Storm Country

Way back when I was a wee little essayist, in my first year of grad school and having taken exactly one nonfiction writing class, when I was a man who mostly considered himself a fiction writer, I wrote an essay titled “Storm Country,” about growing up in Tornado Alley Arkansas.

I’ve been thinking about that essay a lot recently, mainly because it’s storm season again in America and we are getting storms every day in Kansas. And because of us getting storms everyday in Kansas, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of watching storm chasers streaming live on Youtube.

I found them by accident, or algorithm, I guess, since nothing’s really an accident when it comes to casual viewing anymore. But I must have clicked on a tornado video at work or something, because live storm chasers came up in my feed, and, praise be to algorithms, I clicked that damn link so fast it would have made your head spin, as my mother used to say.

The first guy I found saved a family. He was following a tornado—remember, I was watching this live, as it happened, hundreds of miles away—that hit a small house. By the time he got there, the family was flagging him down. They were bleeding and bruised, and this dude, this streamer, gets them into his car and takes them to the hospital. This is a short news clip, but you can find the full stream on the streamer’s page: https://www.youtube.com/@FreddyMcKinney

See, I had plans to go storm chasing myself. In 2017, I went to Greensburg, Kansas, on the 10th anniversary of the town being wiped out by a tornado. I visited one of the National Weather Service’s stations, this one outside Kansas City, and got a tour of the place. I published a couple of essays about storms, and natural disasters. I took a class on how to be a storm spotter for local weather stations.

My plan was to write a book, centering on Greensburg and the disaster there, but also other disasters. The resilience of people who live through such times. And about growing up in storm country, where the sky can turn angry at any time so old men watch the weather at all times.

Then I sort of put it on the back burner. I don’t know why. Money. Time. Energy.

But I did I publish three essay collections, and “Storm Country” is in the first of those. It was the second essay I ever got published. It was the first essay that got into Best American Essays, in 2005, with a big shout-out to Susan Orlean, guest editor that year, and the inestimable Bob Atwan, who’s become something like a friend over the years.

That essay, and its inclusion in Best American, gave me confidence I didn’t have. It gave me hope my words could reach a wider audience.

So, in honor of spring in the Midwest, and storms, and tornadoes and old essays and hopefully finding new audiences, I’d like to share it here. Since it has never been published online, I am going to put it behind a paywall. I do this as a reward for my paid subscribers. If you are not a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading to paid, or check out my other work on Substack—95% of it is free, and I plan on keeping much of it free as long as I am here.

Thank you all for being here, and be careful out there.