Читать книгу Twister - Genanne Walsh - Страница 7

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Dust devils, cyclones, whirlwinds, waterspouts, twisters. Tornado. A modification of the Spanish word for thunderstorm: tronada.

A tornado begins most often with the tronada. Cumulonimbus clouds cluster. Warm updrafts cool in the atmosphere, water droplets and ice crystals form and fall; downdrafts are met by upstart updrafts. Air rushes in to fill the void. Nature becomes a vacuum, sweeping dirt into the vortex, growing darker and stronger, and spinning around its axis. The twister can travel anywhere.

The birds know first. They cluster unnaturally, stringing themselves along the power lines and flying in angular patterns. There is a more than usual darting to their movements, a quickening. Then insects disappear—dragonflies, bees, mosquitoes, ladybugs, spiders, cicadas, and weevils crawl for cover under leaves and into the rotting black logs out by Johnson’s Creek. Voles burrow. Mice gather in their dark dens and fall into anxious dreams, kicking and biting in fitful sleep. Barn cats and house cats crouch in readiness, tails twitching.

Not all see it coming. The colorful denizens of a fish tank wind their way blissfully back and forth between the tines of the plastic merman’s plastic trident. A worm in a supermarket pear shipped from Argentina eats a peaceful path through its mealy universe. This pear, long past its prime, sits atop Scottie Dunleavy’s worktable in the small back room of Dunleavy’s Fine Shoes (&Shoe Repair) on the almost forgotten end of Main Street, a few blocks down from the old town square.

Tornado. From the Latin tonare, meaning to thunder, which is also related to astonish, detonate, stun.