A Charred Life 
Blown Away
Ever since the 1953 killer tornado struck Waco, I’ve been fascinated with the awesome spectacle and horrifying history of Texas twisters.
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But in 1948 two Air Force meteorologists at Tinker Air Force Base, near Oklahoma City—Major E. J. Fawbush and Captain Robert Miller—found that they could forecast tornadoes. This happened through a stupendous coincidence, but then coincidences are part of tornado lore. On March 20 Fawbush and Miller watched a tornado cross Tinker field and took careful note of the conditions. Only five days later, an almost identical cell approached Tinker. It looked the same on the charts—so they called a tornado alert. Sure enough, another funnel crossed the field in exactly the same place.
Encouraged, Fawbush and Miller began forecasting tornadoes for the military. (The public was still left in the dark.) By 1952 they had the basic scenario down—a convergence of moist and dry air flowing into a low-pressure area with the jet stream overhead—and had made 52 successful predictions. On March 17 of that year, the Weather Bureau issued a forecast based on their scenario for the first time. The watch box was so big it included Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. But tornadoes did strike that day (near Wichita Falls, of course), and the forecast was considered a success.
I remember the anxiety of those first forecasts. I was in the third grade, and one morning our teacher sent us home, although the sky was cloudless. As we played in a vacant lot on our block, we were constantly aware that we were under a tornado alert. Big cumulus clouds began rolling out of the west. Their shadows raced across the lot toward us, and for a moment we were in cool shade and heard the singing of grasshoppers. Then the sunlight poured down again, drenching us in heat and glare. Finally—with a pang of fear but a strangely pleasurable sense of anticipation—we saw the anvil top of the big storm appear on the horizon. It looked exactly like the cloud of a hydrogen bomb.
Details of the tornado that struck Fort Worth on Labor Day in 1952 still remain military secrets. About a hundred of the Strategic Air Command’s B-36 bombers were at Carswell Air Force Base getting retrofitted with jet engines. The tornado crossed the base, smashing one bomber to pieces and severely damaging the others. According to tornado lore, a nuclear bomb may have been destroyed and its plutonium core scattered. This incident probably inspired the Air Force to get into the tornado-chasing business. A squadron of F-100 Super Sabres who styled themselves the Rough Riders began flying around storms, collecting data. On one occasion, a pilot (who must have been insane) tried flying through a supercell. Hailstones shattered his canopy instantly, and he barely got back alive.
But for my money the greatest aerial tornado chaser of them all was James Cook, a Jacksboro rancher and former Army Air Corps pilot. Cook owned a P-51D Mustang and volunteered his services to the Weather Bureau. Cook’s P-51D was at Love Field in 1957 on the day of the Great Dallas Tornado and was destroyed. He got another surplus airplane—a twin-engine P-38 Lightning—and kept right on chasing. He flew more than one hundred sorties over Tornado Alley, a severe-storm corridor that runs from Texas through Oklahoma and Kansas to Nebraska, taking meteorological readings. This was a risky business. As Cook told the papers: “If you play too close, sooner or later you’ll plow up a snake. That’s not for me.” Cook was right down there “in the clag,” as storm chasers say, flying beneath the supercells. The real danger was from microbursts, sudden downdrafts, which could have slammed him to the ground in seconds. But nobody knew about microbursts then. His exploits must have far outdone movie storm chasers. James Cook, would that you were still around!
NOW IT IS LATE AFTERNOON. WACO AND Dallas are behind me, and I am crossing the Red River Valley. Tornado signs are everywhere. I see sheet metal still wrapped around a utility pole. Every parking lot has a car peppered with big hail dents. Gift shops in the area sell Pet Tornadoes—plastic tubes of starch and water that, when spun, form a funnel of bubbles. The Memphis High School football team is called the Cyclones, and their mascot is a funnel with a strangely benign face, like Casper the Friendly Ghost’s.
I stop at the Medicine Mounds, four little caprock mesas in the valley of the Pease River that were the center of the universe for Quanah Parker, the son of a white captive who became a great Comanche war chief. From a distance, they have a dark, solemn aspect and seem always in shadow. Up close, they are smaller than I thought and covered with scrub cedar. As a boy I was secretly thrilled by the thought of being a white child captured by the Comanche. Then I could have lived the life I was meant to live—ranging over the plains, going on vision quests, finding wives, and killing my enemies. I could have done the things a man really wants to do! But now that I’m here, all I can do is wonder: How could the Comanche have lived in this country without sun block? There is such latent hostility in this terrain. It seems to be telling me to give it up and go home.
Then, far to the north, I see translucent cumulus domes. There are some storms trying to get started up there after all. The jet stream must be moving in this direction. Feeling much better, I drive on through the Quartz Mountains, a green and pleasant country that seems to have had some rainfall, and stop for the night in Sayre, Oklahoma. In a motel, I watch the Weather Channel and see one of those storms blow up and roll northeast all the way to Kansas. The forecast for tomorrow now gives us a 20 percent chance of storms.
Precise forecasting is the motive for all the research. If tornadoes can be forecast, lives may be spared. The Great Dallas Tornado of 1957—the first tornado to be photographed extensively—gave meteorologists a great deal of new information. Hundreds of feet of film were shot by Maurice Levy of NBC, which instantly found its way onto the national news. It was spectacular footage—clouds of flying shingles, whole roofs rising and tumbling slowly through the air. We watched it, I remember, in the same silence as we watched the footage of atomic explosions blowing houses apart on the Nevada Proving Ground.
I WAKE TO A STRONG WIND BLOWING clouds up from the south, humidity increasing, a 30 percent chance of storms here today. Still not very good odds. On the Weather Channel, I see commercials for the movie Twister, which opens the next day, and hear the mayor of Beatrice, Nebraska, a town hit by tornadoes the night before, say, “We’re all plains stock, and we’ll all pull together.” This is arid country, covered with eons of sand blown from the beds of the Red River, the Canadian, the Pease. The wind has been blowing here forever. There are groves of shinnery, or blackjack oak, exposed beds of red clay, and yellow grass.
Just to the west is the 100th meridian, which is also the Texas-Oklahoma border. It has been called the beginning of the Great American Desert, for beyond it, the country averages less than twenty inches of rainfall a year. On a precipitation map, the contrast is startling. On one side of the meridian there is rain; on the other, almost none. This is also where the dry line usually forms—the line along which great storms are born, the ones that then roll on to hit Childress, Vernon, Benjamin, Crowell, Wichita Falls, and Dallas, all prime tornado targets. Today I have a feeling about the meridian, and storm chasing always seems to come down to intuition. Anyway, the ruins of Glazier are out there, so I drive on. The day has gotten hotter, and now there are no clouds at all.
On April 10, 1979, came the great Red River Outbreak. Big tornadoes struck Seymour and Vernon that day, but the worst hit Wichita Falls. The almanac calls this tornado, which killed 42 people and did $400 million in property damage, the worst in Texas history. More than 3,000 homes were destroyed (two entire subdivisions) and 20,000 people were left homeless—so many that the federal government brought in fleets of trailers for them to live in.
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