Kansas City Public Library exhibit illuminates the poetry in weather.
Across Kansas, and oftentimes south to Arkansas and Texas or north to Iowa, Montana and the Dakotas, Stephen Locke roams the back roads in his 15-year-old Ford Explorer, its metal hood and roof cratered by hailstorms, the windshield twice-replaced.
They are the scars of storm chasing, though Locke is not the thrill-seeking cowboy of modern lore, camera in hand, looking to snap the most destructive side of nature. There is beauty in a billowing supercell in the distance, in jagged streaks of lightning and thin, swaying funnels reaching down to the countryside. That’s what his photographs convey, not merely mayhem.
And that is what former Kansas poet laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg puts into words.
They connected five or six years back, Locke in search of someone who could put his images in some kind of literary context, Mirriam-Goldberg interested in lending vision to the poetic nature of what she calls “wild weather.” The result was Chasing Weather: Tornadoes, Tempests, and Thunderous Skies in Word and Image, a 160-page collection of photos and verse published in September 2014 that is both sumptuous and affecting.
The Kansas City Public Library has collected 17 of Locke’s best shots – along with Mirriam-Goldberg’s poetry – for the exhibit Chasing Weather, which opened April 2 at the downtown Central Library. It remains on display in the Genevieve Guldner Gallery through the last weekend in May.
Locke, a Shawnee Mission South High School graduate who works out of his Tempest Gallery in Roeland Park, Kansas, recalls the day he sent Mirriam-Goldberg a request to befriend her on Facebook. He knew her only as the state’s poet laureate, a position she held from 2009-13. She knew nothing about him, but accepted.
Sometime later, she commented that one of Locke’s posted videos was “poetic” and he shot her a private message inquiring about the possibility of working together. “I felt, if she would be willing to dance with me, it would be an excellent collaboration,” he says. “And indeed, it has been. She has been as enthusiastic or more than I was.
“It just worked out.”
Mirriam-Goldberg can’t remember a time when she wasn’t fascinated by weather. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, and central New Jersey, the big events were hurricanes or their remnants. She moved to college at the University of Missouri, where she first studied journalism and eventually earned a degree in history, and then to Kansas, where she now lives with her husband and family on several acres south of Lawrence.
That brought acquaintance with thunderstorms and tornadoes, wall clouds and shelf clouds, spectacular displays of lightning and supercells inspiring equal parts apprehension and awe.
“I really feel like weather flows through our lives, like this parade across the sky, and it influences us in all kinds of subtle and at times dramatic and obvious ways,” says Mirriam-Goldberg, 56, who also writes fiction and nonfiction and teaches at Goddard College in Vermont.
“I know I’m not alone in feeling a little more awake and alive when the sun’s out. And I always feel a surge of energy when a storm is breaking. … When I moved to the Midwest when I was 19 and the sky opened up, well, I was in heaven.”
Locke traces his weather fixation to a late-spring night in 1989, when he wanted to do some landscape photography and camped out on the Flint Hills’ Konza Prairie south of Manhattan, Kansas. A storm blew up on the horizon. He snapped as lightning danced. And after developing the film, he was dazzled and seduced by the images.
The next step was teaching himself to forecast severe storms, not just in Kansas but all across the Great Plains.
In his case, Locke says, “Storm chasing is actually a misnomer. My goal is not to chase. It’s to intercept a storm, to predict where it’s going to be beginning 10 days out. And then three days out, one day out, 10 hours, 10 minutes. The goal is to predict right down to the square mile so I can be in front of it and already set up.”
While the hail-pocked Explorer speaks to his occasional forecasting miscalculation, he prefers distance from a storm and panoramic views. With that and a meticulous post-production process – often stretching into months – Locke produces grander-scale, higher-quality images appealing to art enthusiasts, television networks and production companies. He has developed a method for turning hundreds of high-resolution still shots into time-lapse video.
Questioned once about how many Kansas counties he’d covered in his storm chasing, Locke did some back-checking. All 105 of them, it turned out. He doesn’t bother tracking the mileage he annually logs, he says. He doesn’t care.
Nor, at 59, does he foresee slowing down. “I’ll do it forever,” he predicts.
In verse – here in the opening stanzas of her poem Chasing Weather – Mirriam-Goldberg expresses why.
Unpredictable as love that will outlive us,
The clouds fold fast, twist themselves wide…
–Steve Weiberg
