Lone Tree

Lone Tree, Norman OK, 30 January 2000

If this solitary elm tree could take pictures, its sky gallery would rival that of any human photographer: the vapor's edge of a violent tornado which slapped it as a sapling in 1949, at least three other daytime tornadoes within view, and two at night silhouetted by lightning. On display, one would see ice storms, downbursts, cracked clay from searing heat waves and droughts, flatland floods, hailstorms that stripped off leaves by the bushel, the ultimate close-ups of a few direct lightning strikes, and a 360-degree panorama of this snow fog. Room after room could exhibit grass fires, wide-angle views of supercells from every direction, sun dogs and haloes and rainbows of all forms, comets, meteors, aurorae, thousands of dazzling sunrises and sunsets -- indeed, any cloud and every wondrous or wicked sky over central Oklahoma for many decades.

© Roger Edwards. All rights reserved.