A Road Less Travelled

I like weather. “Not this or that kind of weather, but just weather,” as Denniston told Jane in That Hideous Strength. So really, the idea of adventuring off to chase down ‘severe weather patterns’ (also known as ‘dangerous big swirly wind’) was kind of a no brainer once I got used to the idea.

After the requisite number of planning e-mails had been sent, and the necessary complex social dynamics properly sorted, I set off in a mini-van with Jeremy D, Samuel and some ham radio equipment, to go try to find a tornado. Yes, I am insane.

We headed for Maccomb, and I eventually gained the title of Official Navigator, because I never actually got us lost, and noticed pretty quickly when I missed finding our turn. In Maccomb we drove around in circles for a little while trying to find a place with wi-fi so we could get updated radar info. (The driving around in circles was not the fault of the Official Navigator–the Illinois atlas does not provide a detailed map of Maccomb.) Eventually we left for Keokuk, armed with updated information, food, and extra straws and napkins. About this time I decided to pull out my camera, needed to keep track of the cellphone between a couple of calls, while still navigating, all of which was shortly after assembling ham radio equipment on my lap while we were driving. I decided that I needed a much better organizational system for all of this stuff. I never did develop one, you understand, but I really needed one.

It was in Keokuk that things got exciting. We started hearing various storm warnings on the weather band, for various counties in the three different states we were at the corners of, one of which had already developed a tornado. A big tornado. It was at this point that Jeremy started yelling that yes, that’s the one we were after, and I started trying not to listen to the, “if you can’t find shelter, get in a ditch and put your hands over your head” warnings.

I tried distracting myself with the task of navigating based on a list of unfamiliar counties in the warning, surrounded by lists of unfamiliar counties in other less interesting warnings, using only the small strip of Iowa map located on the edge of one page of the Illinois atlas. This led to perhaps the single most dramatic moment of the trip, where Jeremy went tearing into a Casey’s, demanded a map of Iowa, and started to get on the road again almost before he’d had time to throw the map at me.

Eventually, with a few phone calls to Jeremy’s friend who was also out stormchasing, we ended up in a gravel patch next to some grain silos, gazing at the object of our chase. I have to admit that it mostly looked like a distant gray blob to me, though a pretty cool looking gray blob cloud thing, especially with the ocasional lightening to set it off. Jeremy referred to the gray blob as a wall cloud, and pointed out where it was beginning to form funnel clouds, after which it was definitely the coolest gray blob I’d ever seen.

No, seriously, it really was cool. I don’t know enough about what I was seeing to really get it, or make sense out of it myself, but just knowing what I was looking at was a really cool experience for fan of weather. It’s somehow all tied up with Aslan not being a safe lion, and “dark is His path on the wings of the storm”, but that’s probably a seperate blog post (which I will likely never get around to writing…)

After a detour on to some gravel roads (which included a really cool view of the striations across the sky leading into the funnel cloud and me getting some blurry pictures of said sky and funnel cloud) it was getting dark and time to head home. This is when we discovered that time can get away from you when you’re storm chasing, and we had a long drive home. But then, that was just all the fun of a cross country trip without any of the inconvenience of actually having to go anywhere, and meanwhile, I had officially been storm chasing. It was a good day.

Did I mention that I got to see gray blobby weather?

Official video of us stormchasing is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXF0MzaJ8TU

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Friends & Family, Life, Children and Dishes, Raquel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.