Fooling With a Whirlwind
Man loses hat, shirt, in tornado encounter; PLUS cheese related murder plot
This short cautionary tale comes from the Ellsworth American newspaper of 7 October 1875. The incident occurred on the previous Saturday near the town of Faribault, Minnesota.
“A farmer who lives about five miles northwest of Faribault, by the name of Samuel Johnson, was going along the road when suddenly a whirlwind, which described a circle apparently not more than three feet in diameter, appeared in the road in front of him.
It took up the dust pretty lively and buzzed like a swarm of bees, but Mr Johnson kept on his way towards it, thinking it had no great amount of power. In fact, he did not think it worth his while to step one side to let it whirl past, but kept straight on and met it straight in the road.
When they came together, the whirlwind seemed to drop everything else and took hold of Mr Johnson, and in less time than it takes to tell it, Mr Johnson had lost his hat and his shirt, and was pitched about twenty feet into a gutter, feeling as though he had been shocked by a battery.
It was a rough experience, and Mr Johnson will never fool with a whirlwind again.”
Whirlwinds are very common, even over here in the UK. The type encountered by Samuel Johnson was likely a dust devil. Other types of whirlwinds include leaf devils, water devils, and fire devils — all named for the type of materials sucked into their rapidly rotating vortexes. Major whirlwinds are generally known as tornadoes or twisters.
At the time of writing, the US storm season is ramping up, with tornadoes weaving trails of destruction across Oklahoma, Kansas, and other parts of the American heartland. At the lower end of the scale, the UK has seen several reports of mini-tornadoes in recent weeks, including this dust devil filmed in a Welsh pub car park. (Look out for the man saving his glass of beer.)
Terrifying and spectacular, whirlwinds have long had cinematic appeal. This summer sees the release of Twisters, a pluralised sequel to the 1996 storm-chasing movie Twister. But the original whirlwind movie was released 85 years ago when a tornado scooped up Dorothy Gale and her dog Toto (and a witch on a bicycle) and deposited them in the magical land of Oz. Here’s some original test footage of the twister from 1939’s Wizard of Oz:
Recommended
The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti (2014)
The Telling Room of the title is in a bodega in a cave in the tiny Spanish hilltop village of Guzman. It’s where the locals gather to tell stories, drink wine, and eat cheese. Michael Paterniti, the excellent magazine writer, travels to Guzman to find a particular cheese, made from an ancient recipe and reputed to be the best in the world. He finds that the cheesemaker, the enigmatic Ambrosio, has lost his company in mysterious circumstances that only those accepted into the Telling Room might know. So, he moves his young family to Guzman for six months to try to unravel the tale. Guzman is about a hundred miles north of Madrid, in the Old Castile (Castile and León) region. The book is part charming travelogue, part gripping mystery, and, I think, a perfect summer read. Most definitely the best book I’ve ever read about cheese.
You can get The Telling Room from Amazon, and I’ve added it to the Singular Discoveries Amazon bookshelf.*
My favourite Michael Paterniti magazine article is this one for Esquire about Swissair Flight 111, which crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1998 with the loss of 229 lives: The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy.
It’s a masterpiece of storytelling, and if you want to know why it’s so good, Nieman Storyboard has a Why’s This So Good? about it.
The Long Fall… is also included in Paterniti’s book of collected magazine stories, Love and Other Ways of Dying. It’s out of print in the UK, but you can pick up a used copy from Amazon.
News
The good folks at Narratively have republished my story about the hapless Duffy brothers, the self-styled American gangsters who met their downfall in Newcastle upon Tyne, as a Narratively Classic with a new introduction. You can read it here:
This reminded me I also wrote a Twitter thread about a third Duffy brother, Jimmy, a Boston Marathon-winning athlete and tragic Canadian war hero, you can find that here:
https://twitter.com/paulbrownUK/status/1410961669983981569
The Singular Discoveries podcast has been nominated for the Independent Podcast Awards. If you haven’t already listened, you can find all episodes here.
More next month. Please share and subscribe. Thanks for reading. ◆
*This publication features Amazon affiliate links. If you use them, I may receive a few pennies to help fund the newsletter. See our Amazon bookshelf here.