BY Dan McGraw

This was Gold's first year operating his Silver Lining Tours. Like other tours, Gold's group meets in Oklahoma City- the heart of a wide swath of the Great Plains known as Tornado Alley. For the next 10 days, Gold and his driver and meteorological sidekick, Sean Lyons, would search for the best possible storm sites. The most absurd aspect of storm-chasing tours (aside from driving into menacing storms) is that you never know from day to day where you will end up. Could be North Dakota. Could be West Texas. One thing you can count on is a lot of driving, 600 miles on some days.

The group embarking on Silver Lining’s- tour seemed to have little in common. Francis Marley, a retired police officer from Worcester, Mass., and his wife, Veda, were given the tour by their children as a retirement gift. Meeno Vander a maritime meteorologist for the Dutch government wanted to see some American severe weather. Mark Chatten an information technologist in England had been studying meteorology since he was a kid. . Cindy Young, a shy book editor from Toronto, came because she had always been fascinated by severe weather, while Bill Hopkins, a software analyst from Austin, Texas, joined the tour to get over fears he harbored about tornadoes from his childhood in Lawrence, Kan.

 Over the next three days, we learned that storm chasing can be an inexact science at best. We spent 16-hour days driving and eating truck-stop food. The typical day would begin with Gold and Lyons hunkered in front of their laptop computer, downloading data that would predict wind speed and moisture content in different parts of the country. We would make our way toward the optimum area for tornadoes, and every two or three hours Gold would pull over at a truck stop to download more data. Having been chasing storms for 10 years, Gold seemed to know the location of every truck stop on the Great Plains. He favored those with phones at the tables (for easier downloading) and Subway sandwich shops.

From Kansas to Missouri to Nebraska and South Dakota, we found nothing. We'd drive for three hours. Stop to download. Gold would order a turkey sub and a Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink, study the latest radar, and mutter about conflicting models. We would drive three more hours. More Yoo-Hoos and turkey subs.

But on the fifth day, we awoke in Lincoln, Neb. to storm sirens wailing and news that Frank Sinatra had died. A tornado : had been spotted south of town and was moving toward us at 45 mph. While the Nebraska Legislature hid in the basement of the Capitol three blocks away, the tour camped on the hotel balcony, grabbing their video cam eras to record a storm with winds clocked at 100 mph. Gold was unimpressed. As he went to take a shower, he told the group, 'When you see rubble flying by get me." Gold knew that the real storms that day would be in central Iowa, near Ottumwa. And after the Lincoln storm passed, we loaded our vehicles and sped to the east. The conditions all day were eerie: A haze hung over the farmland, but the winds were blowing at about 30 mph and the temperature approached go degrees, conditions that breed catastrophic storms. 'I'm really afraid today," he confided to Charlie and me at a truck stop. "There is a good chance for storms of biblical proportions."

Black beast. We arrived in Ottumwa as the sirens began. Every few minutes an annoying woman on the radio kept telling us to seek the shelter of an interior room or to lie face down in a ditch. The storms were moving northeast at 45 mph, but the roads ran north-south and east-west in a grid. We drove the right angles; the storm followed the hypotenuse. We outran the black beast and hung with the roiling monster storm. And for the next 90 minutes, we stayed in front of that storm. Occasionally, it would drop a funnel, only to pull back. The sky was a yellowish purple, the wall cloud spinning and teasing, sometimes just a few hundred yards from the road. We chased, often at unsafe speeds, waiting for the tornado to form.

We came to Bellevue, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, and realized the road ended there. The nearest bridge was 25 miles away. We stood on the side of the road and watched as the wall cloud spun about 1,000 feet over our head. Ten minutes later, the storm dropped a tornado across the river.

I half expected the group to be bitterly disappointed, but they were exhilarated. They had come to see severe weather and were rewarded. Gold told Charlie and me that the storm we outran earlier in the day had spawned a "wedge" tornado a half-mile wide on the ground. The tornado flattened the town of Washington, Iowa (population 7,074) but lolled no one. At one point we were about 5 miles from the wedge tornado, and if we had gone straight instead of turning left, we would have run right into it.