featuring Connor Mockett
Hello, everyone! Welcome back to another Life with Connor the Weatherman column. I’ll be continuing on with the stories about my storm chasing adventures in the United States this past May, but this will be the final story. I’ve had a lot of fun doing the storytelling for this trip!
So, in the last column I ended it talking about staying the night in Tulsa, Oklahoma after our supposed final chase of the trip on May 25. May 26 was supposed to be the day where our team was driven back to Kansas City to pick up our own vehicles to start the drive home back to Canada. The morning of the 26th came around, so we decided to go for breakfast with a couple of other storm chasing friends to say goodbye for the season. We were sitting at the restaurant table, and checked the weather models just for fun to see if we were going to be driving through any rain or remnant storms from the day before.
As we checked the models, we realized the storms from May 25 had left an outflow boundary in northeast Oklahoma and a lot of the parameters from the 25th were also still there. We looked at each other and said, “chase?” Naturally, we all said screw it, and decided to hop in the truck and go to northeast Oklahoma to chase some storms.
We arrived at this developing supercell near Vinita, Oklahoma in the early afternoon. It was not looking too healthy as a storm, but we decided to follow it for quite a while anyway because it was the last day. We ended up in Arkansas as the storm had started to gain some strength, but got stuck in some traffic in what was a very busy town, so had to start playing catch up on the backside of the storm. It started to chuck some really big hail, some the size of baseballs that we could see bouncing in the ditch as it hit the ground. It started to get really windy as well when we started to get deeper inside the core of the storm.
Then, suddenly, traffic was at a standstill on this two lane road in some Arkansas mountains. We finally get up to the front of the line and realize there’s a tree on the road. Now – we’re Canadians – so when we see that people need help, we help. We parked the truck in front of the tree and blocked traffic, and we got Tom’s chainsaw out and he got to cutting the tree up while Braydon, Jordan, and I started pulling branches off the road. The police showed up as well and helped out a bit with the traffic. After about 10-15 minutes, we opened the road back up. At that point, the chase was over, because the storm was quite far away even after only 10-15 minutes of helping.
We stopped about 5 minutes after and collected our thoughts about what to do for the rest of the day. Do we go back to Tulsa and hang out for one more night because we were still relatively close to the city, or do we just go to Kansas City for the night? Hmm… Tulsa it is! We all hung out at Texas Roadhouse and had an amazing steak.
The next morning was the real goodbye. We all hugged it out, packed up the truck, and away went Tom, Jordan, and I back to Kansas City. Jordan and I grabbed our cars, I went towards Ontario, Jordan and Tom went towards Manitoba. And that was it! The trip was over, we were headed home. An amazing trip with incredible storms, moments, and memories.
However, the May 26 chase would come back to haunt all four of us about 2-3 weeks later. I started having some sort of reaction all over my body, at first thought to be an allergic reaction to something, but I had no idea what it was from. So I texted the group chat, and thankfully I did because we wouldn’t have figured this out, and weirdly enough all four of the other guys had the same reaction as I had. So we started to retrace our steps and gave out some theories, and we came up with…poison oak!
All of us, Braydon, Tom, Jordan, and I, were destroyed by the poison oak. It was the itchiest, most excruciating two weeks of my life. I was on very strong medication to try and get it under control, and finally at the end of the two weeks of medication, it started to improve. After that whole fiasco, we now know one thing: We sure aren’t going back to Arkansas!
