Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  To the tornado obsessed, the very thing that makes everyone else so complacent is just what’s so frightening: the tornado’s elusiveness. It’s not just that tornadoes are rare. It’s that one can happen right in front of you and you still might not realize what you’re seeing. They flash past with little or no warning. They can arrive hidden within curtains of falling rain or occluded by clouds of dust and debris. Some have moved at more than sixty miles an hour and have skimmed through entire towns before anyone outside the immediate damage zone even realized they were there. Sometimes it’s only the amount of wreckage afterward, and the confused memories of the survivors that they had heard some gigantic, mysterious roar at the same instant, that confirmed that there really had been a tornado at all.

  That wreckage, of course, is another reason the tornado can take such a hold on the imagination: tornadoes are so fantastically destructive. Before tornadoes were routinely captured on video, the main visual documentation of their existence was of their aftermath. Some of the earliest photographs and newsreels of the American Midwest are scenes of tornado damage. The images, even now, are grotesque and horrifying. Schools and churches become skeletal apparitions; heavy Victorian furniture is dangling from trees; a potbellied stove sits in a pig wallow; a town has become a plateau of splintered timber. They seem almost like examples of old American tall-tale art—the surreal postcards once sold as novelties, where solemn men in bowler hats inspected impossibly vast pumpkins and strawberries: comic boasts about the strangeness of life in the American heartland.

  But the deepest mystery of the tornado is its actual physical presence. This is something that even now no video image can capture. A tornado funnel has an unforgettable quality of the surreal, or the hyper-real: its unimaginable size (tens of thousands of feet high), its apparent solidity, and its terrifyingly rapid movement all make it appear like a religious vision. A tornado seems to be not a cloud but some sort of inconceivable created structure—one that reaches up from the ground to the heavens as though extending from this world to the next. You can’t help but see it as essentially supernatural.

  The man who wrote “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” Stan Jones, said it was based on an old cowboy legend. He’d heard it in his boyhood from an elderly cowhand, and he had no idea how much further it went back. The truth is that it can be taken back quite a long way: to medieval Europe and to the legend of the Wild Hunt. This was another story about strange huntsmen eternally riding after supernatural prey. In various versions of the legend, the huntsmen were demons, or ghosts, or fairies; they were led by Odin or Satan or King Arthur (or all three); they were hunting a supernatural horse, or a wild boar, or wood nymphs who took the form of windblown leaves. The sight of the Wild Hunt was often taken as a presage of disaster, of a coming war or a plague; almost always it meant doom for the eyewitness, who would be stolen away in sleep to join in the hunt himself.

  The modern-day equivalent of the Wild Hunt can be seen on the highways of the American heartland every spring. They are caravans of station wagons and vans and SUVs, taking atmospheric soundings with their latest meteorological software, tracking dry lines and vortex signatures, searching for the mysterious and elusive terror of the funnel cloud. It seems like the latest and most cutting-edge kind of entertainment, but it, too, is a hunt that’s been going on for a very long time. The contemporary tornado chasers are only the latest in a centuries-deep tradition of obsessive hunting. People rode after funnel clouds on horseback; they traced out damage tracks on foot, through unmapped forests and limitless swamps; they spent years sifting through paper archives, looking for the eyewitness testimony that would bring them closer to the unimaginable reality of the storm.

  Most of those early hunters are forgotten now, but they used to be celebrities. James Espy, whose pursuit of the secrets of the tornado led him to be called the Storm King, was at one point the best-known scientist in America; his debates with other scientists were followed by newspapers as though they were boxing matches. John Park Finley traveled the country in the late nineteenth century to lecture on the unsuspected dangers of tornadoes and stirred up so much controversy that his career ended in a highly public shipwreck. And there were many others—professional meteorologists and obsessive amateurs, even a Founding Father, people who risked their lives, wrecked their careers, and lost lifelong friends in poisonous feuds, all for the sake of that ever-receding quarry.

  Their stories are mostly buried and have to be rooted out from all kinds of obscure sources: military field reports, privately printed pamphlets, family documents, unpublished memoirs, letters to editors, newspaper interviews, transcripts of courts-martial, congressional testimonies. But from them a strange kind of history does emerge—not a succession of blandly uplifting technological triumphs, but something more ambiguous: a story of doubts and blind guesses, grinding stupidity and unaccountable insight, horrifying violence and mysterious beauty. It’s just what you’d expect from a hunt that’s still thundering onward across those endless skies.

  Prologue

  The Pillar in the Storm

  On May 8, 1680, on the outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a farmer named Samuel Stone saw a strange cloud appear in the northwestern sky. Stone later remembered the day as unusually hot, with a strong southwest wind blowing. Two things made him notice the cloud: it was moving toward him—which is to say, it was traveling against the wind—and it was singing.

  In those days, people weren’t necessarily shocked by strange apparitions in the sky. That was a time when scientific knowledge of the atmosphere was essentially nonexistent; there was no firm distinction drawn among clouds, comets, rainbows, the northern lights, and visions of heaven. They were all called meteors, which roughly meant “something transitory in the upper air.” Meteors came in countless odd and often sinister forms. A comet was usually taken as a sign of disaster; a passing cloud shaped like a face or a hand could put a whole town in a panic. There were credible stories of ghostly armies seen fighting along the horizon at night and of demonic laughter falling from the moon. Samuel Stone doubtless thought the singing cloud was just another of these meteors.

  Still, he called his son over, and the two stood in the middle of a field and watched as the cloud approached them. When it was directly overhead, its singing—a kind of buzzing ululation, like a trumpet—was suddenly answered from somewhere on the ground nearby. In a meadow beyond the fences, a little whirlwind had sprung up. The whirlwind came rushing across the fields, scattering the mown grass and weeds everywhere in wild spirals. It swept past the two men and charged up the hill toward their house. It was swelling up and growing stronger as it passed. By the time it reached the hilltop, it was uprooting and overturning trees. It crested the hilltop—missing the house but hitting the barn full on. The barn was a heavy construction of planking and trestles; the whirlwind ripped off the roof as though flicking at a stray leaf. The roof hung in midair for a moment and then fell to the earth with a thud so big it could be felt for a mile around.

  Stone and his son raced up the hill. The rest of the family came cautiously out of the house. Nobody had been hurt, but they had all been terrified by the noise. They were astonished by the sight of the barn roof; the shriek of the whirlwind had been so loud that they hadn’t even heard the crash.

  The whole group stood together on the hilltop and watched the whirlwind skim off into the distance. It churned across a wide field of Indian corn, casting huge black plumes to either side. Then it floated up into the middle air and skipped along a line of hilltops. A half mile or so farther on, it reached down toward the earth again. They couldn’t see what happened to it after that.

  Stone’s neighbor to the east, Matthew Bridge, took up the story. Bridge said that he, his son, and his servant John Robbins were working in the fields when they saw something moving rapidly over the ground straight toward them. It was a pitch-dark, billowing cloud about a hundred yards wide. It was sucking up everything in its path as it advanced: bushes were be
ing ripped out of the soil by the roots, ancient fallen trees were rising into the air and tumbling up into the blackness, large rocks and boulders were soaring skyward like some kind of mysterious avalanche in reverse. So many leaves and tree branches were swirling in the heights, Bridge said, “the top and sides of the cloud looked like a greenwood.”

  The three men stared at the cloud in wonderment until it was almost on top of them. Then they all made a break toward the house for shelter. But it was too late; midway across the open field, they were engulfed. They threw themselves to the ground in the middle of a stand of bushes. The cloud roared around them and lashed them with a torrent of flying debris. Robbins couldn’t hold on; he let go with a despairing cry and was sucked into the blast. As the shriek of the wind reached a crescendo, Bridge couldn’t stop himself from looking up. The air was black as night, but within its surging fury he could make out something strange. There was a revolving glow at the heart of the cloud. Bridge described it as “a light pillar, about eight or ten foot diameter, which seemed like a screw or solid body.”

  Then the cloud and the glowing pillar were gone. Bridge and his son shook free from the branches and clods of dirt and rose shakily to their feet. Robbins was nowhere to be seen. They found him a little later on the far side of the field. Almost every inch of his body was bruised, almost every bone was broken, and he was dead.

  The cloud had already roared on out of sight. Bridge and his son began following its trail; they were soon joined by the Stone family, who’d come riding over from their farm. The line of damage led out of the cleared land at the edge of town back into the dense woodlands. It went on for more than a mile: the trees were all downed as though swept by a gigantic broom. The track of the cloud spread out the deeper it went, until it was a couple hundred yards wide. It finally dwindled away in the depths of a swamp bristling with hundreds of spruce trees.

  Nobody in the group had any notion of what the cloud was. They’d never seen anything like it in their lives. So Bridge and Stone turned to the best-educated man they knew, the pastor of the local church. He had no idea what it could be, either; he might have been inclined to disbelieve the men if he hadn’t seen the track of damage himself. So he wrote out a detailed summary of their story, and he mailed it to the only man in the American colonies he thought might have a better clue: the celebrated Puritan preacher Increase Mather.

  Mather was famous in those days for his hellfire sermonizing (he was the father of Cotton Mather, who inherited his style), but he was also known for his interest in odd and unusual events. He called these events “illustrious providences,” by which he meant something roughly like “memorable occurrences.” In one of his books he defined illustrious providences this way: “tempests, floods, earthquakes, thunders as are unusual, strange apparitions, witchcrafts, diabolical possessions, remarkable judgements upon noted sinners, and answers of prayer.” He had been collecting these stories for years. He gathered them from newspapers, from anecdotes in classical literature, from contemporary journals and books of letters (he was an omnivorous reader; he owned books on everything from medicine in the ancient world to a salacious contemporary story about the lives of London prostitutes). He knew stories about magical amulets, stories about strange plants and animals growing in people’s bodies, stories about people who broke into a sweat when a cat entered a room unseen, and one story about a man who, presented with a meal of pork, broke into hysterical laughter.

  Mather was particularly fascinated by stories about the weather. He held to the common Christian view of those days that storms were the work of Lucifer, “prince of the powers of the air”; in one of his sermons he pictured Lucifer dwelling amid the fumes and smoke of a thunderstorm like an alchemist in his laboratory. But he also loved any weather story that was odd and inexplicable. He was intrigued by rainstones, for instance. These were mysterious rocks that fell from the sky at the height of thunderstorms. One rainstone was a hunk of iron that weighed fifty pounds; another proved to be a kind of brass that was impervious to the hottest forge; and Mather also had a report of a town in Germany that was once pelted with a shower of rainstones “of a green and partly cerulean color … with metallic sparks like gold intermixed.”

  But he was most curious about American weather. He had a notion that the weather in North America was more violent than it was anywhere else in the world. There was no way to tell this for sure; nobody was keeping weather records. And anyway, the weather in America, like almost everything else about America, was still almost wholly unknown; the colonies were still only a thin scattering of clearings between the ocean and a vast unmapped forest. Still, Mather (who had been born in the colonies) kept hearing from recent arrivals that the weather back home in Europe was nowhere near as extreme as it was in the New World, and he had duly collected several instances of American weather that seemed to be uniquely violent: hailstorms so severe that they’d caused fatalities, and winter storms that left entire towns encased in ice. He knew many instances of New England storms with deadly lightning, including one case where a lightning bolt had blasted through a church window and melted a man’s hair to a pillar.

  The story from Cambridge of the strange cloud with the glowing pillar within it was a natural for Mather’s collection. Mather made room for it in the book he was writing—a survey of his oddest stories, which he titled An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences. He admitted that he had no idea what the cloud was. Nor did he have any stories that were quite like it. The closest he could get was a story about a strange nighttime incident in the forests of Massachusetts—an event that was described as “a dreadful havoc.” There were no eyewitnesses, but when people went into the forest the next morning, they found that thousands of trees had been downed. Was this another instance of the pillar in the cloud? Was this another uniquely American kind of storm? Mather refused to speculate. He cut the discussion off with a curt dismissal: “Thus about strange storms.” Then he changed the subject to earthquakes.

  But he couldn’t shake the thought of the storm. There was one more authority he could consult: the recently founded Royal Society of London. It was an organization devoted to what was then known as natural philosophy and is now called the sciences—archaeology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, meteorology: anything at all that involved the physical world. He sent the society’s members a long summary of the strange cloud. They were baffled by the story, too. But they published it in the next issue of their journal, Philosophical Transactions. (The journal’s full name was Philosophical Transactions, Giving Some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World.)

  Amid the riotous clutter of reporting in the journal’s pages, the latest news and speculations about eclipses, microbes, disastrous frosts, “the Sepulchral Lamps of the Ancients,” and “an anatomy of a Monstrous Pig,” Mather’s letter went unnoticed. It stayed buried in the back issues for more than seventy years, until it was found by another, much more famous investigator of illustrious providences—Benjamin Franklin.

  1

  The Electricians

  Among the popular entertainers and traveling acts in eighteenth-century America were performers known as electricians. They gave lectures on the subject of static electricity. That may sound like the height of tedium, but back then static electricity was a wholly mysterious phenomenon, and the lectures included spectacular demonstrations of its unusual properties. The electricians had arrays of metal wheels that shot off multicolored sparks when they were spun. They had long glass tubes called auroras that glowed in the dark and, when rubbed vigorously with silk cloth, could draw up metal filings as though they were magnets. They had Leyden jars—ceramic bottles with coils of copper wire that could store and release static charges. The lectures of the electricians were dazzling shows, punctuated by furious sizzlings and loud banging flashes that would make the ladies in the audience scream in delighted terror and could even force grunts of alarm from th
e most stoic of the men.

  In 1743, a Scottish electrician named Dr. Archibald Spencer performed in Boston. Dr. Spencer’s act was more serious than that of most electricians. He had an elaborate theory about the nature of electricity that he would describe at great length between the special effects. Spencer’s theory was based on the idea that electricity was a “subtle fluid.” This was a term borrowed from Renaissance alchemy; it meant a fluid that was weightless, invisible, and, under normal circumstances, undetectable. Spencer believed that the subtle fluid of electricity was a hidden fire emitted by the sun, which scorched the eyes and was thus responsible for every form of eye disease. (The electrical theory of disease was a particular interest of Spencer’s, since he’d been trained as a physician.) He also believed electrical fluid was present everywhere in earth’s atmosphere. It revealed itself in countless tiny ways. A recently fired bullet, for instance, was hot to the touch: this was because of its passage through the electrical fluid. A strong wind was fiery on the cheeks even on the coldest days: that was an electrical fluid burn. But the presence of the fluid was most apparent in a thunderstorm. The air, Spencer explained, was filled with ice crystals, which during storms were melted by the heat of the electrical fluid: the melted water fell as rain, the dissolving crystals released lightning bolts, and the thunderclap was the rush of air into the vacuum the crystals left behind.