Facing my fears…and promptly crapping my pants.

Thursday night was an interesting night at work. We had numerous very close calls with tornadoes forming and never quite touching down in Fort Smith and the surrounding areas. At one point, I was asked to ditch what I was doing and go outside with a camera on my shoulder to see if I could catch some of this action. Unless a flash of lightning helped, I wasn’t going to see crap with that camera, but what the hell, it’s a bit of excitement. So I stood outside, rolled the tape, and aimed at the sky.
A little side note about tornadoes: I’m scared to death of them. Really. My real life up-close-and-personal experiences with them have only cemented that, from my very earliest tornado experiences to the “big one” in 1996. I’m fascinated by them, I’ve tried to educate myself on how and why they happen to try to get rid of some of that fear, and it hasn’t really helped, because all I’ve learned is that they’re an unavoidable, unstoppable force of nature that’ll kill you mighty dead if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and probably destroy you home and everything in it too. It’s rather difficult not to fear that.
Anyway, to my amazement, as I pointed my camera at the sky, I could see that the clouds to the southwest of the station were indeed rotating fairly tightly, and then a finger dipped down out of the sky, rotating fast than the rest and trying to get organized, and my camera was pointed right at it the whole time. It was really actually kind of beautiful. It got as close to the ground as maybe halfway down the height of our transmitter tower (right next to the building, which was attracting lightning like nobody’s business), and then fell apart. All of this without making a sound.
Once I was sure that I had gotten all of that on tape, I turned and ran back into the station at top speed, at one point running right through where the cleaning crew had just waxed the floor and busting my ass (while holding the camera, far more pricey than a year’s worth of my salary, or in all likelihood my life insurance), and then ran into the newsroom saying “I got a funnel cloud!”
And then I loaded up the tape and looked…and…
Nothing. Too dark. I was able to see it with my eyes, but the camera couldn’t pick it out, and I couldn’t enhance it worth a damn. Zero black is zero black. And there wasn’t a single bright bolt of lightning that picked the funnel out either.
When I mentioned that I’d been able to see it with the naked eye, I was told, “If that’s the case, then the floodlight on the outside of the building was how you were able to see it at all. So if it had touched down, it would’ve been right on top of you.”
I shrugged, handed my camera off to a news photog who had just arrived at the station so he could use it…and then went to the bathroom where I proceeded to evacuate pretty much everything that had gone into my digestive system in the past 12 hours, because I had just stared down a twister that was a lot closer than I thought it was. If that had hit the ground, it would’ve been on me.
Oh well. The whole experience was almost therapeutic until reality sank in. 😯
One final note: after finishing the rest of my duties for the night, I went over my tape again, and found a dim flash of lightning that put my mind at ease: I didn’t hallucinate this one.