We’ve been running after them for centuries.

by Jeffrey Perkel  

When I was young, I wanted to be a meteorologist. Specifically, as I suspect many youngsters are, I was fascinated by severe weather.

Growing up in Miami Beach, I was always hoping (without understanding the reality, obviously) to experience a hurricane. My parents had lived through the cyclone-heavy ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, and I was fascinated by the stories they told of high water on Ocean Boulevard and Collins Avenue, of downed trees and power lines, of wind and waves.

Whenever I mentioned that I thought I would like to live through a hurricane, my father always said the same thing: “You’re not missing much,” by which he meant, much fun. But I didn’t care. I clipped stories from the Miami Herald on every storm to approach Miami and tracked them on my own personal tracking map. In 18 years, I had one close call and zero hits.

With age came maturity, and a sense of perspective. Zero-for-18 actually is a good thing. Hurricanes might look exciting on TV, but storms with names like Hugo and Andrew, Katrina and Sandy, taught me the foolishness of wanting to put myself in the eye of the storm. People die, families are ripped apart, and homes and lives are destroyed. (For a fantastic book on this topic, I cannot recommend highly enough Isaac’s Storm, by Erik Larson, on the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.)

The other meteorological event I always wanted to witness, but never have, is a tornado. My kids saw one once, though. They were driving cross-country with my in-laws when they stopped at a gas station in Wyoming during a thunderstorm for a bathroom break. As they came out, they heard people screaming. There, in a field about a mile away, was a narrow rope tornado, moving away from them and dissipating. That night on the phone, I asked my shutterbug son why he didn’t snap a picture of it so his mother and I could see it. He said, in that exasperated, exaggerated tone only pre-teens can pull off: “Dad, we were running for our lives.”

My son may have been being overly dramatic, but you need only to look at the devastation these storms have wrought over the past few years to recognize the truth in that statement. Joplin, Mo., Tuscaloosa, Ala., and most recently, Moore and Oklahoma City, Okla., have been forever scarred in just a few minutes by the passage of a devastating tornado.

Among the most recent dead were three storm chaser/scientists who were killed when the twister they were chasing suddenly changed course: Tim Samaras, one of the stars of the reality TV program, “Storm Chasers,” on the Discovery Channel, his son Paul, and crew member, Carl Young. The circumstances of Samaras’ death are actually reminiscent of the movie Twister, in which a storm chaser (played by Cary Elwes) dies when the massive F5 tornado he’s trailing abruptly shifts its track and plows directly into his SUV.

Twister and “Storm Chasers” emphasize the excitement of the chase, and both are fun to watch. But again, some perspective: Those are real peoples’ lives being wiped away in an instant. So I don’t think I’ll be signing up for any chasing vacations any time soon. Still, there is a way to enjoy them vicariously, so to speak, from the comfort of your living room.

Storm Kings: The Untold History of America’s First Tornado Chasers, by Lee Sandlin (author of Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild), details the science of tornadoes and the history of storm chasing from the confusion and terror caused by a 1680 tornado in Cambridge, Mass., to the tricked-out chasers of today. It deals especially with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when scientists had no idea what a tornado was or whence it came.

Sandlin introduces us to such characters as James Espy, the so-called “Storm King,” and his rival William Redfield, an amateur meteorologist who rose to become the first-ever director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. We learn about Ben Franklin and his famous kite, and Robert Lincoln, son of the former president, who feuded with one of the early heads of the nation’s weather service; of John Park Finley, who spent decades in the mid-to-late 1800s meticulously amassing tornado data only to be unceremoniously hung out to dry when it became politically expedient, and Father Peter Pernin, a Wisconsin priest who experienced a catastrophic tornado up close and personal.

Through it all, Sandlin slowly unfolds the science of tornadoes, and how it is that even today, many of the fundamentals remain unclear. Only relatively recently, for instance, did meteorologists finally learn that the low pressure at the center of a tornado is incidental to its damage — meaning the advice to open a window in advance of a tornado is not only pointless, but dangerous. Instead, it’s the incredibly rapid airflow, or “surface inflow jets,” that make a twister so destructive. “The tornado isn’t a peculiar kind of cloud but a certain configuration of the air, a moving vortex within the storm, which in its purest form is invisible,” Sandlin explains.

Full of politics and intrigue, tragedy and pathos, Storm Kings is eminently readable. Sandlin makes real for us the confusion of early settlers who had never witnessed anything even remotely like a violent Great Plains thunderstorm. He talks of “fire tornadoes,” spawned from clouds caused by rising columns of superheated air from forest fires and the like, and how one such event decimated Pestigo, Wisc., in October 1871 — encasing all the ruin in glass from molten soil silicates.

He tells us about the Kiowa tribe of the Great Plains, who attributed tornadoes to a pair of boys who asked their sorcerer to conjure for them “the most powerful horse in the world, a horse that would leave all the other nations of the plains in awe” — an ultimately unridable beast they called the “Red Wind.” And we discover also that the main character in The Wizard of Oz was modeled on a real person. Dorothy Gale was a young girl who died in a tornado that struck Irving, Kansas, on May 30, 1879.

Storm Kings is an easy read — at 260 pages, I finished it in two days — and well annotated. If you’re interested in so-called Kansas cyclones, pick up a copy. These days, it’s as close as I want to come to the real thing.

[Front page image credit: Possibly the oldest known photograph of a tornado, taken in 1884 in South Dakota. Public domain from NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.]