Another story, not really a chase but more of an accident:
When I was returning home from a nerd convention in Chicago in late September or early October, I got caught in a thunderstorm on the Iowa-Illinois border. I wasn't prepared for it at all, so I called my roommate to see what was going on. It turned out the storm had a history as bad as a Texas Ex, and sure enough, the dwindling hours of daylight revealed a few people taking pictures on the side of the road. I drove onward mindlessly and a little fearful, and somehow - whether the storm intensified or I had outrun it a bit, I don't know - I got ahead of it and right in front of it before it decided to outrun me. Looking back now, I think the storm was probably the rare breed that moves almost directly north. It's the only way I can put what happened next together in my head.
The rain had been falling for a while, but what I assume now was the "core" struck me right as the sun had fallen suddenly and totally out of the sky. Hail the size of peas began pelting my car, and the wind picked up very quickly, sending sheets across the highway and beginning to rob all hope of visibility. Spying lights from a little town right on the side of the road, I pulled off the highway and headed there, knowing instinctively that I was in trouble and needed shelter.
As I was turning around on the overpass, I saw through the core several flashes, in a linear sequence, of transformers blowing some distance away. The sequence, of course, was approaching me.
Bad.
I turned into the town, but as fate would have it, the entire "town" was an extremely large trailer park - the largest I'd ever seen in my life. No actual "town" was anywhere nearby on the flat horizon, or at least no town that currently had lights. There wasn't even a store there. I parked at the office and, being nightfall on a Sunday, the door was of course locked and dark, but I tried it anyway. Locked. And dark.
I ran for the nearest place as the wind picked up more. Fortunately, or so I thought, a gentleman and his family were outside, his kids under a makeshift canopy that served as a roof and his wife standing next to him, silent. His family was wearing church cloathing. He was wearing absolutely nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.
The gaze in his eye was dangerous. I figured what was coming was more dangerous, and quickly relayed to the well-dressed gent that it looked like transformers were being blown and in a linear way and heading right there. I twirled around my finger, hoping he'd catch on that I was talking about a tornado and that his kids would be too young to understand, but immediately the boy asked "did that man say a tornado is coming?" And began crying, setting his smaller sister to mimic the same task. The gentleman more than unpolitely informed me that he'd seen nothing but a Severe Thunderstorm Warning, and that I should find somewhere else to hide. His look became somehow even more angry and detached.
Then a transformer blew much closer. The lights went out all around the park. His kids screamed. He less than kindly tried to quieten them. His wife still said nothing. I called emergency on my cell, trying to talk loud enough so that both the operator and our boxered hero could hear, but the operator told me the same thing about the storm and suggested that I seek shelter anyway, passing along that I couldn't report a tornado unless I was "a registered expert" or something like that (???).
I turned around to find that he had shepherded his family into his house and shut the door into that now-black space, leaving me alone.
The wind picked up and the hail did, too. I tried to jaunt back to my car, but returned very quickly after getting pelted with hail so hard I thought I was getting blasted by a BB machine gun. I knocked on the door in a rushed panic, and heard a very loud and very violent slam from the other side in answer. That would be Western Illinois for "no."
Then, like some fascinating anti-miracle, at precisely the right time to make it seem like I'd torn it down in reaction, the wind took off the makeshift porch roof and slammed his cheap Halloween jack-o-lanterns and pinup scarecrow right against his door in quick succession. I was standing a foot away, watching in horror.
The decision was quick: either what was going to come out from behind me was worse, or what was coming from the southwest was worse. I figured that even if it was the latter, the former was of no help, so I took off for my car. The wind had turned precipitation into a horizontal affair, but I ran as hard as I could against the wind with my eyes mostly forced shut, netting a speed equal to walking. While fifty years older. On a walker in the mall.
Halfway to my car I looked back, and saw that the man was standing halfway outside of his darkened doorway. He was watching me intently. Through the haze I couldn't tell at all what the dark half of him still inside of the house was doing. In my head, I imagined, as my imagination always takes off in horrible situations, a shadowed arm on a shadowed rifle.
I finally made it to my car. I crawled inside and barely forced the door shut. Fearing a flip, I got into my back seat, buckled myself in, and knelt as flat as I possibly could on the back seat, my face in the cushions and my hands over my neck in the same position they taught us overtime in the Wichita Falls school system after Terrible Tuesday. My car rocked back and forth and I thought at any minute that I would be lifted up and tossed.
I wasn't.
It had been around four minutes from the first power flash to the moment where I buckled up for "safety" in the back seat, and two minutes or so sitting down. Maybe three. Maybe five. I don't know. All I know is that the rocking stopped, the hail let up, and the rain had reduced to a light patter. And I heard no roar louder than the twenty or thirty miles an hour that remained in the wind.
Looking back at the house revealed the crazy man still standing there, in the same position, with half of him out of sight, now in full view due to the rain letting up. Its as if none of the ferocity of what hit phased him any. He stared at my car like a vulture.
I figured he'd have a better shot now.
I took off like a Duke of Hazzard. Hell, with how fast I bolted to the front seat and peeled out of there, they could've called me Crown Prince of Hazzard.
It was over. Whether a tornado was on the ground or not was moot; when I got home no report was cited. I even tried calling the NWS to find out what happened. They didn't know for sure, but nobody had reported a tornado and the radar never indicated one, even though there was significant damage to the transformers out in that rural area.
0-1-1.
) The first two shots were taken from a train platform about 2 miles north of downtown, the 3rd and 4th shots were taken on the beach about a mile north of that after the bow moved through and the sun began to set. Fun fact- the specks of light around the lightning are airplanes on their way to land at O'Hare. The damage pictures were taken the next day in a cemetary just north of Wrigley Field. The NWS stated in the damage survey that they believe the straight line winds reached 100 mph!
