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I remember falling asleep in the hallway of our house growing up, covered in pillows and blankets, listening to the soothing voice of Jim Giles on KOTV as he talked my mom and dad through the movement of a tornado, our first since landing in Oklahoma. Through half-opened eyes I could see the TV glowing dimly from the living room, with murmured words and sirens mingling in the dark. Dad would go out the front door now and then, check on things himself, then come back in to continue the vigil. He’d been a farmer, back in Nebraska, but these were different and more dangerous skies.
My family had moved here when I was four, and listening to these broadcasts from the brown-carpeted hallway was part of how I learned to speak Oklahoman. Here’s KOTV meteorologist Mike Anderson in a 1990 broadcast, using a soft-spoken dialect that, for me, eventually started to feel like the language of home: the Cherokee and Muskogee place names instead of Norwegian or Swedish, the pronunciation of “cloudy” as “claddy,” “winduhs” for “windows.” He’s looking forward to going down to the Okmulgee Christmas parade on “Saturdy.”
Gas prices were $1.18 in that broadcast. The AIDS Quilt had made its way to Tulsa. Canned corn was 29 cents at Skaggs Alpha-Beta. Anderson is mostly static in front of the weather map, looking and pointing; once, he does a beautiful gesture that looks like he’s pulling a cloud mass down and across from Idaho and gently setting it over the midwest.
Earlier this spring, in my own children’s childhood home, we huddled in the middle of the house to watch the weather. Tornado sirens were going off, but making the call to go to the basement is part vibes, part watching the storm track, and part hearing Travis Meyer say “take shelter now.” What was on the screen, though, could not have been more different from the low-res radar map and pointer stick that old Jim Giles relied on. It was a radioactive blast of red: stop light red, red so red it's turning purple, red like bleeding eyeballs. (“That’s … a lot,” said one of my kids.) I couldn't tell the difference between where it was bad and where it was worse. The map had so many polygons and screens layered on top of each other that it looked like a nightmare geometry class, pixels shattering across the Osage hills like something from Rust Cohle’s hallucinatory nighttime drives.