coop, where Gary’s dad threw his body onto his son and grabbed a support beam buried deep in the ground. It seemed to be their only hope of not being sucked away. Hanging on for dear life, he heard the windows around him breaking and opened his eyes just as the building’s tin roof peeled away like the lid of a soup can. Chickens, squawking for dear life, were zooming past his head like “feathered bullets,” he later recalled, and at that moment he believed his young life was over. But then, with a flash of lightning and a ground-shaking crash of thunder, the storm was suddenly over—vanishing almost as quickly as it had come. Covered in a mix of mud, bird droppings, and feathers, he sat there shaking and terrified but thrilled by the storm. His father, who was by then no stranger to the random assaults, was not quite so excited. “Good Lord,” he said to his son. “Will we ever know when these darn things are going to hit?”
At that point the only warning system one could hope for was a police officer parked on the west side of town on stormy days to keep watch for funnels. If the officer spotted a storm coming, he would radio back to the station or, more often in those days, race back to town and blow the emergency siren himself. After that storm Gary and his family moved closer to town. As he grew up, he’d hear the siren go off seconds before the storms hit. He and his family would race to the storm cellar—crawling down into the dark hole in the ground that also served as storage for the dozens of mason jars his mom canned every year. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what was more terrifying—that roar in the distance or the darkness of the cellar, where snakes and black widows with their deadly venom lurked.
England’s fascination with storms only grew as he got older. He looked forward to the spring with a mix of fear and anticipation. He was ten or eleven when he finally saw his first tornado, a funnel that magically appeared in the distance when he was riding the school bus home one spring afternoon. It dropped down in a field near the North Canadian River, which ran south of town. It wasn’t a big tornado, and it faded away quickly, but he was mesmerized. His dad had taken a job as a delivery driver for a bread company, and Gary occasionally joined him on the long routes around western Oklahoma. The truck didn’t have a radio, and his dad passed the time singing old country songs while Gary stared out the window at the sky, looking for signs of that next storm.
Television had arrived in Oklahoma by then, though England and his family were too poor to own a set. The first time he saw a television was through the front window of his uncle’s hardware store. A crowd had gathered around a brown box where he could see a faint picture of people who appeared to be caught in a snowstorm. The reception was poor—Seiling was more than 100 miles away from Oklahoma City, home of the state’s only television station at that point—but soon the picture became clearer as tall antennas began to rise on the landscape like metal weeds. He would walk by the hardware store as often as he could, staring into that storefront where the brown box gave him a glimpse of a world that seemed so far away.
By then Gary was old enough to begin to think of what his future might hold. He figured he’d probably be a pig farmer someday—he’d always liked pigs. But one fateful night he walked past the hardware store and saw something he’d never seen before: a man standing in front of a map of Oklahoma that was covered in chalk lines. He couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but crude lines on the map appeared to represent weather fronts, cold air and hot air, and they were converging right over Oklahoma. He watched as the man wrote numbers over different regions of the state. In one corner of the map he wrote, in all caps, “RAIN.” A day later it did rain, just as the man had predicted—and England was
At that point the only warning system one could hope for was a police officer parked on the west side of town on stormy days to keep watch for funnels. If the officer spotted a storm coming, he would radio back to the station or, more often in those days, race back to town and blow the emergency siren himself. After that storm Gary and his family moved closer to town. As he grew up, he’d hear the siren go off seconds before the storms hit. He and his family would race to the storm cellar—crawling down into the dark hole in the ground that also served as storage for the dozens of mason jars his mom canned every year. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what was more terrifying—that roar in the distance or the darkness of the cellar, where snakes and black widows with their deadly venom lurked.
England’s fascination with storms only grew as he got older. He looked forward to the spring with a mix of fear and anticipation. He was ten or eleven when he finally saw his first tornado, a funnel that magically appeared in the distance when he was riding the school bus home one spring afternoon. It dropped down in a field near the North Canadian River, which ran south of town. It wasn’t a big tornado, and it faded away quickly, but he was mesmerized. His dad had taken a job as a delivery driver for a bread company, and Gary occasionally joined him on the long routes around western Oklahoma. The truck didn’t have a radio, and his dad passed the time singing old country songs while Gary stared out the window at the sky, looking for signs of that next storm.
Television had arrived in Oklahoma by then, though England and his family were too poor to own a set. The first time he saw a television was through the front window of his uncle’s hardware store. A crowd had gathered around a brown box where he could see a faint picture of people who appeared to be caught in a snowstorm. The reception was poor—Seiling was more than 100 miles away from Oklahoma City, home of the state’s only television station at that point—but soon the picture became clearer as tall antennas began to rise on the landscape like metal weeds. He would walk by the hardware store as often as he could, staring into that storefront where the brown box gave him a glimpse of a world that seemed so far away.
By then Gary was old enough to begin to think of what his future might hold. He figured he’d probably be a pig farmer someday—he’d always liked pigs. But one fateful night he walked past the hardware store and saw something he’d never seen before: a man standing in front of a map of Oklahoma that was covered in chalk lines. He couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but crude lines on the map appeared to represent weather fronts, cold air and hot air, and they were converging right over Oklahoma. He watched as the man wrote numbers over different regions of the state. In one corner of the map he wrote, in all caps, “RAIN.” A day later it did rain, just as the man had predicted—and England was
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