I grew up in
Western New York, where magnificent thunderstorms are a rarity. Most
storms there are of the very long, very gray, grumbling sort, storms that are nothing more than
rain clouds with a flash or two. Still, I remember standing at my
bedroom window, nose pressed up against the cool glass, willing for an unusual, beautiful stroke of
lightning. I was fascinated with weather. I poured over weather books, a
plain little ten-year old girl in ripped leggings and a t-shirt, pointing up at a cumulus cloud and prognosticating rain. It was always a vague daydream of mine to see a
tornado.
I moved with my family, not too long ago, to St. Louis, Missouri. We arrived in the very middle of summer. To a New Yorker, Missouri summers are unbearably hot and humid. The air is heavy and the sun glares angrily, relentlessly down. I spent most of my time indoors and grew rapidly miserable with my new home. I did not quite notice the storms, nor anything else.
One night in May, about half a year since I'd arrived, I woke in the middle of the night with a terrible earache. It was with a sort of electric shiver that I heard the first murmuring roll of thunder. Padding to the empty middle bedroom, which has an enormous window looking out over the hills, I pressed my nose to the glass and waited. Lightning did not flash, it darted in sizzling strikes across the sky. Thunder screamed through the sky and the house creaked alarmingly with wind. Raindrops struck the window with loud 'rats!', gradually becoming louder and louder. Mammatus clouds shone in stark relief with every bolt, the only clouds of the sort I'd ever seen. I was mesmerized. Later I would learn that this line of storms spawned tornadoes only a county away, tornadoes that had destroyed a small farm town that had stood for 150 years.
That spring, I noticed that before every major storm, I would get a horrible earache. It was odd, I thought, but must be due to the dropping pressure. This had never happened in New York. Whenever I contemplated this, a strange reverence for storms bubbled up in me, not the cheerful naivete I had entertained as a little girl, but respect. I still longed to see a tornado, but I realized how terrible and great and wild they are.
It was last summer that I got my chance. My parents, brother and I were on our way to Yellowstone National Park by car. We had stopped overnight in Omaha, Nebraska, and, before sunset, had admired the beautiful, fan-like clouds. We did not connect these with the strangely intense squalls we had driven through that afternoon, or the vans with radio equipment photographing the clouds, parked on overpasses. My ear ached until I thought my head would split. It was not until the lightning flashed, that we realized the fans were the anvils of an enormous thunderhead, one that filled the horizon. My older brother and I ventured outside, as it was still clear overhead, to get a better view of the lightning. The night was sticky and strangely still. My eardrum thrummed painfully in unison with my pulse. We stood still, watching the unusually electric looking flashes.
"Dan," I said presently, putting an elbow on his shoulder. "Why is there no thunder?"
He did not look at me. "I don't know."
As I turned back to the storm and saw the mammatus, like an odd rash of the cloud's skin, I felt an inexplicable thrill of very real terror. My ear hurt. "Let's go inside," I whispered, unnerved. Dan did not protest.
It was only until we saw the weather channel and the doppler radar that we realized that the storm we were watching was a county and a half away, that there was no thunder because it was too far off yet, and that its clouds filled the whole sky even though we were miles from the storm. That night, I lay uncomfortably in my hotel bed, listening to the rain and thunder and the terrible, terrible wind. I was struck numb with fright. This was a storm, a real storm. I waited it out, feeling with special acuteness the throb of my ear.
The morning dawned bright and clear and hot. I learned an F3 tornado had hit just to the Southwest in the late evening, and that my family and I had been marveling at its beauty as it tore open a farm house and killed a man.
I have learned to pay attention to my ear and the terrible beauty of the clouds.