to get the fuck up coddin’, isn’t there only a cyclone 15 miles east after coming in on the phone. So we storm outta Norman as it were, eight car procession to see this mighty wind cuttin’ open the sky like a pair of curtains. The lads in the front are out with their cameras, screaming like babbies, shrieking at the thing with all this shite blowin’ up around it from the country. Walkie-talk word gets back it’s over an actual town, Elk City, and we all swing a left off the Route we’re banging down. It’s still only a skinny little slip of a thing in the sky, but we’re pelting up the road and she’s growin’ like a monster. We get so close to the thing that we can see all the shite it’s ripping out of the ground, only a mile away and that. I saw an actual house, an actual house right, with some poor Wizard of Oz Dorothy in the thing, and I tell ya, one minute she’s on the ground, then up she flew. Up she feckin’ flew into the thing. I get home to Julia later on, she’s still snorin’ away, and I tell her, “I saw a Jaysusin tornado, J. I saw the feckin’ apocalypse killin’ everything it laid eyes on.” We pull to a mucky stop in the stillspitting rain, and Brian zips his hiking jacket down, palpably sweating from all this storm talk. I decide to engage Derek. Aside from obvious Premier-League-based differences, Derek Tracey is a lot more immediately fascinating. While Brian seems to have a whimsical knowledge of the science involved in what he’s doing, Derek is intensely interested in his field, like a 16th century ship’s captain comandeering a distraught old fleet around the Horn. He grounds his interest in the explorative past of his hometown, Birr. He tells us about a school visit to the Leviathan, a person-tall telescope in Birr Castle that once ranked as the most powerful telescope in the world, and how it fascinated him that the backarse of Ireland could be home to a thriving sci-
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entific knowledge, and how his mammy bought him an astronomy kit and book of star readings as a kid, only to ask him to read her star signs from it. Derek isn’t even sure if he’s a Cancer or a Leo, but he spends his now ample spare time reading hefty meteorological journals downloaded from the internet, trying to familiarize himself with those across a vast technological divide from him, learning new jargon, and new detection developments. He’s had little real-life storm thrills except for the aforementioned Co. Clare mini-tornado, but the potency of nature in PMS mode has galvanized him into almost entirely eschewing a paying job to drive shotgun with Brian on crosscountry twister travails. We wonder, later, on the bus journey home if he might be a little Asperger’s. As we talk hometowns, I mention a story I’d once heard in Ringsend Community Centre about an apparent hurricane ripping the roof of some auld wan’s house on Castle Road, in 1974. The New Year, I think it was. ‘1974 was a dirty HOOR of a year,’ Brian gesticulates over his Freshways sandwich, a bit of egg landing unfortunately on Derek’s specs. ‘I tell ya, I was a ten year old then, and it was, yeah, it was, it was the first time I was excited about the weather. The news was going ninety, fiercest winds ever recorded, an actual hurricane if you ask Beaufort. People’s houses made a hames of, fecking missing cows from farms, flowers whipped away from the front a the shop, and my jaw, I tell ya, was in my lap. The wind was like a brick wall running into you, faster than Linford Christie, faster than the Hiace downhill, and I thought, as a little fella, Jaysus we can build houses stronger than a pack of chrome oxes and they’d blow away with a gust a wind. The big bad wolf, and that. That was pure excitement. I’m sure it was the same up your end, sure we’re only a little island.’ Lightning, to take the figurative rather than scientific tack, never strikes the same place twice, we know, so I wonder what excites Derek and Brian about measuring the angles of cumulounimbus in relation to far off bungalows day-in-day-out. ‘It’s really about the global progression of, like, storm knowledge, you know?’ Derek, wiping his glasses clean of egg mayo spittle, ruminates. ‘We’re really excited for the results from Vortex2, which is this big, like, nomadic fleet of storm experts in America who went out between May and June this year with millions of dollars worth of equipment to figure out once and for all how they can guess when tornadoes’ll hit. At the minute warnings give you like 13 minutes to get
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