Fierce Beauty

FIERCE BEAUTY Storms of the Great Plains

ER IC M E O L A

In a country of light and a season of violence, severe storms slam the Great Plains each spring, spinning columns of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico until they stand on edge and race across the prairie. Before nightfall, lives may end, torn apart as shards of wood and glass and steel slice the air, mixing earth with sky in clouds of dust and rain and hail. A few days pass and then a new storm lifts the ground up, leaving hell below, leaving one man’s land a few counties away on another’s, leaving some people dispossessed and others merely wanderers.

I went to photograph storms west of the 98th meridian and east of the Rockies, made friends, lost sleep, and watched the four winds blow, cutting the troposphere in half. In the afterglow of summer’s solstice, my companion was always the light.

When I was ready to turn onto a paved road, it beckoned me down dirt, shining on a row of phone poles, whispering its siren song to chase it and the storms forever, or at least until the next day.

frontispiece :

Chaotic Updraft Region of Hail Bingham, Nebraska May 17, 2013

opposite :

Phone Poles at Dusk Wheatland, Wyoming June 21, 2013 5

The Revelation of a Fierce Beauty E R I C

M E O L A

A photographer is someone who has his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground.

—Minor White

In August 1977, a few days after Elvis Presley died, I stood in the muggy air on a hot summer

as long as I live, I want Valmy to stay just as it is today, which isn’t much different than what it

night outside a gas station in Nevada owned by Eugene DiGrazia, who had bought the

was when I first came here.”

property in 1932. “Gas station” is a misnomer, for the Valmy Auto Court, lit by neon like an

An hour’s drive west of Valmy, if you turn south on State Route 400, you will soon be on

Edward Hopper set piece, was once a miner’s shack dating to 1900 that had evolved into a

dirt and gravel roads leading off to the Humboldt mountains to the east. That summer in 1977

combination general store, post office, Shell station, and Greyhound bus depot. At that time

I was with musician Bruce Springsteen, and I was making photographs that eventually would

the population of Valmy was less than three-dozen people and a few dogs. DiGrazia had been

be used on an album called The Promise. Driving on one desert road after another for nearly

appointed the town’s postmaster by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s postmaster general, and the

thirty hours straight, with the top down on our rented, red 1965 Ford Galaxie, we turned left,

notice of that appointment was tacked to a wall.

swerving through the washboard ruts, heading toward Unionville on a gravel road that went

In a 1987 interview with Los Angeles Times writer Charles Hillinger, DiGrazia said, “I bought the gas station, store, post office, bus depot . . . when I was 19 for $1,800. I later

into the Humboldt Range and beyond, into infinity.

After driving several miles farther on we stopped, and I placed my Hasselblad camera on

bought 140 acres surrounding the place for $2,100 . . . the station had only one pump and

a tripod and asked him to drive a half-mile down the road, then turn around and head toward

in the beginning cars and trucks were few and far between. A narrow two-lane road went

me. Bruce humored me as I made some photographs, and then the sky began to darken. After

through here. Gas sold for 25 cents a gallon. I paid 19 /2 cents for it.” DiGrazia continued,

I shot a roll, we left the road and went back to Interstate 80 to a nearby roadside café.

1

“We saved for 12 years to get a telephone and have contact with the outside world. I bought

In less than half an hour the sky had turned black, and I insisted we go back to the gravel

30 telephone poles for $1,500 in 1942, and a friend and I strung a wire along the poles for

road. As a cumulonimbus cloud formed in the sky above the long, thin ribbon of a road going

2 1/2 miles to tie in with the main telephone line.” And then he added, “Whatever happens,

off in the distance, I photographed as Bruce drove the car toward me several times, kicking up 7

page

6: Shadows of Clouds on the Land Wolf Point, Montana June 19, 2016

opposite :

Car in Storm Unionville, Nevada August 22, 1977

a dusty plume. Soon it began to rain as flashes of lightning filled the valley. The hypnotic scene

wreaked by the dark blur of a tornado, I thought back to that night in 1977 when we were racing

etched itself into our eyes and minds, and a few days later Bruce wrote the lyrics to a song called

the storm. As the survivors told their stories of loss and devastation, I had an epiphany—the

“The Promised Land.” I will never forget hearing the words for the first time:

time had come to go out to the plains to photograph the fierce beauty we had witnessed that night in Nevada. I owed myself a road trip. I had a story to tell, photographs to make, and

There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm

soon I was reading every book I could find about the prairies and plains.

No matter how many miles I drove, it was never enough. The first 50,000 miles on

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down

the back roads of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and the panhandles

That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground

of Texas and Oklahoma soon gave way to another restless, long drive, and then another.

One midsummer day, I drove into Concordia, Kansas, and went to the Orphan Train Museum.

Faith. That was the word that stayed with me from that stanza. In two lines, the conflu-

Many of New York City’s children were among the 250,000 orphaned, homeless, and aban-

ence of “twister” and “faith” haunted me. What held the people to this land, and why did they

doned youths sent to the Midwest by train during the second half of the nineteenth century.

live here? In his father’s obituary in the December 2, 1990, Reno Gazette-Journal, DiGrazia’s

Shortly after the spring equinox for the past several years I have flown out to Kansas

son stated, “I don’t think he ever thought he could die . . . even at 77 he acted like he was 25. He

and driven south on State Highway 177 to Cottonwood Falls, then turned right onto one of

was up and at ’em to the end.” DiGrazia held his ground in Valmy as a jack-of-all-trades, includ-

the streets named for trees: Walnut, Locust, Mulberry, Oak, Elm, Maple, Sycamore, Cedar,

ing service for fifty-three years as postmaster, longer than anyone else in the West; and like

Pine, Cherry, Plum. Being there—and walking along the quiet cobblestone street that rises in

Springsteen’s father, he was also a bus driver.

several blocks to the magnificent limestone French Renaissance edifice of the Chase County

A storm in the desert had provided Bruce with the material for an anthem, and he ended each stanza by declaring “I believe in a promised land.” I always wanted to go back to that biblical,

Courthouse—has become a ritual.

One morning I sat on a bench, watching long shadows as they raked across the storefronts

storm-filled day when we drove up on a hilltop and watched as lightning revealed the valley floor

of a town worn down in the middle of America. And then I heard a harmonica, coming from a

in staccato bursts of thunder. Standing in the rain as the wind whipped against our bodies, we

café. In that instant I was back to the day when Springsteen and I were on that dirt road. I was

leaned into the squall, laughing with sheer energy as though we were privileged to be present at

back to something I could hold on to, and in the holding find a center and direction. The words

a small moment of Creation. I photographed several bolts of lightning from the hill, and then we

of “The Promised Land” still haunt me forty years after first hearing them:

drove down into the valley and back out onto Interstate 80, heading west toward Reno.

It would take more than three decades before I went back—not to Nevada, but to Tornado Alley and the Great Plains.1 As I watched TV one night in the spring of 2012 and saw the havoc 8

I done my best to live the right way, I get up every morning and go to work each day

Cattle in Hail Downdraft Newell, South Dakota June 14, 2016

26

Storm in the Sandhills Bingham, Nebraska May 17, 2013

60