Chicken ala Cyclone

For those of you who already know of my formidable reputation in the kitchen (as the destroyer of all things edible), you won't mistake this for a culinary column. For those about to learn better, let me recommend you go visit Cheffie Mom instead, where you can get laughs AND REAL EDIBLES, too.

No, I'm here to talk about that spring thing what makes me do silly, stupid things in my automobile this time of year. And I don't mean that kind of silly, stupid: I'm a bit old for reliving high school dates (and would be both better AND worse in performance, but I digress).

I mean the other kind of silly stupid I do: storm chasing for tornado photos. Tornadoes are fascinating things. Fierce, destructive, and having a love/hate relationship with all things mobile-homeish. They are also very unpredictable, even as meteorological science works hard to take away their aura of unpredictability. Tornadoes don't always come from where one expects, or travel as one might think, or destroy this and spare that, with any degree of logic or scientific reason. Nor do they always hit in the right place in a time of year one would expect them not to.

In fact, I suspect that tornadoes have, among other things, a sense of humor. Truly. My proof here is anecdotal. I mean, no one has ever seen a tornado, doubled over and laughing hysterically. It probably wouldn't be recognized as such if one were so witnessed. But tornado anecdotes that border on humorous, abound down the years.

And occasionally, a tornado puts one over on Mankind. More on that in a mo'.

Lots of 'stories' of things -- weird to surreal -- happening during a tornado, are out there in myth and legend. One I remember from my youth, in the wake of an F-5 monster that hit Charles City, Iowa, May 15, 1968, was a story about an elderly woman who was sitting in her backyard, enjoying a cup of coffee, when the storm struck. When it was over, she was there, completely untouched. Everything around her, however -- including her cup of coffee -- was utterly gone.

Not sure I buy that one.

But a couple days after the storm that killed 13 and injured 450, my father -- an insurance adjustor at the time -- paid a visit to Charles City, and I rode along. And I saw evidence along one street in town: on one side, it looked like a post-war moonscape. On the other side, everything was nearly pristine, other than a random uprooted tree here and there. As an 11 year old at the time, I found that to be totally weird.

But Charles City, Iowa, was nothing in terms of tornado surrealty, compared to a more historical (for tornado oddities) for the ages: the Great Bend, Kansas, tornado of November, 1915.

Considering the time of year it struck, this storm was an oddity in itself. And it only got weirder as it went. For example: a Great Bend grocery store's south wall was totally blown away, yet the shelves and canned goods along that wall, stood undisturbed. A cancelled check from a resident of Great Bend, was found in Palmyra, Nebraska -- 305 miles to the northeast. A necktie rack -- with 10 ties still on it -- was found about 40 miles from Great Bend (the story never referenced if the ties were ugly or not). A full, unbroken sack of flour from a local mill was found 110 miles northeast of Great Bend. And a nearby farm was utterly destroyed, but five horses from the farm were found alive and unharmed, still tied to their hitching post; a post that had somehow been relocated more than a quarter mile away from the devastated homestead, without harming the horses.

And then came the really weird stories told by survivors: "an iron jug was blown inside out" ... "a rooster was blow into a jug, with only its head sticking out of the unbroken neck of the jug" ... "there were multiple reports of chickens, alive, but plucked clean by the winds of the twister".

Tornado-plucked chickens are apparently not unique to the Great Bend, KS storm. Well before Great Bend, tornado-plucked chickens were rather common place across the Great Plains. So much so, it spawned one of the weirdest experiments ever, as it regarded and combined tornadics, chicken-plucking, and Man.

And this was well before I discovered the 'get into trouble' tendencies of Bunson burners in Science class.

In 1842, a dubious character named Elias Loomis, was fascinated by tornadic chicken-plucking, and decided that he'd recreate the conditions that made for tornadic chicken-plucking, so as to explain it to wondering and skeptical friends, neighbors and colleagues. Just how he came up with his methodology for exploring his hypothesis, I'll never know, but it's not unlike how CNN researches a story today.

To quote a written account by an eye witness of this experiment, "in order to determine the velocity needed to strip feathers, the six-pounder (a cannon) was loaded with five ounces of powder, and a chicken was substituted for the ball. The gun was pointed upwards and fired. The feathers rose twenty or thirty feet and were scattered by the wind. The body (of the chicken) was torn into small fragments, only a part of which could be found. The velocity was 341 miles per hour".

The account never clarified how it was determined that the velocity of the chicken upon leaving the barrel -- exploding in the process -- was 341 mph; nor does it clarify if Loomis concluded that this was how a tornado plucked a chicken (since the chicken didn't live, and some tornadic-plucked chickens do). I mean, has anyone out there ever seen a tornado load a chicken into a cannon, and fire it?

Neither have I.

It does, however -- with these and other unanswered questions -- leave open the possibility that not only was Elias Loomis duped by a tornado into a specious experiment, unwittingly becoming the father of tax payer-funded governmental research studies of ever increasing ridiculousness; it also suggests that he beat Harlan Sanders and McDonalds to the chicken nuggets craze by more than 130 years.

And one more piece of trivial knowledge was gleaned here, I suppose: that a cannon is no more a chicken's friend than a tornado.

At any rate -- 341 mph or less -- tornadoes inspire many things. Fear, awe, study. They combine Nature's fury with Nature's beauty. And they occasionally inspire myth, lore and legend. Like why a wind-plucked chicken crossed the road in an unbroken jug, while musing to anyone in particular, "you think this is funny?"

Perhaps tornadoes do.