I wanted to see that tornado so badly. I don’t know why. It wasn’t because I saw the movie Twister, or the Wizard of Oz, or 100 shows on the Discovery channel where people chase tornadoes down. Of course that must have been part of it, but that’s not the why. I’m a nerd, and nerds just want to see cool things. But that’s not the why. I’m very confident in the not the reason, but I don’t really know the reason.

It was a summer night south of Temple, Texas, in 2001 or 2002.  Michele and I were out in my red Isuzu pick up, way too late, in the driving rain, lost, looking for a glimpse of a tornado. The TV and radio had blasted warnings and course maps, and though she was definitely not in favor of the plan, she preferred that I not go alone, and I would have gone alone. We’d only been married for a couple of years, so we were still in that stage where one would do anything to support the other, as opposed to flatly calling the other out for being an idiot or an asshole, so she was in the passenger seat outwardly showing more nervousness than I. 

Ever since the car accident that happened in a heavy rain storm in 1982, I am the world’s worst, most nervous, person to be in a car with when it rains. If I’m driving I’m gripping the steering wheel like it’s trying to escape, and if I’m a passenger I’m tense from scalp to toes stomping on the imaginary brake and snapping at the driver, no matter who he or she is. So what was I doing out here in the heaviest rain, the darkest dark, the windiest night, trying to find a storm?

One of the best novels I ever read was The Magus by John Fowles. It’s a complicated book about a selfish, adrift young man. In the book there’s an allegorical tale about an old farmer who spends his nights standing on the shore of the lake screaming out to God and communing with the Biblical pillar of fire. He’s tapped into some force, some great knowledge in a fantastical supernatural phenomenon that gives him focus and meaning in an overwhelming world.

If you grew up in the North, you think hurricanes or tornadoes are romantic mystical occurrences, like seeing a UFO or Bigfoot. They’re not real. They’re fantastic and cool. I think people who grow up in the South probably feel the same way about blizzards. If you grew up in the North you know that two feet of snow is a pain in the ass that you have to shovel that spends the rest of the winter turning brown and making the roads ugly and treacherous. Michele grew up in Texas, and she grew up knowing that bad weather it’s just bad weather; stay inside and wait for it to pass. But I didn’t know that yet.

 I think that I was driving around Bell County from hilltop to hilltop hoping to glimpse my view of the great, mystical, meaningful pillar of storm out there. I had a budding career in medicine, a wife who loved me, and a whole world open in front of me. In some ways at that age, knowing you can be anything, do anything, is a form of not knowing what to be, what to do, where to go. It’s an incredibly privileged version of that problem, certainly. I think from here now that I can see that fear of all that choice and potential to fail is why I would be so stupid as to drive into high winds and wiper swamping rain drops. 

Unlike the character in the Magus, despite the yelling for the storm to show itself, I never got a glimpse of a great pillar twisting from earth to sky. I couldn’t see beyond the windshield wipers in the darkness, because stories aren’t reality. Tornadoes are a giant impersonal weather phenomenon, and if you’re lucky, you fail to get close. 

I found my meaning and direction from the scared woman in the passenger seat.