Text 1: Chasing the sky, by Luke Varga

An original contemporary magazine article.

Storm chasing, it turns out, is mostly driving. For four days our minibus of eight paying customers crossed the plains of Oklahoma and Kansas behind our guide, Shelby, a meteorologist with three laptops, two phones and a habit of muttering at the radar. We ate in petrol stations. We watched clouds that promised everything and delivered drizzle. By the fourth afternoon I had begun to suspect that tornadoes were a rumour.

Then, south of a town I never learned the name of, the sky changed colour. It went from grey to a strange bruised green, and the air, which had been sticky and still, began to pour towards the storm as if the whole landscape were being inhaled. Shelby pulled onto a dirt road, checked the screen, and said, quite softly, ‘There.’

A grey finger was lowering itself from the base of the cloud. It touched the ground a couple of miles away and, instantly, a dark cloud of dust and debris boiled up around it. Then the sound reached us, a steady roar like a freight train that never finished passing. Hail began bouncing off the bonnet, the size of marbles, then golf balls. Nobody spoke. Somebody in the back was filming and crying at the same time.

It lasted eleven minutes. The funnel thinned to a rope, twisted, and was gone, and the sky behind it turned an innocent blue as though nothing had happened.

Twenty minutes later we drove past what it had done. A barn had been folded in half like cardboard. A line of power poles lay snapped in the field. A family were standing in their yard looking at the place where their roof had been, and we drove past them slowly, eight tourists with cameras, and I found I could not look at them. I had come a long way to see something terrifying and beautiful. I had not thought enough about who else would be seeing it.

Text 2: The whirlwind, by Martha Gilchrist

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1884, a woman who has settled with her family on a farm in Kansas writes to her sister in England.

My dearest Ellen,

You will have heard, perhaps, that this country is visited by whirlwinds, and I used to laugh at the stories. I shall never laugh again. On Thursday last, about four in the afternoon, the day being very hot and heavy, John came running from the field and called to me to bring the children to the cellar, for there was a storm coming such as he had never seen.

I ran to the door. In the south-west the sky had turned a colour I can only call green, like the water in a pond, and hanging from the clouds was a great black column, broad at the top and narrowing to the ground, that twisted and swayed like the trunk of some living creature. It was coming straight towards us across the prairie, and as it came it gathered up everything in its path, so that the air about it was full of what I took at first for birds and afterwards understood to be boards, branches and the remains of fences.

We had scarcely shut the cellar door upon ourselves when the noise came. Ellen, I cannot describe it. It was as if all the trains in England were passing over our heads together. The house above us shook and groaned. Little Annie screamed, and I held her face against me and prayed aloud, and John held the door with all his strength, for it seemed as if the wind would tear it from its hinges and us after it.

Then all at once there was a great stillness. When we came up, our house was standing, though the chimney was gone and every pane of glass broken. But of the Hallorans’ cabin, half a mile off, nothing remained but the floor. By God’s mercy they had been in their cellar too. We have taken them in until they can build again.

Your loving sister, Martha

Both of these texts are about witnessing tornadoes.

Compare:

• the writers’ experiences of the tornadoes
• how the writers make these experiences clear to readers

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