Storms

The summer he chased tornadoes, he shone a little brighter.

He packed up his camera and took off with a crew from the Discovery Channel, crisscrossing the Great Plains in a caravan full of meteorologists and storm chasers. They spent days driving back roads through Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, studying radar and waiting around in Walmart parking lots. In the late afternoon, they’d set up on the side of lonely highways stretching toward distant horizons—and pray to intercept a tornado.

Even the experts didn’t always know precisely where the storm would land. He’d call me, excited, and suddenly they’d be driving three states over, hoping to be in the right place at the right time, that the hail didn’t destroy another windshield and that luck would be on their side when it all hit.

The sky could be perfectly blue overhead while the conditions came together: heat, wind shear, pressure, moisture. 

Forces you can’t see, building toward some epic adventure you can’t control. Those skies are just like him.

A stunning expanse, a vastness so high and wide, so full of possibility, I can never quite tell just where his horizon ends.

He’s always billowing with energy, alive like an thunderhead rising over Kansan wheat fields. His ideas condense and reform, changing shape as they grow, adjusting course, and carrying him off to another challenge. Life with him is many things, but boring is not one of them. He’s never the same sunset twice.

And he’s brilliant when you hold him up to the light.

But clouds aren’t as weightless as they appear. Some days, I can feel the heaviness of life weighing him down. Molecules of reality rise, magnetizing into his atmosphere, the grind of the chase wearing at a man’s soul. This year, there have been a lot of clouds. Not enough rain to break the drought. Not enough sun to warm the air for a storm. Just a lot of waiting for something to break loose.

And sometimes I wonder which will break first—the weather of our life, or the man chasing it?

I worry about what happens when every storm finds somewhere else to go, except the one inside him.

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It smelled like rain the night before he left on this trip—the kind that could change things. Giant hasta leaves dripped outside our bedroom window and I said, “I’m ready for this part to be over.” He thought I meant the trip. I meant the nineteen years of goodbyes.

It wears you down, the goodbyes. The cycle of building up, emptying out. The edginess of packing with half a dozen things still sitting on the to-do list. Somehow it’s always rushed, no matter how well we plan.

Navigating the time zones gets old. The phone calls where we’re both so utterly wrung out that neither of us has anything left to say. I always know it’s been about six days when the conversations become little more than a rundown of our schedules. Both of us anticipating tomorrow’s storm, playing the radar game. Be in the right place at the right time. Sometimes it’s easier to surrender to texting and not talk at all.

Usually he leaves early—whispered goodbyes at 3 a.m., a sleepy kiss falling on my forehead before he slips out the door to catch a flight. But I like the trips where I can stand at the edge of the driveway better, waving goodbye with the kids as he pulls away. I still smile and blink back tears, secretly praying for the kind of miracle that makes him turn the car around and come home.

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Maybe one day he’ll find a different path. One that doesn’t take him so far away, so often, for so long. After so many years spent watching taillights disappear down the road, it surprises me to discover how much I want that.

I’ve always supported the chase—the next opportunity, the need to follow the next storm wherever it leads. It’s the life we know. But after all these years, when I thought maybe I’d finally be used to it by now, I’m less interested in where the next adventure will take him, and more hopeful that he might be nearing the end of this one. When will the season give way? When will the weather shift—and with it, the pull of those storms?

The truth is, he loves his work, and he loves his family. That makes it harder. Travel, fresh environments, new people, impossible problems to solve—these things fuel him like wind shear to a tornado. They always have. Freelancing gives him something I can’t. It provides for us, and I made my peace with that a long time ago.

What catches in my throat now is the time apart when time itself seems to be moving so darn fast. There are only so many summers left. Every year the kids get older. Every year the jobs seem harder to come by, harder to land, and harder on him. Harder to find that balance between staying busy enough to survive and working so much you miss the very life you’re trying to provide for.

That’s the part of the storm that wears on you. Knowing that every stretch of insanely busy eventually gives way to a stretch of painfully slow, and every stretch of slow is followed by another storm gathering somewhere on the horizon. After a while, you stop wondering whether it’s coming. You just wonder how much time you have before it hits—or how you’ll make it through until then.

It’s getting harder to hold his hand over a cup of coffee knowing I’m about to watch him disappear over another horizon, both of us reaching for each other from opposite ends of the same sky. Sometimes the storms don’t only take him away when he boards a plane. Increasingly, they follow him home—the pressure of making a living from the next thing. And then the next thing after that.

For most of my life, I’ve given him over to the storms.

But the years are moving faster now, and I find myself wanting him back.

If it’s going to be hard, and if it’s going to be stressful, and if it’s going to go by fast, I want to do as much of it together as we can.

For years, we’ve lived at the mercy of the forecast.

And Lord knows, I’d do anything for him, while he’s out there doing everything for us.

But I’m ready for the weather to let us rest.

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From those airplane windows, he can see things I can’t. Climb high enough above it all and the view changes—even of yourself. Above the deadlines and expectations. Above the worries. Above all that weather brewing inside you, looking for a place to break.

Distance has a way of bringing perspective, a vantage point I will never fully see from down here on the ground.

I’m not the sky. He is—all expansive and vast. Never the same sunset twice.

For nineteen years I’ve watched him disappear beyond the horizon and return again. I’ve watched him build a life for us one flight, one project, one sacrifice, one goodbye at a time. I’ll never stop being proud of him, or grateful for what he’s built. I have numbered every exhausting hour and every thankless mile. I know the weight of love he’s carried when the ache of fatherhood finds him, haunting him like a ghost when he’s far from home. The man I love has given us more than I could have dreamed.

Which is why, tonight, when the kids are tucked in bed and I settle into my time-worn ritual of counting down the days, I’ll fall asleep feeling a little selfish for dreaming of a different sunset.

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