Around lunchtime last week, I looked up at the sky and thought, “Hey, those look a LOT like wall clouds. And that sky has a color I haven’t seen since Portales*. Oh, look, that hubcap-shaped cloud is…”
Rotating.
Over the next 45 seconds, this elegant funnel dropped out of the clouds. It skimmed northeastward, the lower tip probably about 500 to 600 feet off the ground, and evaporated almost overhead. On the ground I felt only a tiny whirlwind, likely coincidental.
I called into the work hotline to report it, as one does, but the funnel didn’t seem to merit uprooting the hundreds of co-workers happily chowing down in the cafeteria nearby. I didn’t see any more funnels, but I heard of several around town that day.
I’ve seen funnel clouds in the SE Valley areas around Phoenix before, but never one so close.
*In 1982 I was able to spend a summer science trip at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, NM, doing all kinds of science-y and science-adjacent stuff like counting carnivorous attack mice on the Staked Plain (Onychomys leucogaster, they’re rather adorable as long as they’re not trying to bite fingers), seeing electron microscopes at work (so cool), cracking a rib at Palo Duro Canyon (the minders never knew or I’d have been sent home early), and getting my second tetanus shot (amateur parkour and barbed wire fences are a dangerous combo, yanno).
One of those adventures included wandering out of the excellent library about 4pm one Saturday afternoon and seeing these kinds of clouds. And funnels. And, despite having parents from West Texas, being stupid enough to go up on a freeway overpass to watch the pretty funnel clouds dropping like Ancient Old Ones out of the sky. I’m sure one of them was within a mile of me.
But I lived, wandered back to the dorm, found nobody around, and went to the vending machines in the basement for a snack. D’oh. Everybody was there, having heard the tornado warnings that I, buried in jewelry books and the Jack Williamson Science Fiction Collection, had simply not heard.
I was and remain that much of an invisible dork.