen, brother.”
“But the payoff can be spectacular.”
Gabi wondered if he was referencing the million bucks or something more esoteric. “So what motivated you, in the beginning, to chase twisters? Certainly it wasn’t money, at least initially.”
“With me, I guess it’s a combination of the chase and being able to poke a finger in the eye of something akin to the Grim Reaper.”
He sped up as they left Oklahoma City, heading northeast on the Turner Turnpike, then continued with his answer to Gabi’s question. “I love the chase, and I’m not talking about just the tactical pursuit. I crave the strategic challenge, too, trying to figure out where to lie in wait for the prey, the supercells. It’s a cat and mouse game against Mother Nature, or maybe God.”
“God?”
Chuck, in a stentorian voice said, “Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm . . . ?”
“Bible?”
“Job 38:25. So yes, God, if you’re a fundamentalist. I’m not. I don’t see God’s directing hand in every storm. To me, it’s more like standing in His test tube and watching His laws of physics and thermodynamics at work. It’s at once humbling and awe-inspiring.” He moved his gaze off the highway for a moment and looked at Gabi, a light of excitement in his eyes, as though he were a child again.
He turned his attention back to road. “Just imagine,” he said, “watching a puff of fluffy cumulus grow into a monster. It starts as a thermal, an invisible updraft rising in the afternoon heat but cooling as it rises, eventually squeezing out whatever moisture it bears into a cloud.
“The cloud grows, billowing upward, expanding, churning, responding to its environment, sucking more heat and moisture into what’s become an engine, an atmospheric motor of immense horsepower.” Chuck stared straight ahead, appearing to become lost in his words.
He went on: “It seems suddenly alive: fierce, majestic, potentially deadly, yet with a structure—a personality, if you will—that’s understandable and approachable. It allows you to stand next to it until it morphs into something more violent, something that chases you away with blasts of wind and spears of lightning . . .” His voice trailed off and Gabi sensed he was somewhere else.
She waited a while and then asked, “You still with us?”
He answered her, almost in a whisper. “I’ve seen ‘the storehouses of the hail’ and ‘the place where the lightning is dispersed’.”
“Job again?” she ventured.
He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “From a story 4000 years old.” He seemed to drift away again. “No. No. It’s only ten years old. I know. I was there.”
Chapter Sixteen
SUNDAY, MAY 5
THE CHASE TEAM had spent Saturday in Tulsa and used the time for personal pursuits. Ziggy, Nosher, Boomie, and Willie Weston rented clubs at a nearby golf course and played eighteen, Gabi and the two women working with Global-American toured the Tulsa Garden Center, while Ty and Chuck hung around the motel. Metcalf mostly bitched, proclaiming Tulsa the tedium capital of the world.
After discovering the city was originally part of Indian Territory, he suggested giving it back to them and letting them turn the town into a giant casino. “At least there’d be something to do,” he groused, “and it might even attract some decent pussy.”
Now, on Sunday, Chuck vectored the team northward into eastern Nebraska, leading the small caravan through green rolling farm country speckled with evergreens and oaks. Tidy small towns, the kind that once might have graced Norman Rockwell paintings, greeted them at regular intervals. Homes with front porches and rocking chairs, small churches advertising potluck suppers, and Dairy Queens with full parking lots proclaimed Middle America.
Chuck took only cursory notice, however. His mind was on the following two days. Even though the chase was only at its halfway point, he knew full well Monday and Tuesday probably would present the last viable opportunities to catch what Metcalf and his cinematographers were after. Beyond that, it appeared the next chance wouldn’t materialize until the following Sunday at the earliest. By then, Chuck’s coach would have turned into a pumpkin, his dreams of a million dollars into the unrequited fantasy of a middle-aged loser.
The Storm Prediction Center had already defined an area of “moderate risk” for tomorrow, meaning there would be a good chance of seeing tornadoes, though being in the right place at the right time would be, as always, the real challenge. The region outlined encompassed central and eastern Nebraska and eastern South Dakota. Chuck planned on overnighting near Lincoln, Nebraska, then launching from there in the morning.
MONDAY, MAY 6
THOUGH EARLY, pillars of clouds towering into a hazy morning sky suggested extreme instability and the promise of thunderstorms to come. A busy southerly breeze, clammy with humidity, bore a strange amalgam of odors: spring wildflowers and ordure de cow. Stormy, nose to the ground and running a zig-zag course in a field adjacent to the motel where the team had spent the night, appeared in hot pursuit of a good spot to deposit her own ordure.
In the motel’s parking lot, Chuck placed his laptop on the hood of his SUV and pulled up a roadmap of Nebraska. Metcalf and his crew gathered around it along with Ty and Gabi.
“We’re here,” Chuck said, pointing to Lincoln. “A squall line is expected to form later today west of here—” he moved his finger over the map until it reached the town of Lexington near the Platte River “—and punch eastward.”
A gust of wind deposited a sheen of dust on the computer’s screen. Chuck brushed it off and continued. “Our best chance to corner a supercell with a tornado will be just after the line starts to develop, when the cells are still discrete.”
“Discreet cells, Chuckie?” Metcalf said, his eyes red and clothes rumpled, perhaps from a late night of partying, “Who woulda thunk. I was led to believe we were after storms behaving badly.” He laughed, burbled really, at his own lame play on words.
“As a matter of fact, my bleary-eyed friend,” Chuck responded, “that’s the optimal time to catch ‘storms behaving badly,’ when they’re still discrete, spelled with an e-t-e. For those of you interested in the science—”
“I’m interested in the cinematography, not the science,” Metcalf interjected, his words muffled by a soft burp.
“Go on about the science,” the cameraman, Boomie, said, ignoring his boss. “Maybe it’ll help me when we’re filming.” Squat and powerfully built, Boomie sported the incongruence of a buzz cut in combination with a short, pointed goatee. Both bleached blond.
Chuck nodded, glad to have an ally within Metcalf’s ranks. He made a mental note to ask Boomie about his name sometime. He wondered if the guy had been a boom operator of some sort in the past.
“So here’s the deal,” Chuck said, “when a line of storms is just beginning to form and the cells are relatively isolated, that is, before they merge into a more or less solid line and don’t have to compete with other storms for the nourishment they need to grow—you know, things like heat, moisture, spin—”
“Helicity!” Gabi said, raising her hand like a kid in school and simultaneously playing the ever-energized magazine reporter.
“Yes,
helicity. Gold star for you,” Chuck responded. “Anyhow, discrete cells—” he glared at Metcalf “—have all that stuff to themselves without having to share it with a bunch of wannabes. Bingo! That’s when they have that magic moment when they can explode into real monsters, the things we’re hunting, tornadic supercells.”
“So,” Boomie said, “we wanna keep our eyes on the lone wolves, the outsiders, so to speak?”
“Maybe you should be boss-man,” Chuck said, folding his laptop.
Metcalf stomped away. “Maybe you should pontificate a little less and actually do a little more, like finding us a goddamn tornado.”
MID-AFTERNOON. The small caravan paused on the shoulder of a road just north of Holdrege in the Platte River Valley. Thunder from a storm about 25 miles southwest grumbled over the square-gridded farm country, much of it freshly planted in what Chuck assumed to be corn or soybeans.
Chuck studied the radar image of the storm on his laptop. Gabi, from the passenger seat, leaned over the computer. Ty scooted forward in the back seat to peer at the image.
“See this?” Chuck said. His finger rested on an appendage protruding from the lower left corner of the storm’s brightly-colored radar return. “That, my friends, could be the beginning of what’s called a hook echo. When you see one of those form, it’s a classic sign of a tornado. Doesn’t always verify, but it’s a big, fat canary gasping for breath in a coal mine.”
The screen refreshed and an electronically generated white line appeared, extending from the appendage toward a position on the computer map near where the vehicles waited. Several short bars, evenly spaced along the longer line, crossed it at right angles. Chuck moved the laptop’s cursor over the white line and clicked on it. Times appeared near each cross bar. He studied them for a moment, then stepped from the SUV and walked to where Metcalf and his crew waited. His heart rate accelerated ever so slightly.
“We’re going to move about a mile north,” he said. “That’ll put us just south of the supercell that’s headed this way, ETA 40 minutes. That should give you guys time to get the crane and camera deployed. Then we’ll hope for the best . . . or worst.”
Metcalf studied the southwest horizon, now obsidian in roiling clouds. “Looks nasty,” he said. “Death and destruction. I love it.” He turned to Boomie. “Let’s get truckin’. Get the Genesis up as fast as you can when bwana gets us in position. Maybe we can get what we need and get off these Godforsaken plains back to civilization before I lose my mind.”
Boomie nodded and clambered into the camera truck’s cab.
A pair of vans, antennae sprouting from their roofs—and on one, an anemometer—raced past heading north. The driver of the lead van waved and gave a friendly toot on his horn as he shot by.
“Chasers,” Chuck said. “Let’s get going before the roads get clogged.”
“Out here?” Metcalf said, unable to hide his amazement.
“You’d be surprised. Supercells attract chasers like moths to a candle.”
Metcalf rolled his eyes and climbed into the Navigator, a vehicle Chuck had begun to think of as the “Blustermobile.”
They drove north for about five minutes and halted on a low rise, pulling off the road next to the gated entrance of a freshly cultivated field. Boomie and Ziggy went to work as soon as the camera truck rolled to a stop. With help from Nosher, they secured the Genesis to the end of the crane, then elevated the crane above the truck to a point where the camera, its sweep unencumbered by utility poles and wires, had a panoramic view of the approaching storm.
Ziggy maneuvered the crane using controls mounted on the truck bed. Boomie, seated in a chair affixed to the base of the crane, operated the camera remotely, his gaze locked on a small monitor mounted next to him.
Metcalf and his second unit director, Willie Weston, stood on a platform over the cab. Willie scanned the darkening sky with a pair of binoculars, tracking the approach of the supercell. Metcalf, trying to appear officious, shouted orders to Boomie, who largely ignored them. Chuck guessed that Boomie probably had a lot more experience operating cameras than Metcalf and didn’t need any “guidance.” Finally, Metcalf gave up trying to direct Boomie and turned his attention to Chuck.
“How much longer, Chaz? Is this thing still comin’?”
“It’s almost on top of us. We may have to pursue it if it doesn’t drop a tornado right away.”
The wind, blowing toward the storm, had grown noticeably stronger, lifting dirt from surrounding fields and stirring it into a ground blizzard of dust. Overhead, an arc of ragged clouds, black as death, marked the leading edge of the supercell’s wall cloud. It came on steadily, almost touching the earth, spinning over the flat plain of the valley on a gyroscopic track toward the Platte River.
Chuck searched the base of the inky, low hanging mass for the telltale pendant that would announce the birth of a funnel aloft, the embryo of a tornado. “Come on, come on,” he muttered out loud, his words lost in the howl of the wind.
Stormy, standing at his feet, growled.
Then it was there. A tiny wedge of darkness hanging from the base of the wall cloud. Seconds later it morphed into a distinct funnel, its tail whipping back and forth like a demented sting ray’s. Chuck spun to look at the camera; Boomie had it pointed at the funnel, tracking the incipient twister with a steady hand.
The whirling blackness, a mere two or three hundred yards distant, edged lower and lower. A twisting spiral of dirt appeared beneath the funnel. “Go, go, go,” Chuck yelled at the melee. It did, blossoming into a full-fledged tornado as the fertile Nebraska soil exploded around it
Metcalf, on top of the cab, held onto his cap with one hand while clapping Willie on the back with the other. Yet Willie seemed less than excited. Chuck knew why. Yes, they had a tornado. Up close and personal. But not exactly an EF-4 or -5. The twister churned past, heading toward the river.
Willie called to Chuck: “We goin’ after it?”
Chuck held his gaze on the twister, wishing it toward adulthood as it spun by. Like a stubborn child, however, it refused to mature, clinging to its ropy adolescence. He ducked back into the Expedition, checked the radar, didn’t see any other immediate targets.
“Okay,” he yelled back to Willie, “let’s go. We’ll try to jump ahead of the storm, reposition and redeploy.” He studied the track of the storm against the map on his computer, doing calculations in his head, while Boomie and Ziggy retracted the crane, dismounted the Genesis, and made certain everything was stowed securely. Chuck glanced up to find Metcalf standing next to the SUV.
“Ya know, Buffalo Bill,” Metcalf said, “this would have been a whole lot easier if we’d had two trucks. We could’ve leapfrogged ahead of the storm with one truck moving while the other filmed. But noooo . . .” He walked away.
Chuck resisted the urge to give him the finger. Mainly because Metcalf was right. Two trucks would have made a difference. With only one, every time they wanted to move they’d lose time, breaking down the equipment, stowing it, driving, then setting everything up again.
Boomie signaled he was ready to go. Chuck called him on his cell phone. “We’ll drive north until we find an east-west road that intersects a route that’ll take us across the Platte. There’re only a few highways that have bridges. Then we’ll jump on I-80, east to Gibbon, turn north again and try to interdict the cell somewhere west of Grand Island.”
“Roger that,” Boomie said. Military lingo. “How’s the storm lookin’?”
“It’s holding together. Hook echo disappeared, but the cell’s probably just cycling. I think it’ll come back. Still tracking northeast.”
“Let’s light the afterburners.”
“We’re off,” Chuck responded.
Forty-five minutes later they again pulled off the road on a low rise, but this time in dry grassland about 30 miles west of Gra
nd Island.
Chuck quickly scanned the radar image of the storm before getting out of the Expedition. He walked back to where Boomie and his cohorts were already preparing to redeploy the crane and camera. “You’ve got about 15 minutes,” Chuck said.
“No sweat,” Boomie said. “We’ll be ready.”
A battered pickup truck stopped on the road next to the camera truck. The driver, a wrinkled, sun-reddened farmer, rolled down his window and surveyed the scene. “Guys makin’ a movie?” he asked.
“Hoping to get some footage of a tornado,” Boomie said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, probably will.” The rancher studied the darkening, lowering clouds, the wind-flattened grass, the lightning pulsing in the blackness layering the horizon. “But not a big one.” He nodded, rolled up his window and proceeded along the road.
Chuck, hands on hips, watched him depart. Thanks for the encouragement.
“Not a big one, huh?” Metcalf said as he walked toward the camera rig. He didn’t wait for an answer.
“So what’s a farmer know anyhow?” Gabi asked. Stormy stood next to her, nose jabbed into the wind.
“Sometimes, I hate to admit, quite a bit,” Chuck responded. “I’ve learned a few of these old codgers, guys who’ve spent their entire life on the Plains, are strangely savvy when it comes to storms. They’ve lived and died, financially speaking, by the weather for decades.”
“So Farmer-Boy Bob can out-forecast the Great White Tornado Hunter?” Ty, who’d joined the conversation, said. He grinned, suggesting it was a lighthearted throwaway line but Chuck knew it was also meant as just another little needle for dear ol’ Dad.
Chuck smiled. “We’ll see.” What else could he say?
Gabi started to speak to Ty, but he raised his hand as if to ward off her words and walked away.
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