What Stands in a Storm Read Online Free PDF Page B

a lasting impression on the master? One night he got his chance: his first taped weathercast.
    He had thought it would be easy, because James made it look effortless. But in front of the green screen, it was not so easy. Jason found himself with his back to the camera—a broadcast sin—floundering around as he tried to figure out where the heck on the blank wall to point. You could almost hear the air whooshing out of his ego like a balloon as he trudged off the set, chin to chest. James had been in the control room, watching the boy unravel. He met him at the door.
    â€œDon’t worry about it,” he said. “It gets easier.”
    That was classic Spann. Little words. Big message. Unforgettable truth. Jason had a seventy-mile drive home to let that marinate. By the time he pulled into his driveway in Holly Pond, he had talked himself out of quitting. It gets easier. Those three words prevented him from giving up on this career.
    After that, Jason worked with James whenever he got the chance. James taught him everything. Most important, he taught him to be himself. Authentic. Viewers could smell a fake across two counties. “Don’t be a blow-dried boob,” James would say, nodding at the stiff-haired guys on the national news. “You be you. You’re from Holly Pond. You remember that. Don’t ever forget where you came from.” Jason watched, listened, and learned. He got a job in a smaller TV market and practiced. In August of 2004, shortly after the ten o’clock news, his phone rang. It was James.
    â€œWhat do you think about coming to work for me?”
    â€œI think it’d be pretty good.”
    Jason could not wait to work a severe weather event with James, to be his right-hand man. But it did not happen right away. In the first bad storm, he found himself third on the totem pole. Jason stormed out of the studio that day, hurt that he was not trusted to do the job that Jameshad hired him to do. But James knew he was not ready. Eight or nine months later, Jason had learned how to anticipate what James needed.
    It got easier.
    In the studio, Jason drove the equipment while James went on camera. Jason had studied James for so long that he knew what he wanted, sometimes even before James did. The hand signals would come in handy today.

    Seven hundred miles away, at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, the warning coordination meteorologist Greg Carbin was watching the Birmingham radar closely. He spotted a bow echo forming—a line of storms pushed out into an arc, like a hunter’s bow. The storms’ position at exactly 5:52 a.m. looked to him like a giant question mark, punctuated by a storm cell at the bottom. It was poised over central Alabama, spreading over roughly eleven counties. Carbin shook his head and thought: Even the atmosphere doesn’t know what it’s doing .
    Like a canoe paddle moving through the surface of a lake, curling the water into whirls within swirls, the squall line moved through the atmosphere, stirring up small to midsize tornadoes. Some dissipated minutes after they formed. Others grew to a size that could shred a double-wide trailer into ribbons. One stayed on the ground for twenty-three miles. They coursed insidiously through the rural lands of west-central Alabama, across counties where timber farms outnumbered stoplights.
    At 5:18 a.m., the fifth tornado of the day to strike Alabama had come straight down the main street of downtown Cordova, a small town an hour’s drive northwest of Birmingham, shattering storefront windows along Commerce Street and leaving a trail of bricks and broken glass.
    As that storm raged on for another nineteen miles, another tornado, a sneaky one, was born on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa. In a blink of the radar’s eye, what looked like a straight-line gust of wind mutatedinto a tornado. By the time it appeared on Jason’s radar, the funnel was already on the ground,