It’s 16:40 at JFK International Airport, and Jake Simmons anxiously sips his coffee three hours before his flight to Caracas, Venezuela. He drums his fingers on the table, hardly the figure I was expecting, but Jake Simmons is a contradiction. He’s a nervous flyer, which is a rather strange admission for one of stormchasers.com’s most daring reporters. If there’s a natural disaster, pending or aftermath, Jake is usually catching the next flight out to cover events on the ground.
Unlike herobeat.com, which focuses on the heroes, stormchasers.com caters to regular people hoping for that big break… that one in a billion lightning strike that triggers their Crisis Gene and imbues them with powers. The irony is, you really do have a better shot at being hit by lightning than getting superpowers, but that doesn’t matter to the thousands of visitors who click on stormchasers.com every week, looking for advice or sharing it. Part of me wonders if interviewing their star reporter is ethical, considering that 1 in every 100 Storm Chasers dies in a reckless stunt trying to get closer to natural disasters. That beats out mountain climbing in Nepal as the world’s most dangerous hobby. Even sky diving gives you better odds for survival at 1 in about 150,000.
Storm Chasers, however, are as much a part of the identity of the hero culture as the metahumans themselves, and every single superhero out there has at least one story that involves saving the life of a power groupie looking to self-trigger. So if I’m going to talk to any staffer, it’ll be Jake Simmons, seen by many within the field as the “The Voice of Reason.”
HERO BEAT: I have to ask… the Voice of Reason?
JAKE: [Laughing] Yeah, I don’t get it either. What they call reason, I just call common sense. Don’t go running out into a lightning storm holding an iron pipe over your head. Don’t walk out naked in the middle of an ice storm. Don’t go walking into certain favelas in Rio. Shit like that. A lot of people don’t get that metahumans are triggered when there’s a large-scale event happening… tsunamis, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, landslides. Running into danger just because it’s dangerous is the kind of ignorance I’m fighting against.
HERO BEAT: But your critics argue that you, your readers, you still risk life and limb for a one in a million longshot. So why take that kind of chance?
JAKE: For the same reason people play the lottery. Someone’s got to win. For other people, it’s destiny. They feel it in their bones… they were meant to be powered.
HERO BEAT: So, destiny or lottery?
JAKE: For me? Oh… definitely lottery.
HERO BEAT: So where is the lottery taking your tonight?
JAKE: To Venezuela, to Lake Maracaibo where the terrain and weather patterns create massive lightning storms that appear 180 nights a year for ten hours at a shot. It’s a re-occurring natural phenomenon that you can set your watch to.
HERO BEAT: You’ve covered this before, though. In fact, it’s one of your top pick destinations for Storm Chasers looking to trigger their Crisis Gene.
JAKE: It’s definitely insane—over 260 lightning flashes every hour. It’s breathtaking. I’d probably go even if I wasn’t gene-priming. I get together with other Storm Chasers to talk about the latest hotspots, but not this time. This time, I’m covering the Venezuelan Government’s grand opening of danger tourism and the new Maracaibo Resort.
HERO BEAT: Other companies catered to danger tourism and Storm Chasers first though, right?
JAKE: Definitely. You have Sagarmāthā Unlimited in Nepal that takes Storm Chasers up Everest, and there’s Do or Die that offers to take their clients into the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia. But this is the first time that danger tourism is being sanctioned by a government. I’m really curious to see what kind of tourist shop they have set up at Maracaibo Resort.
HERO BEAT: You don’t sound convinced.
JAKE: I’m not sure I buy what it’s saying in the brochure… four people triggered at Maracaibo over the last year? I doubt it, but I’m also a realist, right? Danger Tourism happens in poor countries. There you are, running into mudslides and standing on beaches waiting for a tsunami to come, but this is some poor village’s reality. You’re there as some privileged Westerner hoping to get a superpower, and you see everyone who has to live this poverty and shit on a yearly basis. So I get it when the Venezuelan Government and the locals try cashing in on this. If we’re going to treat their backyard like it’s our playground, they might as well make us pay for the privilege.
HERO BEAT: Is there a fear that this kind of recognition might diminish the adventure or the… authenticity?
JAKE: Purists are always going to bitch about how they were the first ones there, and there’s the very real risk that when a location hits the mainstream, the area gets flooded with amateurs who become a liability to themselves and each other. But even then, most of the hardcore Storm Chasers I know don’t bother with tourist traps like Maracaibo or Everest. They minimize population creep—when too many people ruin your odds—and maximize the danger in places like the Antarctic during winter, or aboard trawlers heading into an Atlantic Storm. Most Storm Chasers want to minimize their personal risk or discomfort, which is self-defeating. The serious ones? They know that powers happen in that potential last second of your life when you’ve got one foot firmly in the grave and no idea where the other foot is. I hate to say it, but the real Storm Chasers we lost were probably the closest to triggering than anyone else.
HERO BEAT: Going back to your readers, they seem to cover a wide-ranging audience.
JAKE: Yeah. I guess that was the one thing I wasn’t expecting. When I first started blogging, I knew I was going to speak to like-minded chasers who were as serious about it as I was. But when our site started getting covered in the Comedy News outlets and Entertainment News, we started attracting curiosity seekers and daredevils.
HERO BEAT: You called it the Vulture Culture meets Jackass in one of your articles.
JAKE: God, yes. People love watching other people fuck up a disaster surfing attempt, and our segment on Storm Chaser Fails is huge. We avoid showing death and significant injury, obviously, but remember when I mentioned common sense? We see a huge lack of it in the videos we get.
HERO BEAT: Are you ever worried that it waters down the legitimacy of your site?
JAKE: Initially, yeah, but the number of readers who stuck around for the more serious articles and discussions was amazing. I was never expecting those kinds of numbers, and now, people come to the site to read me, to read about my experiences as a Storm Chaser. It’s incredible.
HERO BEAT: So here’s the question on everyone’s mind. Has anyone won the lottery yet?
JAKE: On record, no. But off record, I’m friends with two Storm Chasers who put themselves in harm’s way and ended up triggering.
HERO BEAT: Why off the record? You’d think this would validate all the risks they took.
JAKE: I actually asked them that, but in the end, I think it came down to one thing. Survivor’s guilt. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t had a friend or acquaintance die during Storm Chasing. Or seen someone die during a natural disaster. When the Crisis Gene finally triggers, I think the question switches from “Someone’s got to win,” to “why was I lucky enough to win.”
STAY TUNED NEXT WEEK WHEN WE CONTINUE OUR CONVERSATION WITH JAKE SIMMONS AND HIS EXPERIENCES STORM CHASING.