by Dennis Bock
Severe Weather
It may have been the mystery of wind then, the spinning of my sister’s mobile above her crib, which eventually led me to the storms. The wind that made those paper-napkin snowflakes dance. I watched summer air breathe under the billowing curtains of her nursery window. Through the slats of her crib I watched the flickerings of understanding move across her face like a sheet of rain over water. Her hands outstretched, upwards. Ignoring me in her concentration.
The year I turned six, two years after we brought my sister home from hospital, my father drove me through the heart of my first tornado.
He was a storm hunter in those days, also drawn to wind. Through the Ontario Weather Centre he’d find out about a storm moving across-province and drive headlong into it at eighty miles an hour with nothing more than a thermos of black coffee and a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches sitting beside him on the passenger seat. Sometimes he’d leave the house at three in the morning to chase one down. He loved all types of severe weather: waterspouts, funnel clouds, flooding downpours, hailstorms, dust devils, and heat lightning. But above all he loved tornadoes.
Everyone at the Ontario Weather Centre knew my father in those days. He used to phone in seven days a week looking for reports of significant weather gathering on the horizon or blowing in from the lakes, then race out of the house like a man late for his own wedding. But he understood storms better than anyone. Sometimes even better than the men at the Centre. He was only an amateur storm watcher, but they often used his reports. They’d ask his opinion concerning certain storms: what one was doing, where it was headed. In the strange cabal of significant weather watchers, my father was quickly making a name for himself. And I wasn’t far behind.
My mother, on the other hand, never cared for storms. By then she had taken to wearing her long red hair done up in a bun, as if battened down tightly against unexpected winds. She worked part-time at the Centennial Public Library, organizing something she called “The Bear Pit.” With the help of government subsidies, she brought in speakers from around the province in an effort to enlighten our small community. Historians and poets, jugglers, race-car drivers. She decided who came, and each speaker was paid a stipend for his or her trouble. My father, who would have been an obvious choice, who could have marvelled the uninitiated with tales of storm hunting, never took the lectern. My mother never asked him; and he never volunteered. I knew hunting storms was a sore spot between them, first because it was a dangerous and crazy thing to be involved in, and later, after Ruby died, because severe weather became as threatening to their marriage as an exotic woman who came crashing through town, staying just long enough to get my father to do something rash or unpredictable.
“This man lived with cannibals in New Guinea for twenty-five years,” my mother would say at the supper table. Or “So-and-so climbed to the top of Mount Everest,” and she’d send a sidelong glance over to my father, the drifting smile that moved over her face when she believed she had something that would finally capture my interest. “The incredible thing is he’s only got one arm. Can you imagine the kind of man it takes to do something like that!” My father, though, tall and forward-leaning, would sit at the kitchen table impassively, unimpressed, rolling his peas around on his plate with his fork and plotting in his head the course of the nearest squall line or reviewing statistics from The Weekly Review of Canadian Climate and Water.
My mother brought me along to many of the Bear Pit sessions. I listened to the stories of a man who’d rolled across the country in a wheelchair; a woman who kept more than two hundred snakes in her basement; the life story of a pair of Siamese twins, now separated. But since the age of ten, storms were my passion. I knew the difference between bead lightning and ball lightning, and that the scientific community was split on whether the latter actually existed. By the time I was thirteen I knew more about storms than any science teacher at school. I won first prize for my grade nine science fair project when I produced a contained tornado by joining two Coke bottles at the neck with a snipped balloon end, one holding ten ounces of water. The clincher was when I rated the strength of my homemade storm on a miniaturized Fujita F-scale, calculating the strength of my whirlwind and the damage in real dollars that an equivalent full-scale tornado would bring to our small town. I knew that a tornado was called a “funnel cloud” until it came to earth, and that Ontario’s hail season had begun on schedule that same year when hailstones were reported at Cootes Paradise on the fourteenth of March and would probably last upwards of a hundred and seventy days, well into September. I knew during our last severe weather season we’d had twenty-nine tornadoes across the province, concentrated into fourteen storm days. During a severe weather season that lasted some forty-five days, fourteen tornado days made for about a thirty per cent season. My father and I had witnessed seven.
Whatever points I gained in science class when I was a kid, my father and I lost at home with my mother. Although she insisted on taking me to her Bear Pit sessions all the way up to grade twelve, deep down inside I think she realized whose footsteps I would follow in since the day my father took me to see that first tornado.
“We’ve got sightings of funnels out near Tillsonburg,” he said, writing something in the pad of paper he always kept with him. Ruby was upstairs having a nap under that snowstorm mobile. He’d just gotten off the phone with the weather centre. It had been tracking a thunderstorm for the last few hours. I remember looking out the window at the still trees across the street, then at my mother. She was standing at the sink, scraping leftovers into a plastic Tupperware dish. My father closed the notepad and slid his pencil behind his right ear. “If we’re lucky, it’ll turn into something serious and suck up a cow or two,” he said and winked at me. My mother turned around and glared at him icily.
As we drove west to Tillsonburg, my father told me what I could expect from a storm like the one we were heading into. He said if the funnel decided to touch down it would only be a baby tornado. “Barely an F-o,” he said. I didn’t understand this new language. As he spoke his eyes roamed the horizon, hoping, I knew, for airborne material. Every fifteen minutes he radioed into the weather centre with an update.
“We might not see anything today,” he said to me as he drove. “I should warn you. But they’ve got funnel sightings coming into the centre. That’s a good sign, at least. Tornadoes are finicky things.” It seemed to me that he was trying to be upbeat.
Between reports over the CB I learned how less than one per cent of thunderstorms manifest themselves as tornadoes, how all conditions have to be just right for one to form. I learned that the world-renowned meteorologist, Professor T. Theodore Fujita, had just developed an ingenious system which helped predict a tornado’s potential destructiveness based on its wind speed. Backtracking, my father explained the Fujita system to me thoroughly, interrupting himself now and then to ask if I had any questions. “No,” I said, slowly pouring him some black coffee from the thermos, trying to remember all the things he’d just told me. A gust of wind bumped the car ever so slightly, as if to lend weight and credibility to my father’s understanding of tornadoes, his explanation of the heavens, and a hot black ribbon of coffee jumped into my lap from the spout.
“What you can explain can’t hurt you,” he said as I handed him the coffee, the stain spreading across my thigh. “There’s nothing to be afraid of from a tornado if you know what you’re dealing with. In scientia est salus.” He stopped talking and blew over his coffee. “I guess you know your mom doesn’t approve of me bringing you out here.”
“Is she mad at us?”
“No, she’s not. But she’s a girl,” he said, “and girls don’t understand the fun stuff like storms.”
The afternoon turned black around four o’clock and two miles east of Delhi we pulled over to the side of the road and let the centre of a baby F-0 tornado pass over us.
“Roll down your window,” my fat
her said excitedly. Newspapers and plastic bags whirled frantically around the car. A pick-up truck and two other cars stopped on the side of the road, more storm hunters like my father. I rolled down the window and a gust of wind reached in and whipped up my hair. Sand and grit blew over my face. “Stick out your hand,” he said. He had his window rolled down the same as mine. “You’re touching it, Peter!” he shouted. “You’re shaking hands with a tornado!”
After the tornado dissipated we got out of the car and talked to the other storm watchers. I didn’t understand much of what they said. My knowledge of storms was still limited to what my father had told me on our way here. I stood beside him, holding his hand while they compared notes. He knew them from other sightings. They all knew each other’s names. My father offered around his coffee and sandwiches, and an old lady from Bond Head cut a slice of chocolate cake for me, which I ate sitting on the hood of our car. On our way home my father asked me again if I had any questions about what we’d seen. Outside of Cambridge he pulled into a Dairy Queen and bought us each an ice cream cone.
“We saw a storm,” I said to Ruby when we got home. She was watching a sparrow hop about in the grass on the front lawn. There was conspiracy in my voice. A secret that we would share. I whispered in her ear. “I shook hands with the tornado. This hand.” I showed her. I wanted to let her know that I understood why her mobile fascinated her so. She looked at me and smiled.
But my family changed with Ruby’s death. Winds churned in ways I’d never known. My mother tried to look forward. She was determined that her sorrow wouldn’t interfere with whatever future we had left. I saw her trying. I knew she was looking inside herself. But my first summer back from the University of Chicago I saw my father’s grief had nowhere to go but out into that strange world of storms and I learned who my mother was finally, where she’d been all those years.
My father and I were going to mark our thirteenth storm season together by shooting for a thirty per cent view rate, which meant roughly ten individual tornadoes, a third of what the province could expect to experience in one season. During our best season we’d managed barely twenty per cent, mostly F-0s and F-1s. We’d have to make it to one in three tornadoes of the expected thirty or so, not including waterspouts, dust devils, and funnel clouds. We were aiming high, but I believed I was ready for it. I was at the head of my class. The University of Chicago offered one of the most respected meteorology graduate programs on the continent. I’d taken to sitting in on Fujita’s lectures every Friday afternoon in the temple-like silence of the Hinds Building. I already had a job lined up for next summer at the Pikes Peak synoptic weather station in Colorado, 14,110 feet above sea level. I’d gotten it through my first-year physics professor, whose brother headed the National Meteorological Center in Camp Springs, Maryland. Come next June, I’d have a bird’s-eye view of the entire northwestern quarter of the continent. On any given morning, I’d be one of the first on the planet to taste whatever new weather system the heavens cared to bring, to rake my fingers through a particular cloud formation, as unique and evanescent as any palm print, to marvel at its particular wash of pink-and-grey light. I believed I could do anything.
I was working at the head office of the Ministry of the Environment in downtown Toronto that summer, compiling data for a study on the effects severe weather had on the farming industry in southwestern Ontario. On a Tuesday afternoon my father called the office from his shop. Barb, my supervisor, handed me the phone.
“Peter,” he said. “We’ve got a serious squall line moving in from the southwest. I think it’s time the both of us suddenly develop a headache. Meet you out front. I’m leaving now.”
“All right. Thank you,” I said, and handed the phone back to Barb. I waited for a few minutes, put my forehead in my hands, leaned over my desk, and then started moaning. I asked if anyone around the office had a bottle of aspirin. A minute later, I keeled over. “A dizzy spell. That’s all,” I said as Barb rose from her desk. I waved her away. “Nothing to worry about,” I insisted.
“We’ll see about that,” she said. “Call in tomorrow to let us know how you’re feeling.” She guided me through the door and down the corridor. For good measure I bumped off a wall as I weaved my way down the hall to the elevators. I leaned my head against the door in case she was still watching me until the bell chimed and I slipped in and the doors closed behind me. Twenty minutes later my father and I were on the 400 due north, hoping to head off a tornado somewhere in cottage country.
Once we were out on the highway we could tell this was no F-0. The wind was up just north of the city, at least fifty miles from where we expected the tornado to appear. Something told me this was going to be the best day of my storm-hunting career. They were talking about it on the local music station. A tornado watch had been issued. One had already touched down in Arthur, about thirty miles to the southwest. Three tornadoes were cutting parallel paths through the centre of the province in the direction of Lake Simcoe, they said. Little Falls lay in the path of the largest. Every ten minutes we radioed into the centre for an update. I studied the clouds racing along the horizon, black and purple, as my father got the latest on the storms. Sightings were flooding in.
“She’d do better to dissipate right now,” he said. “That’s all I can say.” He shook his head. “Even Will Keller wouldn’t be able to get out of this one alive.”
Anyone involved in storm watching knows the story of Will Keller, how he was sucked up into the eye of a tornado one day in 1928 while out walking his dog in Dodge City, Kansas, and spat back out again a mile away, bumped and bruised, and how he lived to tell about it. That was the only recorded case of someone coming out alive from the centre of a full-blown tornado, which is what we had here. Of course I knew the story from my father. I knew the odds of surviving something like that were astronomical, something like one in a million. I knew we couldn’t reasonably hope against odds like those. They’d already reported wind speeds of 130 km/h, enough to lift the roof off a house.
The police had blocked all major arteries into Little Falls by the time we got there. The sun had disappeared. All traffic was going the other way. I recognized some other storm watchers by the cars they were driving, including the old lady who’d fed me chocolate cake after that first baby tornado outside of Delhi years before. Everyone was turning back except my father. A policeman dressed in an orange and yellow rain suit stood at the side of the road directing traffic. My father picked at the steering wheel with his thumbnails and looked over to me, as if to ask what I thought we should do. He slowed the car. Then a mischievous smile came over his face. He locked his elbows against the wheel and drove past the barricade. The policeman yelled something to us and blew into his whistle and waved his arms. But we drove right through. My father’s face was lit up now. He quickly turned down the first side road we came to.
He pulled over on Ravina Crescent and we waited there, the windows up, the car rocking slightly in the wind, a few hundred feet north of where we hoped the tornado would pass. We couldn’t be sure we weren’t in its path. The pad my father took notes in remained unopened on the dashboard, beside the CB. I could tell he was too excited to record his observations as he usually did. He rubbed one hand over his thigh. I looked up and down the street for any indications of storm movement. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father’s face working, the look I’d seen him get before, the look a boy gets when he’s figuring out how to do something he’s not supposed to. I knew he was considering jumping out of the car, but I was ready to grab him if he tried. He’d already undone his seat belt; his hand rested on the door handle. He was thinking about Will Keller.
I spun the radio dial until a local station came clear through the static. A calm female voice was reading through proper tornado procedure. Find shelter, she said. Preferably a basement. Stay out of cars. Close all windows. If you don’t have a basement, lie beneath heavy furn—and then at 4:52 the r
adio went silent. The tornado came up out of the southwest with the sound of an approaching freight train, cutting a three-hundred-foot swath through the town. One of the first things it took down was the power station. Moments later we watched as the roof of the Dominion Super Market three blocks away was racked from its moorings and lifted into the dark funnel. I gripped my hands together tightly. The car shook, the air shuffled with debris, and I felt a strange sucking pressure on my lungs. I tried to remember what my father had always said to me, his refrain in Latin—In scientia est salus. In my mind I ran through everything I knew about tornadoes. I recalled the great men and events in weather history: Aristotle’s treatise on weather science in 350 b.c.; Galilee’s invention of the thermometer; the commencement in 1664 in Paris of the first formal weather observations. I imagined the reaction of Professor Fujita on learning of this storm the following morning. I watched a large plate of sheet metal rise in the sky over a block of houses and dive suddenly, cutting deep into the hood of a parked car. The sound of a freight train grew louder. The names and dates of famous tornadoes and hurricanes flashed before my eyes: Camille, 250 dead; Agnes, 130. I saw the route of the 1925 TriState tornado that killed 689 people.
Suddenly a gust of wind whipped against my face. The door flung open. “Don’t,” I yelled, turning, but I was too late. My father was already out there. He stood in front of the car, leaning into the storm. Projectiles flew through the air. A gust of wind came up against the car and slammed the door shut. The air around me fell still. From inside the car the tornado seemed to move at half speed, as if the storm were some deliberate act of vengeance, calculating and severe, like a torturer exacting a precise, exquisite pain from the body of his victim. Diane, 200.
