An Idle Mind Sparks Curiosity
My Storm Chasing Origin Story
It’s not uncommon for fourth graders to have an interest in science. The popular subjects being paleontology, zoology, astronomy, herpetology, entomology, marine biology, and archeology. It’s a perfect age to be engrossed in these subjects. Old enough to comprehend, young enough to have time to explore the subjects. At least that is how it used to be when I was kid. Before the parental pressures to over-achieve and be involved in a never-ending cycle of activities. Not to mention the attention-sucking, time-stealing allure of tablets and smartphones, both easily distributed anywhere and anytime - even in church. My dad called TV the idiot box. I wonder what he would say about smartphones today.
I sometimes think I was born at the right time. I’m about the youngest age that knew a life before the World Wide Web. I’ve witnessed the evolution of the information age and devolution of our civility. But that’s a subject for another blog. The point is, as a kid, I had the freedom to be curious and shape my own interests. I can’t say my family had much choice in the matter since I was an only child and we lived paycheck to paycheck. I never went on a family vacation or even left the state of Iowa, but once. It was a big event to drive a county away for back-to-school shopping. Nowadays, I’ll drive to the next county for my favorite cheeseburger from the Rusty Duck in Dexter, Iowa. Ironically, a town about the same size I grew up in.
The fossils you’ll find in Iowa are mostly invertebrates that long predate the Triassic period, so my first obsession of unearthing dinosaurs was out of reach. However, the one thing Iowa has plenty of is weather. I would argue we have the most extreme weather on Earth. Our record temperatures range from 118 °F to −47 °F, we have blizzards, massive floods, droughts, wildfires, derechos on par with hurricanes forming on land, hail up to the size of softballs, and of course tornadoes. Of which, Iowa has had the most EF/F5 tornadoes per square mile of any state.
Mr. Hegg, my fourth and as luck would have it fifth grade teacher, made all science fun and engaging. He was a model teacher, and the very best in my opinion. Credit is owed to him for making me believe I had the capacity for learning science, particularly the earth sciences. When it came to photography, I don’t know if it was my dad’s KWWL weather calendar or us being a newly subscribed cable TV household (our one luxury), but some combination of the two led me to take an interest in documenting weather.
Back when you learned things on The Learning Channel and discovered things on The Discovery Channel, I picked up a fascination with tornadoes. Every so often, there was a TV documentary on these educational channels about extreme weather. They started with the same animation about warm moist air clashing with cool dry air over tornado alley. A place I lived just on the cusp of. The shows would carry on with the billowing cumulonimbus clouds and introduce lightning strikes as the buildup would mount to the main event, the climax of the tornado. The footage was sourced from a mix of perfectly placed Midwest dads standing on the back porch with their VHS camcorders and the professional storm chasers and meteorologists recording from distant lands like Kansas and Texas. They might as well been in China or Africa, as far as I was concerned. Yet, the idea that I would one day be in their position was perfectly normal in my nine-year-old mind. And so, I started collecting storms.