The funnel
of a tornado acts as a paranormal conduit, by which the deceased farmer
may gather around himself bits of the world: the fragrant earth that he
once tilled, boards of wood to remind him of the simple houses in which
he used to dwell, cows and other livestock upon which his livelihood at
one time depended. The funnel extends conelike down to the ground from
a fertile cloud, usually the cumulonimbus of an active thunderstorm,
and, at its narrowest point, there exists the farmer, weeping,
clutching his chest, harvesting.
The rapid condensation of water vapor in the low pressure of the
whirling air forms the visible part of the funnel, and near ground
level, the mounting debris cloud adds to its bulk, sometimes creating
funnels of monstrous proportion. Several funnels may develop in a
mature tornado system, with small vortices (farmer children)
continually forming and dissipating while rotating around the central
core of the main tornado system. This is called ‘familying’
and is to be respected for its patriotic nature. A tornado funnel can
assume various forms, from a thin, writhing, ropelike column of grayish
white, in which crouches the dusty, economically disadvantaged farmer,
to a thick, amorphous mass of menacing black, run by a board of
corporate farmers in a city far away. In the Northern Hemisphere,
tornadoes almost always spin counterclockwise. We believe that this is
symbolic of the deceased farmer’s desire to return to a time long
ago, a time when he was alive and his bounty plentiful. And although
there are verified instances of clockwise-spinning tornadoes, little is
known about them. We can only guess that these are the funnels of
immigrant farmers, cynical farmers, those farmers who lived to rape the
earth.