April 14, 2026 - A day that I'll remember fondly for decades to come, lest senility or dementia rob me of such.

It's an open secret that I live in Northern Illinois. Between my enrollment at Northern Illinois University (NIU) and the frequent references to Wisconsin, Chicago, and Illinois at large. If you've been keeping note of our weather patterns, you'd likely recognize that what was traditionally known as "Tornado Alley" seems to have begun an Eastward Shift.

Growing up, I'd always picture Kansas, or Nebraska, the Dakotas, and the like. I never really anticipated that the Active Region would slowly shift closer and closer to home. Now in 2026, I'm confronting a reality that never seemed "In the cards" per se. It really started in Middle School, when my father was undergoing an abdominal surgery.

I was in the 7th or 8th Grade at the time, and I remember distinctly sitting in my Science class. We were using our iMAacs for research when we were suddenly instructed to assume our Tornado Safety positions. The siren came over the P.A., the same warbling whoop we'd always clowned on because it sounded like something out of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. We took the usual positions: away from windows, the interior hallway, curled against the wall with arms over our heads. Sound advice, generally speaking, though if the tornado is strong enough, the roof is gone and you're likely going with it. We crouched there anyway.

In the years leading up to this point, I'd never had a single instance where we needed to take shelter at school. One instance sticks with me, sheltering in my grandparents' basement out in what my budding mind considered the middle of nowhere. I was fretting about my shoes, left upstairs. My uncle deadpanned, "They're already long gone." I get the joke now. At the time, I was distressed.

So here we were, finally confronted with a moment when the years of drilling were put to use... And things went back to normal. What I would later learn is that another cell had spawned a rather strong tornado that reduced one of our local Apple Orchards to shreds. The 2008 Poplar Grove EF-3 Tornado was the first time I remember reckoning with the actual destructive power of a Tornado. Like many youths, I grew up knowing of Tornadoes and their existence, but never really contending with them. They were ephemeral things, a fairy tale warning, an exotic event saved for remote parts of the country. This was the first of many steps that would change my view of severe weather phenomena.

In the subsequent years, we had several events in our area, a pair of Tornadoes in 2009 that once more required my fellow students to take cover in the halls. Then, during my Junior Year, I observed, at a distance, what would later be determined to be a Tornado from my English Class Window. I was supposed to be taking a quiz, but even at this point, I'd become "Weather-Aware" and not only recognized what seemed to be a Funnel, but the presence of power flashes. I raised my hand. I was describing the power flashes to my teacher when the lights in our own building cut out. The aftermath of this event was rather shocking (pun intended) as the photos of twisted power infrastructure were shared with the media.

Finally, a recent series of Severe Weather events in the area gave me pause. About 5 years ago, I was living in a Condo with my parents on the tail end of 2020. I was doing some shopping for the start of the School year, when it became apparent that severe weather was on the way. No sooner had I moved my vehicle into the garage than the Sirens began to sound. I moved to the closet in the Master Bedroom and waited out the storm. A sizeable tornado ripped through my old neighborhood, my alma mater, Rock Valley College, and, most disturbingly, the Farm & Fleet. This last bit is incredibly relevant.

I pulled up the local weather coverage and saw the rotation signature sitting directly on top of me. Yes, this time, the storm came for me! This had never really happened to me, always nearby, but not so close I could have loosed an arrow directly into its path. It caused a lot of damage to nearby buildings, even tearing the Holiday Inn Express Sign off of a nearby Hotel, and depositing it in our Neighbor's lawn. The true disquiet would come just a couple of years later... When I moved into an apartment directly behind said Farm & Fleet.

Every Morning, I wake up and stare at the building I KNOW was hit by a Tornado. I consider what it must have been like on that day, what would I have seen? It was only 2 years later that I would get a bit of an idea. Once more, our area was contending with a tornado, and this time it quite literally hit close to home. My Great Aunt and Uncle's home was damaged by a falling tree; my old neighborhood once again fell victim to its strength, but it hadn't stopped. The path was directed squarely at my Apartment. I was lucky, though; it seemingly weakened, instead only buffeting the whole building with strong winds. It still sounded like the proverbial "Freight Train," it violently shook the doors of the building as it crossed, but the only sustained damage was a few tiles torn from our roof. That was the extent of it, until yesterday.

Years of living with this have shaped how I talk to my students about it. As an ESL teacher, I've found myself in front of a lot of nervous kids during severe weather days, kids who have, in many cases, come from places where their relationship to natural disaster is more immediate and less abstract than the average Midwesterner's. I borrow a line from Ryan Hall, the YouTube weather forecaster I've followed for years: "Don't be scared, be prepared." It's the right framing for kids and the right framing for me. Fear is what tornadoes feel like at a distance. Preparation is what you can actually do.

Last Friday, April 10th, I was surprised to notice that the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) was already calling for an enhanced risk of severe weather for the 14th, a full 4 days out. This is not a common occurrence, and yet it has happened twice this year for different regions. This means that the likelihood of a severe weather event is rather certain, and it did in fact pan out, so to speak. As the weekend progressed, the certainty increased, along with the level of risk.

My brother is mathematically minded and has been fascinated by weather as long as I can remember. Most people talk about the weather to fill the silence. I talk about the weather because I find it genuinely interesting. Devin is the same way. So when his text came in Monday morning, I was already mentally typing "Hell yeah, I'd be down" before I finished reading the question. By Tuesday afternoon, we were in the car.

I taught until 3:05, picked up Amanda from work, and met Devin outside my apartment at 3:30. We pointed the car at Maquoketa, Iowa, and settled in.

We stopped at Casey's, a few blocks away, for a late luncheon of King's Hawaiian Sliders. I'd consider Casey's our unofficial sponsor as we would end up stopping at several in the course of our mission. We continued Westward through Rockford Proper and finally broke out into the sprawling farmlands Illinois is known for (aside from Corruption). We stopped at Lanark for the first of several restroom visits, and we could already see the tops of the oncoming storms on the distant horizon. Of course, as we headed to the West, the Sun was getting lower in the sky. This is exactly the right angle for it to consistently blind us with its beautiful but altogether bright rays.’

We'd been underway for about an hour and a half by the time we reached Savanna. Settled in 1828 by explorers out of Galena, Savanna is one of the oldest towns in Illinois, a former steamboat stop that grew into a logging port and eventually one of the Midwest's largest rail switching yards. You can still see the shape of it in the 1880s buildings along Main Street, the old riverfront, and the rail lines running the length of town. In the nineteenth century, this was where packet boats brought goods up the Mississippi to be redistributed east, north, and south. Mark Twain's river, essentially, is still doing its old job.

Savanna also marks the edge of the Driftless Area. The name comes from the absence of glacial drift, the silt and gravel and boulders that glaciers leave behind when they retreat, because the Driftless was never covered by ice during the last glacial period. While everything around it was being scraped flat by miles-high ice sheets, this pocket of southwestern Wisconsin, northeastern Iowa, southeastern Minnesota, and the extreme northwestern corner of Illinois was simply left alone. The result, an hour's drive west of Rockford, is a functionally alien landscape. Where home is flat sprawling fields broken up by tree lines, the Driftless is rolling hills and steep bluffs and narrow valleys, land that refused to be smoothed. Both blessing and curse for a storm chase: the bluffs hide what's coming, and the dales let you lose a tornado in a fold of ground you didn't know was there.

Our path through Savanna put us at the Mighty Mississippi, particularly engorged after the recent precipitation. Our destination lay on the opposite bank, but to reach it, we had to cross a rather unique stretch of road. Sabula, Iowa, is the only town in Iowa that sits on an island in the river, and it wasn't always one. According to local legend, it was established in 1835, when Isaac Dorman crossed the Mississippi from the Illinois side on a log and decided to settle on the spot. The name is French for "sand," for the soil. It only became an island in 1939, when the Army Corps of Engineers finished Lock and Dam No. 13 and permanently flooded the lowlands west of town.

We crossed the Dale Gardner Veterans Memorial Bridge, passed through the small grid of houses with the river on both sides of us, and came off the causeway into Iowa proper. The land opened up, and we were closing in on Maquoketa.

As the land opened up, so did our view of the situation. The sun had finally been swallowed by the oncoming cloud deck. Devin had rigged the weather radio to the driver's side vanity mirror, the cord dangling behind his head and snaking out the rear driver door to an antenna clamped on the roof. It wasn't elegant, but it worked. Through it came bursts of crackling static as we tried to tune the local NOAA channels.

The radar already showed a fair number of cells to the north of our target. Alongside the reflectivity graphs were dozens of tiny red dots, each one representing a team of chasers. Most had lined up west of Dubuque, a conga line stacked against the earlier cells. We were aiming further south, for something that hadn't formed yet.

For the moment, things were calm. We pulled into Maquoketa and stopped at the Casey's on the highway in town, a newer build, for the last of our preparations. It was already 6 PM. By 6:10, we were rolling past the local ABC affiliate and their Storm Track 8 truck, The Beast, parked out front. We were headed for higher ground. Maquoketa sits at the western edge of the Driftless, and there were plenty of hills to climb.

We took US 61 north, looking for a suitable vantage point with the radar as a guideline, and turned onto Caves Road. An apt name, as we'd soon find out. We passed farm after farm, and the shoulders gave way to gullies; the Prius would have been all too happy to stay in forever. Then, by what could only have been serendipity, the solution appeared. Caves Road is named, it turns out, for the actual caves that make up Maquoketa Caves State Park, and its entrance and welcome center sat just around the next bend. We pulled into the deserted lot and got out to take stock.

Standing at the entrance of the state park felt like the wicked combination of an empty amphitheater, a vacant gym, and the top of a very large hill. I was on a landmass untouched by encroaching ice, watching a mountainous super-cell tumble toward us, growling with pent-up energy ready to burst forth.

Most of us have only heard thunder from inside a house. Fewer have felt it move across open land. The depth of the sound spoke to the size of the storm, lightning tendrils reaching cloud to cloud, cloud to ground.

The rain hadn't come yet, but the scent had. Technology can do remarkable work in predicting storms, and we'd certainly used some to get here, but the human body is its own instrument. The moisture in the air. The barometric pressure pushes against your sinuses. The scent of ozone, the tingle of atmospheric instability against your skin.

The first drops started as a pleasant mist of sorts, gliding along the ever-increasing wind. The Outflow from the cell proper was delivering a welcome breeze to soothe our sun-beaten faces. We both shot brief video updates of the current conditions, notably reacting to the encroaching lightning. We kept our eyes to the skies, surveying the boundaries for any signs of lowering.

I was looking off to the southwest and saw lower-flying clouds, as well as some towering monsters in the distance. It was the former that gave me pause.

"That doesn't look very good," I observed.

"Yeah, I think it's about time we got back to the car."

We both hopped in, heading back towards town, my eyes peeled and fixed upon the "scuds" below the cloudbank. We'd been traveling for about thirty seconds when…

"I think I see something!" I shouted.

The same low-hanging bits of cloud had begun to coalesce into the unmistakable shape of our quarry, "A Tornado!"

Devin pulled over immediately, and we both dove out, phones at the ready. My Owala, an unfortunate casualty of my haste, fell beneath the Prius.

I attempted to hold steady, my hand, which even now was straying from its subject as I beheld, for the first time, a real, tried-and-true tornado. Not from a screen, or beneath a set of trees, but an honest-to-god tornado.

I was agog and at a loss for words, incorrectly identifying it as a stovepipe tornado when it was in fact a rope, the thinnest and most short-lived form.

It didn't last long. It didn't have to. It was a stunning and mystical moment that brought years of near-misses together. We watched it form, we watched it disappear, and we returned to the Prius, me collecting my fallen bottle.

We didn't spot any further spots of rotation, but we still had a monster of a storm barrelling towards us. If you've ever heard of "the skies turning green," you've heard what we saw described perfectly. The cause is none other than hail. "Hailcores" are parts of a storm that you'd really rather not mess with, particularly in a chase situation.

In an effort to save his windshield, we began jockeying positions to capture the immensity of the approaching storm, while avoiding the brunt of the hail. It was during this back and forth that we found ourselves nearly struck by lightning.

At the conclusion of a 3-point turn around, we witnessed a bolt of lightning strike within 100ft of the front hood of the car. The sound was nigh-deafening and instant; none of that traditional rumbling that often follows. Instead, we were quite literally shaken, feeling a burst of energy unlike anything I'd experienced before. The incredulity of what had just occurred and the high from witnessing a tornado first-hand left me in a bout of laughter, and my brother with an exultant "YEEEEEEAH!"

Those ten minutes would be hard to top. Excitement, anxious energy, pure joy, all wrapped together. But the day wasn't over.

We made our way to another vantage point on Hwy 64 and watched a seemingly rain-wrapped tornado pass some tens of miles northward. We were happy to have not been in the mess in that direction, as it had been rather active in terms of hail. We spent several minutes at our spot, taking stock of the situation and planning our next moves. It was a good moment to take in the surroundings and appreciate the temperate conditions.

As we sat, we watched the conga line of chasers attempt to follow the tornadic cell across the Mississippi, only to fall victim to the river's most tragic flaw. There are a few crossings between Iowa and Illinois. To reach our destination, we'd taken the closest crossing between our start and end points, but to do so required a significant southward trajectory. The Northern route near Galena would have put us directly in the path of the earlier storm, and the southern route along I-80 was so far south that it would have been ridiculous.

We soon saw what could have the potential to produce yet another tornado, and set off to try and catch a proper glimpse. Instead, we found ourselves weaving between the hills and valleys of East-Central Iowa, in a remarkably verdant area, on a gravel road. I recorded most of the drive. The scenic views, the pastoral calm, were a welcome counterweight to a high-energy evening.

As we once more rejoined the highway, the sun was sinking ever lower, and the storms were moving further eastward. Much of what we'd just experienced was making its way directly toward our home. We kept our loved ones informed of our positions and informed them of the cells on the way. Each of them took the proper precautions and was ready to ride out the storms.

We eventually pulled off to the side of the highway, as the most potent cells were moving out of our range, and chasing in the dark is a rather dangerous proposition. Devin spoke with a fellow chaser named Brad, who had traveled to the same spot… from Decatur, IL (about 220ish Miles from our general location). He seemed to have been operating on a wing and a prayer, which is not the safest method of chasing, to say the least.

As the pair were discussing the day's highlights, my eyes were toward the skies. As the storms moved past, the very end of the sunset cast a crimson glow across the few breaks of clear sky. The lighting actually made my camera turn the entire world purple, which provided its own unique charm to the photos I captured.

There were plenty of swirling clouds around, and some interesting rotation, but nothing strong enough to form a full-fledged funnel.

It was at this point that we began the long journey home. I remind you that options for crossing were limited, and our previous route was now in the throes of newer storms. That did not leave many other options. The path to Galena was also heavily inundated with storms, leaving us with one last relevant choice… We would cut through Wisconsin!

For anyone forgetting their basic U.S. Geography, Iowa is situated such that its northernmost point is further north than Illinois'. This meant that the only real way to avoid a potentially dangerous situation would be to go around it. The trip to Dubuque was not exactly uneventful, to say the least. We found ourselves in a small bit of hail and some frankly very strong winds.

After traveling through what was a particularly dark stretch of farmlands, we at last saw the lights of Dubuque in the distance. Of course, before we reached Dubuque Proper, we were flashbanged by the warning lights of Dubuque's Airport, which, while helpful to aviators on approach, had a blinding effect upon any of the drivers on the highway.

As we entered the town, we spotted what would be our final pit stop for the night's proceedings… Say it with me, Casey's. Now, late in the evening, true sustenance was required, and Devin sprang for a pair of Casey's famous pizzas. Bellies full, bladders empty, and an update to mom later, we crossed the bridge into good old Wisconsin.

Our initial path was thrown for a loop, as unexpected construction work sent us on a winding detour full of blind corners, sheets of rain, and malfunctioning high beams. There were a few tense moments, and it seemed like we were lost in the midst of the Wisconsin portion of the Driftless, when we finally crossed over to familiar territory.

The area around Lena, IL, is beautiful during the daytime, as I'd experienced just weeks earlier on a drive with Amanda. Tonight it was a strobing disco of cloudbanks spread across the sky. We drove on routes I'd come to know, and settled wearily into a steady pace homeward. As I reclined and checked my rapidly draining phone, I looked up. The storms had moved far enough ahead that we were sitting in a large pocket of calm. Above us, framed by advancing storm clouds on every side, was a vaulted ceiling of stars, ringed by the frequent bursts of lightning still working their way east. I captured it as best I could.

Postscript

While Lena escaped any lasting effects that day, the end of their week would not be so lucky. On Friday, April 17th, another outbreak of tornadic weather brought further storms close to home. I watched as yet another system made its way across the Mississippi, closing in on the very same locations I'd stood in just days before. An EF-2 tornado tore through Lena in the early afternoon. The same system spawned a trio of tornadoes in my own area: an EFU in Pecatonica that didn't leave much recordable damage, and EF-1s in Harrison and Roscoe. I missed seeing them in person, but they impacted friends and colleagues alike.

I am not a degreed meteorologist, and I have no plans to become one. But I have spent enough of my life paying attention to severe weather that I want to do something with that attention beyond sitting with it. Keeping my community informed, what I'm seeing on the radar, walking them through what an enhanced risk day actually means, telling my students that the right response to a siren is preparation rather than panic, feels like the natural extension of standing in that Maquoketa parking lot watching a supercell tumble in. The same tools that let my brother and me witness one of nature's wonders are the same ones that warned those in the path of disaster. I'd like to be one more voice in that signal chain.