John’s eight the first time he sees a tornado with his own eyes. It’s horrifying, sure— it rips and tears at the Earth like some celestial blade, it throws people he goes to school with’s houses into the air, and it kills seven people outside of Sallisaw, his hometown. Despite that, he’s mesmerized as the funnel disappears into the night as if it never existed.

His mother told him it was probably a phase, probably a byproduct of growing up in the storm-prone region of Eastern Oklahoma in the heart of the Cherokee Nation. Unfortunately for his mother’s faint heart, John’s strange penchant for and borderline obsession with severe weather did not turn out to be a phase.

John joined the Air Force out of high school— not because he was keen on the armed forces—but because it was a free ticket to the sky to see what he’d spent years watching from the ground and a free education. He spent a few years in Biloxi on the local base learning how to track and identify weather systems formally (as he’d taught himself a lot in the Sallisaw library growing up), but soon, he left the Air Force and found himself working with a team of scientists, engineers, mechanics, and general madmen who were working on ways to measure, contain, and forewarn the large storms that carved through the South— it made him feel like that kid standing at the edge of the reservoir again, watching the sky go black. But now, he could try and figure out how to stop it, try to, as his father said, foolishly pretend to be God.

Maybe it was that. Maybe John did want power over the unstable elements of the Earth. Or maybe he just wanted himself twenty years before to be less afraid. Whatever it was, he, much like the storms he tirelessly followed, was on a divinely guided path into the unknown.