After the Storm Broke Open the Kansas Sky

Margaret Haines had farmed winter wheat outside Dodge City, Kansas, for thirty-seven years, but the June supercell of 2019 was something else entirely. She stood on her porch and watched the sky turn the color of a bruise — green-black and churning. Then the wind hit. It snapped a sixty-foot cottonwood clean in half like a man breaking a pencil.…