Tryin' To Hear The Roar

"Listen to the roar!! ... can you hear the roar??" There's this Oklahoma weather guy on a YouTube video who keeps sayiing this over and over. He's driving me crazy because, no, I can't hear the roar because he won't shut up or turn down the car radio. It's a little frustrating.

So what do you do when you want to be a Storm Chaser, in your car with the video recorder on your dashboard, and then you realize you've come across an uber-deadly and violent F5 tornado. You can't turn around. You have to drive into Joplin and enter Hades On Earth. Look what happened to this Jeff Piotrowski and his wife Kathryn...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfdK6H9d6J0

 

A few weeks later he is interviewed. Clearly the guy is forever changed and traumatized from the experience.

 

* * *

I have been spending too much time on YouTube watching tornado videos. There is one of the father driving toward the Moore, OK elemtary school where his son attends. He is a block away from the tornado. It is extraordinary footage, not because of what natural phenomenon going on around him, but that he seems to be capturing an image mirrored back to him of his own helplessness, heart-sickness and grief. There are other videos of people getting that close to a tornado.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iuGipbmneY

The Tornado Storm Chasers are an obnoxious lot in pursuit of recording these storms. The videotaping is made from simple, shakey cameras--not the high-end gear you'd might expect from so-called professionals. The throw around jargon like "vortices" as a pretense of some kind of scietific knowledge. One storm chaser even groaned because the funnel cloud never made it "on the ground". What person would be thrilled by such an unfortune?

Some of the Storm Chasers seem to use emotionaless, blanket expressions they throw in along with their jargon. Expressions like "God be with the victims" sometimes comes across as an excuse for the vague voyeurism. But while some of these deadly twisters are destroyed many homes and the lives of adults and schoolchildren, yet the Storm Chasers are thrilled by the event to turn back. It is strange. The videos feel exploitative.

Undoubtly, the best storm chasers are a different kind of storm chaser. They are ones who were up close simple because they were at home and caught a tornado roaring through their neighborhood.  [Watch this in high defnition and plug in your headphones!]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iuGipbmneY

The Oak Lawn Tornado Of 1967

[Above: a photo from the 1967 Oak Lawn tornado which touched down 3 blocks from my childhood home]

April 21, 1967 around 5 pm, my father came home for his dinner break (he was an Oak Lawn police officer on 2nd shift). The skies turned a glowing, putrid green color and perhaps not unincoincidentally, like the skin of the Wicked Witch of Oz. My mother started banging on the bathroom door for my father to let me, my mother and two siblings in and climb in the tub. Not a lot bothered my father, not even tornado sirens. So we climbed in the tub and held on. My mother said it sounded like a freight train. I roared through town only about 3 blocks away. Now I was only 2 years old, so I really don't remember much of it, but each spring we'd get storms like this--the thunderstorm, the sudden stillness, gray-green colored sky, and hail. And my mother would get very worried, upset and anxious.

It was a monster--an F4. Very destructive, but skipped around alot, so it didn't spend a lot of time on the ground doing the kind of damage it could. The tornado nicked the corner of the high school pool where I would even devote 4 years of my life to being in so I could swim competitively.

I was one of those kids that was both in awe and terrified (in a real and also amusement kind of way) of big thunderstorms.

* * *

Watching the tornado videos and interviews, often people will speak of them as if they are some hellish monster with a conscious and evil will. They will yell out, "In God's name, be gone!". I am somewhat amused by this. When I watch the tornado videos, I do not see dark creatures tearing up the landscape. No, not at all.

Actually, I see them as a kind of machine or engine--true to the freight train sound they make, and not at all anykind of attributable characteristic of something like, say, good or evil. It's a vertical wind tunnel. Even hearing the term "monster tornado" when describing a huge F5 tornado, sounds a little too much like projecting some highly-charged emotionally-based human characteristic on, well, a basic natural phenomemon.

What I do find interesting is that scientists are still not 100% sure of how they are formed.

Over the past week I've watch enough YouTube videos now. Tornado videos get boring. When I came across the ones of first Storm Chasers arriving into Joplin, I had had enough.