Nasty weather.

Occasionally I'm struck by a random fascination on a particular topic, and such was the case this past summer when I suddenly felt the need to read something, anything, on tornadoes and storm chasing on the Great Plains. Some cursory catalog searches didn't turn up anything that would satisfy my curiousity, so when I happened to sport Mark Svenvold's account of the May 2004 outbreak of storms on the shelf, I immediately snapped it up.

Tornadoes have always had a fascinating quality about them, driving thrill seekers and scientists alike to drive thousands of miles (literally) in the hopes of seeing just one. Yet the draw of witnessing such storms also speaks to what Svenvold calls 'catastrophilia:' the need to be thisclose to possible, and in some cases, real devestation, either on the ground or beamed over the airwaves via the Weather Channel. It is this fascination with weather as entertainment that makes up the central theme to Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America. To be sure, Svenvold does justice to the art of storm chasing, which requires as much luck as science to put a chaser in the right place at the right (wrong?) time. Like any other seemingly insane endeavor, he portrays a case of characters that range from the quiet, Scout master storm spotter, to the main forecaster at the Storm Prediction Center, and the questionable Californian guy who eventually gets to do some 'real' science out of his homemade tornado intercept vehicle.

These parts of Svenvold's work clip along well, but he's as much concerned with the effect global warming and the Weather Channel have had on the weather and how we perceive it. Although Svenvold makes the argument that both have made impacts on the storms over the plains, the momentum Svenvold had created in the remainder of the work effectively lapses into doldrums. To make the entire book a description of his jaunts across Middle America would be bowing to the lure of catastrophilia, but while struggling through his meditation on the sublime as it relates to storms, I wonder if some more stringent editing could have been merited. Still, Svenvold covers the complete culture of storm chasing in a manner that few other authors have done.

A short work about a long walk.

In this era of fitness mania and extreme sports, the idea of someone walking across the entire North American continent still elicites a sense of awe. We are, after all, talking 3,500 miles across rugged mountains and sweltering plains. Even with modern conveniences such as cell phones and survival gear, it still remains a daunting undertaking. Crossing the continent over a hundred years ago with nothing but a couple of revolvers and five dollars in hand was considered grounds for insanity. Still, that is exactly what Helga Estby and her eldest daughter Clara undertook in the spring of 1896, setting out from their rural Norwegian settlement near Spokane, Washington to New York City, in an attempt to win a $10,000 wager from an anonymous figure. The walk was an epic undertaking, but as Linda Lawrence Hunt chronicles in Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America, it was only a small part of the shifts in the political and social landscapes of America at the cusp of a new century.

Like other studies in microhistory, Hunt uses the experience of one, nearly forgotten individual to cast light on the larger shifts within history. The benefit is to make history personal, which is Bold Spirit's strongest point. Estby was a strong, determined woman whose cross-country trek was likely the least of the hardships that she faced in her lifetime. However, getting into the mind of someone nearly 70 years dead is nearly impossible, and Hunt's task is made all the more difficult by the fact that all of Estby's manuscripts recounting her trip were destroyed by her children in the 1940s. This bit of cultural vandalism was a direct consequence of Helga's walk, and makes Hunt's points about the importance of preserving family histories. But it also leaves Hunt with little to go on other than interviews with Estby's granddaughter and scattered newspaper accounts of the trek itself. These hint at Estby's feelings regarding women's rights, the contentious election of 1896 and the cultural mores of Norwegian immigrants in America, among many other topics , but Hunt's attempts to flesh out the whole story comes down to a lot of conjecture. And, more tragically, there's little chance to hear Helga's story in her own words. Still, Hunt's rediscovery of Estby's remarkable endeavor makes for an unique perspective about a pivotal point in history and introduces modern readers to a woman who was well ahead of her time, even if her full story will forever be lost to time.