The Weather God of Oklahoma City

Bill McCullough for The New York Times

Gary England, the chief meteorologist at Channel 9 in Oklahoma City, at the studio.

I had heard stories about the special powers of Gary England, Tornado Alley's most famous weatherman: how he had tracked storms, back in the day, from a tiny attic office with a primitive radar repurposed from the nose of an airplane; how he had comforted, through the television screen, children who had been left alone in storms. As a nonresident of Oklahoma, however, I had never actually seen England's powers in action. This changed during my first few minutes at the Channel 9 Weather Center.

I was just settling in, unpacking my things, when England, whom I had yet to even meet, went running from his on-the-air command module to the studio's back door. Other meteorologists streamed after him.

England opened the big metal door and leaned outside. The weather over the parking lot looked exactly as it had for the last hour: a low, gray sky pouring steady rain, clouds sucked forward by a wind that would have been obscene anywhere else but in Oklahoma was just a stiff spring breeze. The trees seemed to be rolling their shoulders, loosening up for some vigorous activity to come.

England pointed to a red-and-white metal broadcast tower on the building's back lawn.

"Watch the tower," he said.

We all watched the tower.

A few seconds later he added, with the rhythmic precision of an orchestra conductor calling in the kettledrums, "It should be coming — right . . . now."

And then it came. The clouds accelerated, whipping past the tower as if fleeing something terrible. The rain went from a steady pour to dense, hectic, laser-targeted swarms coming at us sideways. The trees churned with new urgency.

England, having apparently seen all he needed to see, turned and left us at the door. It was unclear, to me at least, whether we had just witnessed a weather forecast or a feat of shamanism — if England was predicting or controlling the storm.

This was May 29, nine days after the tornado that devastated Moore and just as the weather was starting to get bad again.

England is the chief meteorologist at Channel 9 in Oklahoma City, a position he has held since 1972. This has made him a living legend in the state: the voice of public safety for roughly the last 2,000 tornadoes. Early in his career, he was notorious for issuing public tornado warnings before the National Weather Service did — a scandalous violation of hierarchy. He persuaded the owner of Channel 9 to invest in Doppler radar, a technology that promised to improve tornado-warning times to more than 20 minutes, from a single minute, before anyone was even sure it would work. (It did, spectacularly.) In the eyes of most Oklahomans, England is less a meteorologist than a benevolent weather god who routinely saves everyone's lives. He has become a cult figure: a combination of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Foghorn Leghorn, Atticus Finch, Dan Rather, Zeus and Uncle Jesse from "The Dukes of Hazzard." There is a popular Gary England drinking game that, if followed literally, would probably destroy as many lives through alcohol poisoning as extreme weather does. (Take one drink when Gary says any of the following: hook echo, updraft, metro, Doppler, wall cloud, SkyNews 9, underground, mobile home.) In the wreckage of the strongest tornado in recorded history — the one that hit Moore on May 3, 1999 — survivors painted "God Bless Gary England" and "Thanks Gary England for Getting Us Out Alive!!" on the remnants of their destroyed houses. A former governor of the state has described England as "omnipresent, like the clouds and the sun." If Oklahoma could speak, it would speak in the voice of Gary England, with a mild accent (the gentle synthesis of its neighbors' drawls and twangs) and in charming colloquialisms.

England's ancestors came to the state, in search of cheap farmland, before it was even a state. They settled out West, in the desolate area where Oklahoma shades into North Texas, and struggled to raise livestock between droughts and blizzards and dust storms and flash floods. England was born in 1939 in a country house with no electricity, by the light of a kerosene lamp; family lore has it that his parents paid the doctor in chickens. In high school, before England became fully fixated on the weather, he dreamed of being a pig farmer.

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