(cont.) SINCE WE’VE ALEADY SIGNED WAIVERS absolving Tempest of our tornado-related deaths, our leaders brief us on non-cyclonic dangers—rattlesnakes, lightning, too much liquid intake.  Then we pile into 4 radar-laden minivans and hit the road.  Destination:  Hays, KS, halfway to tomorrow’s happy hunting grounds in Nebraska.

We drive, grab beef jerky and Mountain Dew at truck stops, do a 19-person conga through restrooms, then drive some more.  Entertainment consists of roadside kitsch—“See The World’s Biggest Prairie Dog!”—and our storm-seasoned guides comparing war stories with the mnemonic memory of baseball enthusiasts.  “Weren’t you here in 2001?” asks Bill over the chaser channel as we flash through Hoisington, KS..

“April 21, F4 tornado,” confirms Dr. Bob, our captive PhD.

The next afternoon, near Ogallala, NE, we spot our first Supercell.  It hangs over the highway like a giant white anvil, its top sheared characteristically flat by strong stratospheric winds.

“Anyone see a Wheel of Fortune?” asks Keith, referring to the spinning disk that appears on Baron Threat-Net radar when a storm starts rotating.

Before there’s an answer, we crest a ridge and see a translucent column connecting a tiny pointy funnel to a debris cloud.  From our distance, it’s the size of a toothpick.  We speed into a dip, and when we emerge, it’s gone.

“That was a TORNADO!” Marcia and I scream.

“That wasn’t a tornado, folks,” says Dr. Bob.  “That was a landspout.” A landspout, he explains, forms when dust gets sucked up by a storm’s powerful updraft winds, whereas a tornado originates from a Wheel of Fortune Supercell.

Our caravan has strong powers of denial.  “I think that was a tornado,” says Leisa, aiming her camcorder toward the storm as it churns over a farm road.

“We could just pretend that’s a tornado,” suggests New Yorker Erik Trinidad of the wedge-shaped rain core.  “Nobody at home will know the difference.”

We stand shivering in the storm’s cold outflow winds, gaping skyward as if waiting to be beamed up by the mothership.  A fleet of spacecraft-shaped Supercells silently surrounds us on the horizon.  But the show’s over for now, and the most exciting event en route to Kadoka, SD is we run over a rattlesnake.

FOR THREE DAYS we’re teased by cruel storms.  Near Limon, CO, we chase what Dr. Bob calls “an icemaker,” a huge, dignified Supercell that glows the astonishing deep blue-green of an Alaskan glacier and bombards us with golfball-sized hail.  In lonesome ranchland, we encounter what Keith dubs “the mustache storm of doom” because of two horizontal clouds kissing beneath its base.  Over Capulin, a defunct New Mexico volcano, a Supercell inflates and collapses at time-lapse speed, taunting us with a rainbow as it disappears.

We drive through flooding downpours, a dust storm, a grassfire set by CG (cloud-to-ground) lightning, cattle herds, and tumbleweed attack.  As British geologist Dan Irwin says:  “Everything but the Big T.”

Are the tornado tourists disappointed?

“No, because we’re seeing the America you never see,” explains Peter in the Badlands.

“It’s awesome,” agrees Doug, exploring a Colorado ghost town populated by cow skulls, rusting baby buggies, and a boxcar full of meathooks.  “Very relaxing.”

And the occupants of Van 3, the “Kitschmobile,” are in heaven.  As we pinball from Pierre, SD to Tucumcari, NM, they discover Orange Crush cake, Frito Pie,  supermarket skull rings, and the life-sized brontosaurus guarding I-90’s kitsch Nirvana, Wall Drug.

“This tour is like a trip through your childhood foods,” says Leisa, eating her favorite, Cherry Mash.  “I’m having a wonderful time.”

WHETHER IT’S GOOD KARMA OR THE GUMMYWORMS Doug and his van-mates feed an Oklahoman storm on Memorial Day, our 3000-mile effort finally results in a closer encounter.  We’ve followed this Supercell for 6 hours, observing its life cycle from cumulus puff to the monster mesocyclone now covering Cimarron County.  Around dinnertime, as we’re paralleling it on 412, it produces a big anteater-snout funnel—that quickly feathers apart.

But the storm isn’t done yet.  Ten minutes later, Bill allows a short observational stop, and we join the “chaser jam” lining 412 just as Guymon’s sirens go off.  The wind punches our vehicles and keens in the telephone wires.  The Supercell’s base lowers further, extinguishing all light but a wink of sunset and its own luminous green core. I’m thinking how much my grandmother feared that eerie phosphorescence when a thin funnel snakes from it sideways.  It lengthens, crooks toward the ground, and touches down—for a few seconds.  Then, languorously, it retracts and is gone. Our crew stands in silent awe.  Or is it anticlimax?

I ask during our post-midnight post-mortem in an Amarillo, TX McDonald’s.

“I’m ready to do it again tomorrow,” says Doug.

“Me too,” says Manchester Melanie—formerly reluctant chaperone, now addict. “It was so beautiful I forgot to be scared.”

There’s enthusiastic agreement.  Everyone’s wall-eyed with adrenaline, talking like newly inducted cult members.

“I’ve never been a religious person,” says Leisa as we head out to catch 40 winks before our final day’s chase. “But that storm was like communion—being one with something so much bigger than yourself.”

JENNA BLUM's debut novel THOSE WHO SAVE US has been on the New York Times bestseller list since October 2007, earned the Harold Ribalow Prize by Elie Wisel, and is currently in its ninth paperback printing.  Jenna runs novel workshops at Grub Street Writers in Boston, her home city between stormchasing ventures to research her next novel.