Wild Night

I first saw the lightning when I walked out of Target. At the time, around eight o'clock, it was far in the distance -- just a handful of flashes every minute or so. I returned home to an empty house; mom was getting her hair done and dad was tending to his booster club. Uninterested in Thursday night's TV offerings, I decided I'd spend some time on the porch -- storm-watching.

Back in my adolescent years I spent a great deal of time watching storms from my front porch. In fact, I commonly took our camcorder with me for those afternoon firecrackers. We probably still have 10-12 video tapes around the house with thunderstorm footage. Well, our video camera has long been retired, but I still had access to my Nikon D70 digital still camera. So, I plucked it out of its case and took a seat on my front steps.

For the next hour, I sat perfectly still against the porch railing, my camera set to rapid-fire, snapping as fast as I could when the clouds flickered. After about an hour of fiddling with shutter speeds and apertures I had gotten fairly good at catching the occasional bright cloud (occasionally good last night meant probably one out of every fifteen shots wasn't completely black). I had been outside for nearly an hour when I heard something I've never heard before.

The town sirens went off. For real. Not a test.

Now, I had spent the afternoon at KWQC and it didn't seem like anything too serious was coming our way in terms of weather. Let alone something so serious that, for the first time in my 26 years in Rock Island, the town sirens would need to be used. This was fairly alarming. I quickly ran inside and turned on the television to see Rock Island county coded in red: Tornado Warning.

I hung out at the kitchen table as the veteran TV6 news team used phrases like "this is classic" and "I've never seen..." Then I saw something on the radar I've never seen before: the color black. Black. What the hell is black? In addition to this rather unpleasant hole in the radar, there was literally a wall of spirals that doppler uses to indicate rotation. And it was all headed our way. I got through three (two and a half) hurricanes in Florida without the slightest hint of a bowel mishap, but I definitely had to clench last night.

From the looks of the radar, I had some time before I had to consider diving into the crawl space. So, I returned to the porch with my camera, assured that things were going to pick up quite a bit. Both of my parents arrived without even noticing their son on the porch with a camera (probably shouldn't make that public knowledge). Not long after my cousin, Amy, came over to brave the storm with us. All in all I spent upwards of two hours shooting. Now 1 for 154 isn't the greatest batting average, but when this is your one hit... no complaints.


Interesting side note: I sent this photo in to my chaps at KWQC and they've made liberal use of it on its broadcasts last night and this morning. However, I didn't get credit for it, despite putting my name in the e-mail. That hurts my feelings a little. So, just remember good people, when you see the above picture on television over the next couple days, you know who shot it.