"Cumulus: from the Latin "heap," these clouds are flat-bottomed with rounded tops which appear as lobes or domes. In time, these tops unfold into white towering clouds called cumulus congestus. "

"In the afternoon the tops of these clouds may grow smooth and flat to form the anvil shape typical of a thunderhead, or cumulonimbus. "

"Cumulus shed trails of ice crystals, known as virga, that evaporate without melting long before they reach the ground. Bands of cirrocumulus are rippled by swiftly moving air currents above them, much like the surface of a lake. "

In Oklahoma City we find Paige alone and nervous in her new house. The three of us sit at her new kitchen table, talk about old times, have a laugh, then we're off to find the Ramada Inn.

Afterwards we retreat to the hotel bar and watch the locals line up on the dance floor, clapping their hands and spinning on their heels. This is Line Dancing, and it's foreign to anything I've ever known. My friends in New York would never believe this.

I fall asleep sitting up on my bar stool.

"stratus: from the Latin "layered," form sheets of cloud that may extend hundreds, even thousands of miles. They appear as a uniform, gray layer or as a stratum of merged puffs or patches. "

Cut to: dead armadillo next to the road, hot air undulating off the pavement as we drive back to Colorado the next day with a hangover. A battalion of U.S. Army artillery trucks going the other way. Big 20 mm Howitzers roll past, some painted the color of sand. Oil wells churn slowly against the backdrop of gentle hills, clumps of rounded, dark green trees pushing into the wind.

More big guns roll past.

"Mammatus clouds bulge toward the ground, boiling upside down under the high anvil of cumulonimbus. These formations are produced by downdrafts of dense air cooled by the evaporation of water droplets."

White pillars of cumulus billow and push into the new space, loom over us, imposing, lyrical, like a monstrous cauliflower. At Salina the tailwind becomes a crosswind, then a headwind. We battle it for three hundred miles as the engine strains and drinks more oil.

"On the basis of height, clouds are classified into four groups: high level, middle level, low level, and clouds with marked vertical development. Also, whether they form layers (stratus ), puffs (cumulus ), or hairlike filaments (cirrus ). "

A cloud grows at an angle above the rectangular silos that pepper the horizon. Farmers bring their harvests to these silos to be separated by quality, sold, and loaded onto freight trains. The wheat sways as we move through it and I can glimpse down each row for an instant. Andy looks out the window at an anvil-shaped cloud.

"That would be a thunderhead," he says.

A redtail hawk sits motionless on a fence-post. We've been driving west for seven hours in the grueling heat.

Approaching a dark gray wall of cloud to the southwest. A few pale outlines against the darkness, low and solitary. The smell of a cattle ranch, sprinklers turning in enormous circles, driven forward by water.

The sky turns from gray to black - the first few drops of rain hit the windshield like falling eggs. Andy points the truck directly into the storm while hard rain beats at the windshield and sends a stream of mist through the rear of the truck. We pull off under a bridge and install a sheet of Plexiglass Andy has cut to fit the rear window.

I'm reaching in the glove compartment for a screwdriver when the bolt of lightning strikes, my hand strobed, white, followed by a bomb-like thunderclap. Soaking wet by the time we've repaired the rear of the truck with a bungie-cord and some duct tape.

"A tornado is an intense vortex, or rotating air column, rendered visible by the funnel cloud extending downward from the base of the cumulonimbus cloud and by the swirling mass of dust and debris lifted from the ground. "

"This is twister country you know," Andy says.

We're barreling forward when there's a roar from underneath the truck. The highway has been flooded by the storm and the 4-runner hits the puddle at 65 mph, fishtailing like a spastic eel, tires rising up off the pavement. We begin to hydroplane.

Andy works the breaks and the truck veers right then swings radically to the left. Tires touch asphalt and we rise back up on the highway.

He takes a slow drag off his pipe and puts a new flame in its bowl, sending a plume of smoke around his head. Neither of us say anything. After a while the sky lifts. A full moon appears, moving evenly through a patchwork of clouds.