Awe at the tornado

This tornado (click link to see video) is rushing by not too far from our editors' home base. Now, to any of our readers from Tornado Alley, this will not seem an unusual thing in late May. Here on the corridor of the Rockies, it makes a few of us stand up and gasp, though.


This storm renews my wonder at the raw energy of our world. Part of me wants to go at once and become a meteorologist! We need another fantasist of the caliber of Frank L. Baum to give us another myth of the tornado. Such a wild thing deserves a myth. Consider these myths from the past:

* Dorothy swept off to Oz
* Pecos Bill with a lasso about the tornado's funnel, waving his Stetson hat in the air and yowling his joy (now look at that shot above of the storm and imagine riding that across the open plain)
* The Shawnee Prophet climbing up the inside of the tornado as one might climb a stair, and looking out into all of time, in Orson Scott Card's Red Prophet

Are there others?