As writers of fiction, many of us deal with moments of crisis and threats to mortality on behalf of our characters. We have to imagine what that feels like.

Then there’s the real world…

A couple of nights ago, there was an outburst of tornados and related weather in my part of central Pennsylvania in the mountains. Now, I grew up in Kansas City and there’s nothing I like so well as extreme storms and especially tornados. I’ve seen lots of them reasonably close up, and they’re terrific! Typically, if you’re outdoors you can sense the exact sort of weather that’s indicative of the possibility (color of sky, liveliness of the air, temperature, more ominous than thunderstorms), and you can see (or sometimes hear) them coming (sparks of powerlines blowing down, sounds like a choo-choo train). In the old days, with more primitive television, you could even spot them as they formed as an electrical disturbance on an unoccupied broadcast TV channel. Great stuff!

So there I was with my hubby in our 1812 cabin on our farm near the top of one of the hollows. There had been thunderstorm threats, but nothing materializing yet, in the twilight. A weather alert sounded off on my phone, I glanced out at the sky, recognized the incoming storm look-and-feel of the part I could see, and hastened out the front door to the cabin porch to get a better view. Didn’t have my phone on me, so no pics, but the illustration I’ve borrowed for this post is pretty accurate. Just picture a small cabin directly underneath the rosy cloud, remove the clump of the green trees, tilt the landscape on a mountain slope in a hollow, and add enclosed emptiness all around. Keep the lighting.

There, looking almost close enough to touch, was a wall cloud, colored in dirty pink and brown, dimly lit, revolving noiselessly and sedately not far above me out in the front yard as it sucked in the moisture from the ground and fed it into the storm cell above. It hovered not far over my head, just a little way out into the front field rather than directly over the roof. It stayed in place as if pinned there.

Where I grew up, we referred to a wall cloud like that as a “mother of tornados”, since that’s what feeds the actual funnel clouds that form and then touch down to bounce back up or persist along the ground. I’d never been that close to one before, and it was mesmerizing.

Like all such existential things, it concentrated the mind. 🙂 There was, of course, nothing you could do about it. There are no basements in 200-year-old cabins and, while there was a root cellar, it wasn’t all that close and my husband wouldn’t have been able to walk there quickly enough. Though all the silent movement was up and around (rotating and pulling up moisture), that wasn’t going to persist. It would either rise back up and dissipate as it ran out of energy, or it was going to start spawning emerging funnel points and setting tornados down through the wall cloud. That’s how it works.

So. I called my husband over to take a look at it, on the grounds that he would never see something like that again, up close and personal, then I made sure the dog was inside, and watched.

As it happened, the wall cloud disintegrated into pounding rain (that’s not unusual) and moved down slope further away and out of sight, where it then proceeded to spawn some funnels and break trees capriciously all the way down the hollow. No one was hurt, the damage was relatively minor all around once it was done, and everyone was grateful, if a bit shocked (this not actually being Kansas, after all).

I was moved by the vividness of my own personal reactions to what was, after all, an existential crisis, after a fashion — it could easily have been fatal to us, if the funnels had emerged. As I reviewed my own actions, I tried (as one does) to decide if I could have done anything differently, or what I would have done if…

I wasn’t sorry to have encountered the wall cloud so closely — in fact, I was fascinated — and I knew there was little effective I could accomplish to mitigate whatever was going to happen (like those car accidents that give you subjective hours to think about what’s coming) so I embraced the opportunity to thrill over the unique experience (the scare of a lifetime). I may not have a photo of my own, but the mental image I have of that silently revolving wall cloud will be hard to erase (and me, I’m glad about that. I got away with it. Makes me smile).

And that’s the point. This is what your characters may feel, after an existential crisis. This is the sort of thing they may muse about, or regret, or rebound from. They’ll bore others with the story. They’ll pat themselves on the back for their sang-froid, or they’ll obsess over their hesitations and missed opportunities. It has to feel real to them, with all of its ups and downs — true to their character, revealing to the reader.

How do you mine this sort of thing for your own creations?