AP Photo

Just a few hours before a tornado touched down in Queens, New York this past September, I was hanging out on a beach in The Rockaways, a narrow peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic just southeast of Brooklyn (though it is technically a part of Queens). The storm hadn't rolled in yet, but the wind had-- little white clouds raced across the sky, sand flew through the air above the beach, and, along the shoreline, huge globs of foam blew off the water and collected on the beach in thick, jiggling blankets of yellowish-white.