We’re off to see the wizard, and this time I plan to get photos

Had a tornado watch in my county a couple weeks back. As usual, I did the exact opposite of what the keyed up TV weather man was telling me to do – I grabbed my camera and headed out into the open countryside, hoping to grab at least one good “twister” shot. But as has been the case the last hundred or so times I’ve done this, no twister materialized and I came home empty-handed.

I’ve been trying to get a decent photo of a tornado for the past 35 years, but so far, nothin’. I’ve never even seen one, much less caught one on film.

I’ve mentioned here before that I’m a fan of “big weather,” and weather doesn’t get much bigger than a “Wizard of Oz”-sized twister. Over the years, I’ve developed what can only be called an obsession with them. Tornadoes are the white whale to my Captain Ahab.

To make matters worse, tornadoes have repeatedly taunted me with “near misses.”

The first I was too young to remember. I was only an infant and was cowering in the root cellar with my mother and grandmother when a tornado whisked away the house above us. Not a board was left, to hear my grandma tell it.

The next hit nine years later, on a Palm Sunday I’m sure a lot of West Michigan folks still remember. Tornadoes were touching down all around us, but I was a kid and my folks – who remembered all too well the root cellar incident – wouldn’t allow me to leave the basement.

But my most memorable close encounter of the windy kind occurred nearly ten years later, while I was hitch-hiking from Detroit to Missouri. I had been on the road a couple days and had made it only as far as Illinois.

My last ride had dropped me off in a tiny, rural town; a one-stoplight burg boasting a bar, two churches, a mom & pop diner, and three-dozen indifferently maintained homes perched along a two-lane blacktop. It was getting on toward dusk and the odds of finding a quick lift out of Mayberry were not good.

The sky was overcast, and rather than hitch after dark, I opted to make camp in a fallow field just south of town. I hiked back from the road and erected my little “bug” tent near some abandoned railroad tracks.

Snuggled into my sleeping bag, I nodded off two minutes after zipping in for the night. Some time later, I woke to the sound of heavy rain blatting against the tent’s Nylon exterior. There’s nothing cozier than sleeping through a thunderstorm in a good tent that doesn’t leak; I was asleep again in minutes.

Still later I was awakened by the sound of a train passing, a big one, from the sound of it. The tracks weren’t abandoned after all, it seemed. The walls of my tent bellowed violently in and out. The train passed and I again dozed.

Sunlight dappled the roof of my tent the next morning. I crawled loose of my sleeping bag and unzipped the tent. There, not three feet from the entrance, was a cow. A dead cow; on its back, with all four hooves pointing toward the flawless, blue sky.

It took a moment to process the scene. Extricating myself from the tent, I saw the field was littered with debris – branches, auto parts, torn and dirty clothing. The ground itself looked as if it had been ripped up in places, one of those places not ten feet from my tent.

Back in town, over a coffee at the mom & pop diner, I learned a tornado had swept through the night before. No one killed; thank Heaven, but lots of property damage.

A twister had missed me by ten feet, a flying cow by three. The next time that happens, I’m getting a picture.

Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.