When I was a kid, I was enamored with Paxton’s Bill Harding, who I perceived to be the hero of the film. He was stoic, like all good Midwesterners. He was serious, straitlaced, and smart, with no time for the hijinks of his fellow storm chasers, least of all his estranged wife, Jo, played by an obsessed and somewhat unhinged Helen Hunt. Jo was smart, but she was also unstable; she was wild and willful and reckless. Where Bill was solid, Jo was erratic. She was volatile. She was crazy, says Bill’s new fiancée—the craziest one of them all. She was a woman who ran directly into the storm, despite the desperate protestations of the men in her crew, who banged her fists against the chest of a man who wanted to protect her—from harm, from nature, from herself. She is woman as fable, as harbinger: We’re meant to be in awe of her, to marvel at her tenacity. But we’re also meant to fear her. We watch, face in fists, as she screams into the wind and storms away; we watch in the end, with relief, as she is held at last in the arms of the man who loves her—who keeps her safe from the storm.
It wasn’t until recently that I understood Jo had been the hero all along. With her unruly hair and dirt-stained clothes, her khakis that were almost certainly stuffed with pens and a small notebook and a compass and a knife and an assortment of tools I didn’t even know about, her boyish mannerisms and short, androgynous name (unlike Bill’s new fiancée, a nice proper woman named, horribly, Melissa), she was everything I wanted to be. Jo was a woman who carried both an all-encompassing fear and the obsession born of it, both desire and the pain from which it was created—a burden and a torch that burned in her and carried her forward, which a girl like me might have noticed had she only looked closely enough. Had she only possessed the tools to see.
In the Midwest, people talk about the weather. It’s the first topic to spring from our lips when we pick up the phone, when we step inside a friend’s house for dinner, when we gather for a backyard barbecue. It’s in the kitchen as we wash dishes, on living room couches as we “have a set” at the holidays. It’s in talk of vacations and weekend plans, softball games and golf tournaments, the corn fest and the county fair. It’s part of every conversation, a backdrop to everything we do. If it’s going to rain, if it’s calling for storms, the wind that split the birch in two. Thank God it didn’t hit the house, we say. The lakes are low, the rivers high, the wheat is getting dry. It’s the humidity, we say, not the heat. It’s become something of a joke, but it has serious roots. For in the Midwest, the weather is volatile. It’s unpredictable. A blue sky can change in a second to green. And so we look to the sky because the sky is the only reliable predictor of what might come. Perhaps especially for families like mine, whose livelihood was once tied directly to the crops, the weather is more influential than anything, more powerful than God himself. It can mean the difference between a good season and a bad one, having food on the table or not. For some farmers, it has literally meant life or death. So we keep thermometers and barometers and rain gauges nailed to our decks, stuck to the sides of our houses. We keep watch as those needles rise and fall, and we look to the sky with hope, with anticipation, with fear. We pray for rain, and we pray for it to stop. We pray to be spared from the wind.
“Going green,” Bill says, his eyes to the sky, just before a tornado hits.
“Greenage,” says Dusty, played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Two ghosts waiting for a monster. He’s giddy when he says it.
Tornado season changes depending on which part of the country you’re in. In Wisconsin, the heart of the season stretches from March through July. Most tornadoes hit in the summer, between 3:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., but they can strike at any time, with little or no warning. The siren system works by county, and in Mount Horeb the tower is located near a softball field where I played summer games as a kid. It stands, a massive obelisk of cloud-gray steel, speakers on all sides—both beacon and warning, a promise of protection and a reminder of things to come.
In our small public school, we had tornado drills: A voice would crackle through speakers, telling us a warning had been issued, that we should leave our classrooms in an orderly fashion and follow our teachers to the designated shelter. It could be a hallway or the gym. It could be a bathroom or locker room. We sat on the floor against steel lockers, legs drawn to chests, told to take cover until the threat had expired. These drills were never frightening; they were thrilling. It was exciting to be crammed into a tight, dark space with your friends, with the boys and girls you had crushes on. There was something romantic about it. What if a tornado actually hit? We’d whisper, our small arms and legs brushing together, goose bumps rising up on flesh, huddled on the cold tile floor. What if the roof blew off the school, like it had in Barneveld, and we got sucked up into the sky? These wild fascinations of children, a fantasy of physics, like Dorothy spinning through the air on her bed, but never the possibility of death. We’d giggle and shiver in the windowless hallways, sure that the stone walls of the school would protect us.
The thing about tornadoes is they’re still something of a mystery. What’s funny is that, despite Twister’s tenuous science, its plot was inspired by actual meteorological experiments in the 1970s and 1980s—where DOROTHY was TOTO, an instrumented metal drum meant to be deposited in a tornado from the bed of a pickup truck. TOTO was never quite successful, but in recent years meteorologists have developed similar, and more effective, experiments to study twisters—all hinged on the idea of putting instruments of measurement directly in the path of a storm to better understand how it works and develop better warning systems. At the heart of it all, there’s an obsession—the same one Jo and Bill had, that all storm chasers have—that’s not unlike faith: the desire to know something unknowable, to understand this deadly miracle, this unpredictable and awe-inspiring act of nature, this mechanism of fate, this impossible act of God.
My hometown has a thing for mythology. Settled mostly by Norwegians, Mount Horeb is known as the “Troll Capital of the World.” We called it Mount Horrible when we were kids, but now, having lived far away for so long, I appreciate the strangeness of the town. If one were driving along Main Street, a single-stoplight stretch known as “the Trollway,” one would behold more than a dozen statues of trolls carved out of tree stumps. Each troll is about four feet tall, and there’s one on almost every block. The troll outside the telephone company plays an accordion; the troll outside an 1895 Queen Anne is a gardener. There’s a tooth fairy troll, a carp fisher troll, a troll with a chicken on its head. There’s a peddler troll, a tourist troll, a troll on a tricycle. They’re ugly things, with large proboscises, straggly hair, and mischievous grins, that a local woodworker has carved from maples and oaks since the 1980s. His trolls were preceded by those of a Norwegian artist named Oljanna Cunneen, who started painting and installing plywood trolls around town in the 1960s. The relevance of the trolls to Mount Horeb is a topic of local debate, but one theory suggests that the immigrants who settled the area believed the creatures—who, according to Scandinavian folklore, dwell in mountains and possess magical, prophetic powers—lived in the Blue Mounds and protected us from evil. Some of the tree-stump trolls have rotted, and some have been cut down. Others still stand, sentries for the town.