Trey Greenwood
About Me
An EF-5 tornado in the arid deserts of Arizona? Yeah, right. Saguaros flying through the air like children’s toys, the seemingly undisturbed desert landscape mauled and wiped clean of any defining remnants? An even loftier proposition. Why do I paint these pictures? I love severe weather, and I love Arizona. In my mind, the perfect atmospheric scenario is a mile-wide wedge tornado thrashing the vast Arizona deserts, paralleling a little-used state highway, and avoiding people and structures. Now, I know that this will likely never happen, but hey, it’s okay to dream sometimes.
Extreme weather has been a passion of mine ever since my parents watched the movie, Twister, with me when I was just a toddler. Something about the violent beauty and the unpredictability of Mother Nature has hooked me since those early years. Having lived in states, like California, Utah, and Nevada, where the weather often fails to excite, I watched countless television specials about tornadoes and gaped at the occasional summer thunderstorm that produced a bolt of lightning here and there. But my greatest weather memories have come from Mother Nature’s summer home, Arizona. No, it’s not all sidewalk omelets and dust devils here in the Grand Canyon State.
I remember coming home from a friend’s birthday party when I was six or seven. Conditions were brutal outside: high winds, frequent lightning, heavy rain. Severe thunderstorm warnings dominated the radio. I used to pretend (in order to annoy my mom) that I was a real storm chaser whenever a thunderstorm caught us in our car. So I looked up through the windshield like Bill Paxton in Twister, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. The heavens were churning; the clouds were rotating above our heads. Of course, my mom thought that I—a kid who always cried “tornado” when it came to weather—was joking when I ecstatically recounted what I saw. For once, I wasn’t joking. We were actually smack dab underneath a supercell thunderstorm’s tornadic rotation. If I were a few years older and if iPhones were invented then, I might have demanded my mom to pull over so that I could capture a rare-yet-breathtaking Arizona supercell from a front row seat.
Fast-forward several years to July 5, 2011. I had just finished dinner at P.F. Chang’s China Bistro with my parents and my uncle’s family, who were on a visit from Alabama. As we exited the restaurant, I caught sight of a seemingly world-ending wall of dust barreling down on us. My dad quickly hopped in the front seat of the car in order to attempt to outrun the grand haboob. Didn’t work. It was a matter of seconds before late-day sunshine morphed into a dark abyss. With my uncle’s family following closely behind, we traversed the dust-obscured roads of Chandler, AZ, at top speeds of thirty miles-per-hour. It was truly an apocalyptic scene—the mammoth wall of dust stretched 100 miles wide and almost 10,000 feet tall. I have never, nor will I likely ever, see anything like that again in my lifetime, even on the supercell-dotted skies of Tornado Alley.
Arizona, while nothing like the severe weather hotbed of the Midwest, is a grand spectacle in itself thanks to its vast stage for Mother Nature’s awe-inspiring productions. The performance enters intermission in winter and spring, when Mother Nature returns home to Tornado Alley and churns America’s peaceful prairieland. But when summer rolls around, Arizona takes the stage with its majestic cumulonimbus anvils, colossal walls of dust, and extravagant lightning displays. Even though Mother Nature doesn’t extend her fingers toward the Arizona deserts in the form of tornadoes, sometimes, I just wouldn’t chose any other place in the world to watch a good monsoon thunderstorm in the dying light of a warm summer evening.