Traversing Tornado Alley

“So, if you get into trouble, just point right at it.  I mean, cars are meant to withstand the most force from the front, right?  120 mph. 140 mph.  It’s best to take it head on instead of broadside or from behind because it’s not built to withstand pressure from that direction.”  

At that point, Amy interrupted Dave and said, “What?!?”  ​

Clearly, Dave had gone right back into his tornado chasing days and was excitedly telling us stories interspersed with ‘nuggets of wisdom’ since we were heading down into “Tornado Alley”.  Without seeming to hear Amy, Dave then pulled out his phone and told us a few different apps to use to track the storms as they generally move east-northeast and since the roads are gridded out north and south, you need to stay below the storms as you track them so you always have ways to escape. 

“Wait, wait.  What did you say about the direction of pointing the car?!?”

Dave looked up at Amy and smiled a broad smile and stated, “Well, uh, I mean, that’s not going to happen but, you know, it’s good to know.”  Our collective laugh broke the tension as Amy made me and the boys (read: me, again) promise not to chase storms across the Texas-Oklahoma panhandle.  I looked directly at her and said we would not chase storms … without detaching the rig first.  Another joke but heartfelt; we were not about to hunt for tornados across the southern US plains, but we were heading directly into their breeding grounds.

“Where are you guys?!?  It’s actually moving southeast at 30 mph about midway between Dumas and Amarillo.”  

Dave’s texts came fast and furious as we had been sending him pictures of rolling clouds and massive electrical storms and relayed the new set of National Weather Service warnings that were regularly coming in over the radio: potentially deadly storm … northeast of Amarillo … baseball-sized hail … seek immediate cover in first floor of strong multi-story structures … lethal hail … 

“Uh, we’re at the intersection of 87 and 1913, halfway between Dumas and Amarillo….”  

“Go north now.”

Based on the texts alone we would have been freaked out but we had been pacing this storm and two others just like it for the last 4 hours as we drove across northeast New Mexico and into Texas.  We saw one storm’s entire development as we spent the late afternoon watching it transform into a beast that eventually dropped ping-pong sized hail just outside of Perrytown as it went on to trigger tornado warnings in Oklahoma.  As we steadily angled south, it passed us to the north, but we were racing too fast across the Texas plains and slowly gained on another monster that dominated the entire view to the east.  That’s when the now familiar NWS radio warnings shifted away from the beast hell-bent on punishing northeast Texas and western Oklahoma and started mentioning the monster north of Amarillo, the one directly in front of us.

The boys and I decided to stop at a four-way intersection and flyover, which gave us the option to flee in any needed cardinal direction, and just wait it out.  For almost two hours we stood transfixed by a non-stop electrical show that illuminated the monster’s multi-dimensional cloud structure, arced fantastical spiderwebs across the face of the clouds, erupted violet and red hues deep in it’s various bellies and shuddered and vibrated bolts in that air-searing way that stays imprinted in your retina long after you have blinked the image away.  We eventually saw the reassuring appearance of the moon with a good chunk of the constellations and stars that make up the ‘winter hexagon’ emerge from the monster’s flank off to our west which promised a break in the weather but our gaze was still transfixed on the light show.  ​

Finally, and with Dave’s blessings via bursts of texts with attached and updated radar images, we meandered east towards the monster and Lake Meredith, our boondocking spot for the night.  For an entire afternoon and evening we had been skirting on the edge of a series of storms and luckily we were on the back edge of this one.  The back edge that saw the beauty in the monster as the sunset revealed its gorgeous tropospheric plumes above rainbows brilliant in the growling darkness churning across the earth.  Falling asleep we were fortunate to never feel its wrath. ​