The Enemy is Ennui

In “The Wizard of Oz”, it’s the tornado that sets the story in motion, lifting Dorothy up and away from her Kansas home to the Land of Oz.

 

That same tornado also set in motion the career of meteorologist Brent Scudder ’56 after he saw it on screen as an eight-year-old. Though it frightened him, the twister also captured his imagination and ultimately whirled him to the ends of the Earth and back again before dropping him on the doorstep of Dorothy’s home state as an octogenarian storm chaser.

 

Sitting in his Toyota Highlander on the side of the road near Wichita Falls, Texas, Scudder peered at the radar on his laptop. He’d hoped to see his first tornado on that spring 2021 day, but after driving three hours west to chase one that was predicted to blow up in the area, he no longer saw any sign of a storm.

 

Another false alarm was disappointing — but not surprising — after three seasons of attempts. The U.S. records about 1,200 tornadoes a year, but when you’re one man in an SUV on the Great Plains, where the roads are long and straight and the wrong choice at an intersection can send you miles away from your target, the odds are against being in the right place at the right time.

 

Calling off his search for the day, Scudder checked into a hotel. Then, the television alerted him to a tornado watch for Altus, Oklahoma, 90 minutes away. Close enough. Back into the Highlander, with its bumper sticker proclaiming “The Enemy is Ennui.”

 

“I got near Altus and the clouds were so thick and the rain so heavy I didn’t think I’d see anything,” Scudder says. “I was halfway back to the hotel when the cloud formations got very interesting. I looked to the west and saw a tornado about 10 miles away. It stayed on the ground maybe 20 seconds.”

 

Then Scudder, hoping the tornado would come down again, did something he calls stupid — he decided to get closer.

 

“I ran into the biggest hailstorm I ever saw,” he says. “The hail was the size of baseballs. It cracked my windshield and put dents in the car.”

 

After three seasons and tens of thousands of miles, endless hours of too-calm weather, and countless decisions about where to find a tornado, one had found him. It was the culmination of a desire that had been gathering force in Scudder for three-quarters of a century.

 

As a student at St. Paul’s School, his interest in weather had been strong enough for a vice rector to notice and put him in charge of the weather station. At Kenyon College, Scudder majored in physics and entered the Air Force ROTC program, which sent him to weather school. His time in Ohio, on the edge of Tornado Alley, dissolved his childhood fear of twisters and left only the awe he’d felt as a boy watching Dorothy’s house fly away.

 

After earning a master’s in meteorology at New York University, Scudder spent 15 months at Byrd Station in Antarctica gathering data on the upper atmosphere. Most of the rest of his career was on the East Coast; he went into airline dispatching after 20 years in industrial meteorology creating forecasts for private companies and retired soon after 9/11. The desire to see a tornado “kind of festered” for many years, but he couldn’t find time for the pursuit. After his second wife died in 2017, Scudder had the money and time for storm chasing.

 

“There I was, at the age of 80,” says Scudder, who plans to write a book about his continuing adventures, “starting to chase storms when really I should only be using my car to go to the post office.”