Since the mid-1990s, tourists have paid storm-chasers to take them to places in the American Great Plains where they expect to see tornadoes. Why, a reasonable follow-up question might go, would anyone want to get so close to something so destructive? These tourists, a 2017 anthropological study found, characterize their relationship to severe weather as a “passion,” describing their feelings about tornadoes using words like “enjoyment,” “fascination” and “love.” Some of the anthropologist’s informants seem spiritually moved by tornadoes—one tourist called the storms “humbling”—but the main motivator seemed to be simple: Twisters are cool.
America has many more tornadoes than any other country, and its citizenry has long regarded twisters with a mix of fear, awe and thrilled pleasure. Fast-moving and dramatic, tornadoes have been both catalysts for American religious thought and irresistible centerpieces for popular entertainment. Understanding their audience, in their advertising materials storm-chasing outfits use phrases like “jaw-dropping,” “dazzling,” “amazing” and “breathtaking” to describe the kinds of storms tourists could expect to see. One needn’t be an extreme-weather enthusiast, however, to take a brief and far-less hazardous tour: of the culture tornadoes have inspired and of the transformation of American society’s feelings about these storms from fear to excitement.
European colonists in the future United States were fascinated—and sometimes horrified—by their new land’s weather. One of the major tools they used to explain all the hurricanes, blizzards and tornadoes that beset their fragile settlements was theology. The Puritans, writes historian Peter J. Thuesen in his book Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather, “took for granted that the more pious a person or society, the less harm they would suffer from violent weather.” Puritan clergyman Increase Mather’s Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, published in 1684, described a tornado—he called it a “Whirl-wind”—that hit Massachusetts in 1680. (Americans didn’t generally use the word “tornado” until the nineteenth century.) The eyewitness reports of that tornado that Mather gathered for his text emphasized the seeming randomness of the fortunes of those who encountered it.
Farmer Matthew Bridge described grabbing a “Boy with him” and deciding to “ly flat upon the Ground behind some Bushes,” while “thick Cloud and Pillar passed so near them as almost to touch their feet, and with its force bent the Bushes down over them, and yet their lives were preserved.” But “John Robbins,” a “Servant Man,” was not so lucky, as he was “suddenly slain,” “his Body being much bruised, and many Bones broken by the violence thereof.” In his essay, Mather refrains from directly blaming those killed by the storm for their misfortune; however, Thuesen notes in his book that in a sermon addressing the incident that Mather gave around this time, the clergyman didn’t hold back from crediting “God’s wrath” for the disaster.