I came home filled with Jesus’s love. Using the green-screened IBM in our basement—still a few years away from that hallowed new treasure of dial-up internet, which I would eventually use to spelunk X-Files fansites and hunt-and-peck late-night messages in chat rooms to some nameless boy in Potosi—I typed up bible verses and printed them out, then taped them to my bedroom walls. But even as I proselytized to my bewildered family, even as I wore a sterling silver Jesus fish on my finger like an engagement ring, even as I listened to DC Talk and Jars of Clay, even as I prayed each night, I’m not sure I ever really believed. In a small town, the promises of religion are the language of protection, and I was being promised unconditional love—just as my body, and my very existence as a girl, had begun to betray me. Just as my desires had begun to consume me. Just as I was being taught to believe those desires were wrong, that they would mark me irreparably as both sinner and slut. So I swallowed the words that were taught to me at church, and at those Christian summer camps, like Communion. I tried my best to believe them. For a while, maybe I convinced myself I did.
What I believed in, through it all, was the weather. What I mean is I revered the weather, in all its volatility and power, as I knew I was supposed to revere God. In particular, I revered tornadoes. I could never really explain what it was about tornadoes that had a hold on me, but I knew it mirrored the fervor of faith they wanted us to adopt in church: an awe-inspired, fear-induced belief in something beyond my capacity to comprehend. I had never seen a tornado, but I knew one could strike at any time. I feared and exalted tornadoes. I worshipped them. I considered their ability to destroy—and in some cases to pardon—something holy.
I was nine or ten when the obsession began. This was the dawn of a strange and inexplicable few years in my small-girl life when I couldn’t be interested in anything without becoming consumed by it. I was obsessed with the weather like I was obsessed with Pogs and pewter dragons fused to amethyst, with the Beatles and The Kids in the Hall and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s CATS soundtrack. I tore through books about tornadoes, first at the public library and then at the Waldenbooks in the mall, thirty minutes away in Madison, where my mother and I drove on weekends. We spent hours in that tiny chain bookstore, where I snaked from the horror section to the nonfiction aisle, sitting on the floor with a stack of Christopher Pike and R. L. Stine and whatever slick new odes to destruction I could find.
I studied tornadoes. I learned how to prepare. I read about meteorology, weather patterns, the clashing of warm front and cold. I read about the jet stream, low-pressure systems, dew points, and super cells; about cumulous, cumulonimbus, and funnel clouds; about rotation, radars, and lead time—the number of minutes, or more often seconds, between warning and touchdown. I read about the static currents survivors said they could feel in their skin, about the green of the sky, the electric smell in the air—like a lightning-struck power line or a live wire. I read under the covers in bed with a flashlight. I read the words of scientists and storm chasers and meteorologists, who spoke, like prophets, of the warming of the earth, who warned of the coming years and the severity of storms that would only get worse.
A few years later, when my friends and I were buying Teen Beat and Bop from the grocery store and hanging centerfolds of the Backstreet Boys and Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonathan Taylor Thomas on our walls, I developed a crush on the local television meteorologist. His name was David George, and he was a pale middle-aged man with round cheeks and gray hair, thin lips and a Texas accent. I worshipped David and watched his forecasts religiously—sometimes, in the spring and summer during peak tornado season, all three nightly newscasts at five, six, and ten o’clock. When I was fourteen, my parents procured a glossy autographed headshot of the NBC 15 chief meteorologist himself and gave it to me as a Christmas present. I taped it up next to Leo and JTT, and each night before bed I admired their faces in the glow of my night-light—these androgynous boys and one cherubic middle-aged man. I wished them all good night and said a little prayer to David for keeping me safe.
If a tornado was the finger of God, then what did you call the man who predicted God’s hand? David George was a prophet of severe weather. He offered not just protection but a sense of control just when I started becoming aware of my lack of it. Adolescence had become its own kind of storm system, volatile and unpredictable: My body’s boyish build had begun to shift course, budding breasts and bleeding, and I began to realize that even the sturdiest structures, like family and home, could be blown away in an instant. I latched on to David as a strange kind of constant. Tornadoes were both childhood monster and wrath of God, and David told me when they would come. Standing against his green screen, hands following the invisible path of the jet stream, he told me when the humidity was rising, when the barometer was falling, when the low-pressure systems were careening toward the high. He told me when we were under a watch or a warning. He stayed up with me on summer nights, when the watches lasted well into the early-morning hours. He kept me updated on each cell’s location, which direction it was heading, and what towns were in its path. A soothsayer, preparing us for who and what we might grieve, he told me the speed of straight-line winds, the diameter of hail, if a funnel had been spotted, and where it might touch down. He charted a path on the Doppler radar, a new technology then, to track the storm’s trajectory. He said, “Get to the basement.” He warned, “Find a windowless interior room.” The way parents’ nagging reminders hinted at their love, he said, “Take your flashlight, your radio, have extra batteries on hand.” He sat with me, tie loosened, as long as the power stayed on and the station stayed on the air—even as the winds rippled waves across my twelve-inch TV screen. He stayed by my side while my parents slept, the two of them convinced the sirens would save us.
Twister was released in 1996, when I was thirteen. I saw the movie twice in theaters and owned a copy on VHS that I watched until the tape wore out and the picture on our tube TV began to wobble and wave like it did during a storm. I was fascinated by the idea of Oklahoma and Kansas, the dark heart of Tornado Alley. I dreamed of being a storm chaser, me and a crack team of scientists who might develop the ability to see inside a tornado—so we might better understand the storms and build better warning systems. So we might protect sleeping towns like Barneveld. It wasn’t enough to be saved; I wanted to be the savior.
In its opening week, Twister brought in over $41 million, making it the number one blockbuster in North America (second only that summer to Independence Day). It went on to earn over $500 million, was played constantly on the USA Network, and was quickly dubbed a New American Classic. But Roger Ebert gave it just a startling two and a half stars, calling it “loud” and “dumb,” and most other critics panned it, bemoaning the special effects taking a front seat in the proverbial storm-chasing pickup truck to character development and plot. On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie boasts a lousy 57 percent rating. When asked, meteorologists and storm chasers will still roll their eyes and tell you that, in terms of the movie’s science, it’s mostly bullshit.
I loved it. More than twenty years later, I still love it. On a recent rewatch (which I do at least once a year, typically at the height of tornado season), I discovered that even though I know the movie by heart, it still fills me with certain dread. I’m still terrified as Bill and Jo drive headlong into each storm, cows swooping by and oil tankers exploding in their path. It’s a ridiculous movie, and of course I know every time how it will end: impossibly—with Bill and Jo strapped to a pipe in the middle of a pasture, swinging in the wind in the dead center of an F5 and miraculously surviving. But during those 113 ridiculous minutes, I’m still gripped by the possibilities the movie entertains. I’m still held fast by both the fear and the thrill of it. I’m still convinced that I, too, could survive an F5.