Gary Panter blog

SIGHTING

On July 4, 1976, on the bicentennial birthday of the USA, my girlfriend and I were driving back to Dallas from a visit to my Grandparents in Talihina, Oklahoma. It was early afternoon as we approached the man-made lake, Ray Hubbard, on the northeast side of Dallas.

The driving rain stopped and ahead of us, crossing the highway, was a real, live, twisting tornado. We, and everyone else on the highway, stopped our cars and stared ahead, transfixed.

As one might imagine, pictures of a tornado don't express the naked power that you sense and the details you can see revealed in the presence of one.

The green sky above the tornado was spinning like a giant drain so we were very much aware of the layers of air above.

The vortex appeared unthinkably powerful and grew and lost skins of debris and water so that the funnel became thicker and thinner from moment to moment, with layers of violence spiraling out of the clouds and joining the spinning column of black air.

Luckily, it was crossing our path rather than heading toward us. After it crossed the highway and headed across the lake, it lost organizational power and broke up into crazy flying curls of tornado tube segments that reeled and sputtered out in the air over the lake.

It was a spectacular Bicentennial show. No one was killed.