Chasing Tornadoes
Indederminacy and the Sublime in Nature
Smart people head for the basement when the tornado warning comes — whenever the threat is imminent. That’s what my mother always did, ushering my siblings and me down there to crouch against the wall and listen to the radio until the all-clear report came.
I lingered upstairs once, hoping for a glimpse out the window of that menacing force of nature, but she whisked me away before I could see anything. Consequently, tornadoes were more the stuff of nightmares than reality in my early youth. I knew them only through the devastation shown on tv.
I was ten years old before I saw one. It was only a funnel swirling down from dark clouds, but it looked like a tornado to me. Technically speaking, a funnel isn’t a tornado until it hits the ground. I was playing outside at the time. There was no rain falling, no freight-train-sounding wind blowing, no big storm. No warning had been issued either. A funnel suddenly materialized overhead then disappeared just as quickly. I was astonished by it. That twisting protrusion of cloud was not like anything I had ever seen before. It seemed utterly fantastic to me.
Terror and the Sublime
Like hurricanes, tornadoes demonstrate the power of wind. Hurricanes are much bigger than tornadoes, of course…
