Dad said he’d mow the lawn. A tornado was coming. Nevertheless, he persisted. Thenius Wessels of Three Hills Canada was photographed in this amazing, now-viral shot, mowing the damn lawn in the shadow of a looming tornado.
Cecilia Wessels, who is his wife, shared the photo she took on Facebook: “My beast mowing the lawn with a breeze in his hair.”
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Cecilia says her husband planned to mow the lawn that day, and didn’t want the twister to get in the way of his to-do list.
Their daughter, 9, woke Cecilia up Thenius refused to come inside.
Dad insists the tornado was further away than the viral image suggests.
From the Canadian Press:
“I literally took the picture to show my mum and dad in South Africa, ‘Look there’s a tornado,’ and now everyone is like, ‘Why is your husband mowing the lawn?”‘ Cecilia Wessels said Saturday.
“Our whole street, everyone was on their back patios taking pictures,” she added.
Theunis Wessels said he was keeping watch of his surroundings and saw the twister form as the swirling connected from the sky and the ground to form the funnel.
Theunis said he watched a TV program about storm chasers, so he’s familiar with them.
The tornado moved away to the east, he said.
“It looks much closer if you look in the photo, but it was really far away. Well, not really far, far away, but it was far away from us,” he said.
“I was keeping an eye on it.”
[via Daily Beast]