Hoadley was hooked. The next day he explored the town to inspect the damage and saw a transmission tower doubled over as though in pain, the top end on the ground. Lacking the technology today’s storm chasers rely upon to track the skies, Hoadley had to study the weather in an intense and methodical fashion, creating elaborate charts, plotting surface maps, and trying to find patterns in morning data that could help predict the nature of afternoon storms.
Storm chasers are addicted to awe. In what seem like secular pilgrimages, they drive for thousands of kilometres to pursue, map, snap, report, record or just gawk and gaze at severe weather events. These tend to be, most spectacularly, tornadoes, but include thunderstorms, dust storms, cyclones, waterspouts, and rare cloud formations like mammatus or shelf clouds.
Chasers often speak in poetry, and use words and phrases like anvil, ghost, cell, squall, fire devil, dust devil, willy-willy, tower, radar, lift, wind shear, thunderhead, core-punching, morphology. They spend weeks at a time thundering along isolated roads, eyes straining for shifts in cloud patterns and winds. What they desire most are supercells, the storms that give rise to the most spectacular, long-lasting tornadoes and other dramatic formations. There is a kind of a religiosity to their obsession, an exhilaration and a worshipful hunting of wonder.
Take Australian Nick Moir, a superb photographer who has been chasing extreme weather for twenty years, in Australia and the United States. He sees storms as ‘living entities’, or giant animals, each one unique and astounding. A former colleague of mine at The Sydney Morning Herald, where he is now chief photographer, Moir long ago earned the reputation of being a driven risk-taker. In May 2019, while chasing storms around the town of Imperial, Nebraska, he saw what he believed to be the ‘most beautiful [storm] cell of the decade’, a storm that was subsequently dubbed the ‘Imperial Mothership’. Watching the atmosphere swirl around the storm was ‘awe-inspiring’, he said. ‘It’s like looking at a god. When clouds, the atmosphere becomes so organised . . . it’s no wonder people thought these things were deities. I took a lot of shots, but I also just stood and watched it. It’s rotating in real time, this thing that’s 30 to 50 kilometres across. It’s like the spaceship from Independence Day.’
Awe can fuel adrenaline, but it is the result of more than danger, risk and speed: it is about witnessing something spectacular and rare. As Moir has said, chasing storms ‘makes you feel really small . . . It reminds us of how insignificant we are.’ In the short film Chasing Monsters by Krystle Wright, Moir is shown crying out ‘Look at it!’ as he stands with his curly hair whipping his face, in front of an enormous, looming, swirling dark cloud. He throws his arms wide and bending his knees, as though in prayer, a man worshipping over and over, ‘Look at it! Look at iiiiiit! This is why we come here.’ Wright, who was with Moir on the day of the Imperial Mothership, said it was ‘utterly surreal’: ‘I felt the full range of emotions from fear to ecstasy.’
It is a range of emotions that inspires addiction, one David Hoadley, now an octogenarian, is very familiar with. In 1977, Hoadley, who worked as a budget analyst in the water-quality program at the Environmental Protection Authority, founded Storm Track magazine, which allowed the diverse community of storm chasers to communicate for the first time. A few years later, in Storm Track, he tried to answer the question most frequently asked of storm chasers: ‘Why?’ He wrote: ‘First is the sheer, raw experience of confronting an elemental force of nature — uncontrolled and unpredictable — which is at once awesome, magnificent, dangerous and picturesque. Few life experiences can compare with the anticipation of a chaser while standing in the path of a big storm, in the gusty inflow of warm, moist gulf wind sweeping up into a lowering, darkening cloud base, grumbling with thunder as a great engine begins to turn.’
Then there was the ‘experience of something infinite, a sense of powers at work and scales of movement that so transcend a single man and overwhelm the senses that one feels intuitively (without really seeking) something eternal — but ephemeral — almost a conscious thought, but just below the surface. As when a vertical 50,000-foot wall of clouds glides silently away to the east (intermittent, distant thunder) and goes golden in a setting sun against a deep, rich azure sky, one can only pause and look and wonder.’
Hoadley is sometimes called the ‘pioneer’ storm chaser because he was the first to travel interstate while chasing, and to make his own predictions. He, however, defers to a man called Roger Jensen, who began actively hunting and photographing severe thunderstorms a little earlier. Jensen began chasing in 1953 when still a teenager, but saw his first tornado in Fargo in 1957: ‘a big and dirty thunderstorm backlit by the sun’.
Today storm chasing has become cool, with inevitable consequences: roads surrounding storm systems are increasingly choked with TV and radio crews, amateurs, photographers, adrenaline junkies and safari-type storm-chasing tours, as well as veteran chasers, who roll their eyes at the embarrassing commercialisation and the yahoos who don’t understand the dangers and are prone to be reckless. Of these new adherents, Jensen said, sounding doubtful, ‘I hope they are out chasing for the same reasons we are chasing.’
According to Storm Track, while most chasers are steeped in meteorology and forecasting, they come from a broad range of professions, including roofers, postal workers, pilots and store owners. Ninety-eight per cent are men, and the average age is thirty-five. For some, storm chasing is a thrill, for others a thirst.
For those who are truly dedicated, it’s not a fad, but an all-consuming, life-long love. Jensen was succinct when asked why he had chased storms for fifty years: ‘Gosh, it’s for the awe at what you’re seeing. I was born loving storms.’ To support his passion, he worked in his farm and greenhouse, as well as at a turkey-processing plant. In the years before he died in 2001, he and his friends ensured he found a nursing home with an ‘unobstructed vantage point’ in Texas.
FEW OF US ACTUALLY live in Tornado Valley, which is doubtless a relief for some. Many people would travel thousands of kilometres to avoid extreme weather events, which, scientists predict, are unfortunately going to occur more frequently in the future as a result of climate change. This fact alone makes the role of photography even more important, in documenting the often-devastating consequences of changing weather patterns. Moir, for example, has been chasing and photographing dust storms, too — as well as our cataclysmic bushfires — which is one crucial way of recording the impact of the drought in rural Australia.
It’s not necessary, though, to go accelerating into storm systems to experience the awe and wonder associated with weather phenomena; we can often savour it in our own suburbs, even our own gardens. Which is why I love the story of Clyve Herbert, an Australian who spent two decades chasing big storms in the Australian outback without luck, then finally saw a tornado when he was hanging out the washing in his backyard. Herbert, who lives on the Bellarine Peninsula, south-west of Melbourne, told The Age, ‘I just noticed a funnel hanging out the back of a storm. I raced inside, got my camera and chased the tornado on foot. My children were going berserk, running around like fieldmice!’