Tim had brought along no such thing, nor had he ever drawn one up. He told Brown he’d be back, and the next day, sure enough, he walked in with a yellow sheet of paper summarizing, in handwriting, his limited experience. Brown had to admire Tim’s gumption. The kid had brass, but no experience beyond working in a mom-and-pop radio-repair shop. Yet here he was, twenty years old, with no college education, and he’s knocking on the door of one of the premier research contractors in the West. Despite the fact that Tim was staggeringly unqualified on paper, Brown saw something in the young man. He couldn’t explain it, but he could look past the thin résumé to what Tim might become. Brown had been building research organizations for years; he prided himself on spotting talent and had long ago learned to listen to his gut. He offered Tim the job.
The young technician was given little time to acclimate at DRI, and as it turned out Tim didn’t need it. A quick study, he taught himself as much electrical engineering and physics as was demanded by his duties: namely, testing and exploding weapons systems. Before he was old enough to drink, he had already earned himself a Pentagon security clearance.
Among his earliest projects was a mammoth conventional-explosives test, which was to be the largest of its kind ever attempted. At White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, not far from the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated, DRI had some 4,440 tons of ammonium nitrate explosive and fuel oil (ANFO) rigged to blow. Under the aegis of what was then known as the Defense Nuclear Agency, the Cold War–era test was intended to simulate the blast of a nuclear weapon.
To measure the blast wave, which would require detail right on down to the millisecond, the agency had contracted with Brown’s posse of hotshots to handle the high-speed instrumentation. Brown’s techs were consummate MacGyvers, accustomed to dreaming up weird solutions to complex problems. To track the blast’s cratering characteristics and the flight of ejected rubble, they buried bowling balls stuffed with flares. At T-minus one second, the flares would ignite, allowing cameras to trace their smoking arcs across the sky.
Tim’s role was to manage the more than one hundred ultra-high-speed cameras arrayed around the site. Triggering each at exactly the right moment was an engineering feat in itself—a far cry from repairing a CB on the fritz. The cameras were state-of-the-art machines worth more than Tim’s annual salary, each capable of inhaling film at rates of anywhere from 5,000 to more than 200,000 frames per second. At that speed, the canister could empty in two seconds or less. His sequencer had to trigger each camera just seven-tenths of a second before the explosion. If activated too early, they would run out of film; too late and they wouldn’t be up to speed. Tim knew he’d only get one shot.
The day of the test, he and Brown were hunkered down in a small bunker under roughly four feet of earth. They were less than a mile from the ANFO, closer than anyone else. At T-minus zero, observers saw a point of light, and from it the shock wave grew. It traveled upward and out, an expanding, translucent dome, the density of the air at its leading edge bending the light. They felt it in their feet before they felt it in the air. Tim and Brown were sure to keep their legs slightly bent; the sudden upward lurch of the earth would be painful to locked knees. A wall of sound washed over them and, after that, the negative phase, as a vacuum was created in the blast wave’s wake. Tim felt every pulse as the fist of smoke, fire, and soil rose from a crater some 250 feet deep into the New Mexico sky. The test had gone flawlessly, exhilaratingly. It was a moment—among many others on the test range—that would stick with Tim: if even a nuclear explosion could be simulated, studied, picked apart, and known, what couldn’t be?
The six young engineers at DRI became like brothers. When handling 30,000-joule lasers and military-grade explosives, each entrusted his life to the man working next to him. They traveled often, to White Sands or the Suffield Research Centre, near Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. The hours were long through the week, and on the weekend they were often together, grilling burgers and drinking beer. The tumbleweed ethos of the rootless, traveling geek was a lifestyle, and Tim became its embodiment: seldom home and usually without significant attachment.
By all appearances, he had been right about college. He had settled into a regular job—albeit a spectacular, adrenaline-charged one—where he was adored by his boss and colleagues and could be fully himself. Although his schedule now left little time for going up to Red Rocks and watching storms, his path was unfolding better than he could have hoped. He was a young man getting acquainted with life on his own—a happy, carefree, relatively unmomentous life—or so it certainly seemed for a time.
Then, on a winter day in 1980, he met the woman who would become his wife. Kathy Videtich had big, watchful blue eyes above high cheekbones, framed by permed brown hair. Formerly of DRI’s travel office, where she made accommodations and booked flights, she had recently been transferred to the chemistry division when Tim strolled up to her desk to request a few thermometers for an oil-shale project. Kathy couldn’t help but appraise the trim, dark-headed young man. It wasn’t simply that he was handsome and had a nice smile, though she would remember these things about him after he’d taken his leave. The detail that stuck out about him was that this small fellow had brought with him two full sandwiches for lunch. She would carry that odd first memory of him forevermore, the image of a young man who’d retained the metabolism of a thirteen-year-old boy—and the rabid curiosity as well.
Tim was smitten from the start, but he wouldn’t see her again for more than a month. By then, Kathy had left DRI altogether. Yet, by chance, on January 31, 1981, Tim and a friend sauntered into the bar where Kathy was celebrating her new job as a legal secretary in a downtown law firm. Her girlfriend showed interest in Tim, but it was Kathy who absorbed his complete attention. Within an hour, their chemistry was undeniable. Tim thought her beautiful and down-to-earth. Kathy thought he was unlike any other twenty-three-year-old she’d ever met. He had goals, dreams; he was going somewhere. At the end of the night, she furtively slipped him her phone number.
The fledgling romance rapidly intensified, in spite of Tim’s demanding travel schedule. That was, after all, one of the reasons Larry Brown had hired him. He was young, untethered, able to split town at any time. But when he was home, he and Kathy were inseparable. One night, while she was cooking dinner for him, he looked at her thoughtfully for a moment and announced, “You’re the missing piece to the puzzle I’ve been trying to put together.”
On March 26, after less than two months of courtship, he asked her to marry him.
That April, they bought a place of their own in Lakewood, just southwest of Denver. The outside was brown brick with white siding. Inside, there was a big basement for Tim’s workshop. Two tall maples threw deep shade onto the front yard in summer. The wide street was quiet and lined with similar houses, which emptied young children onto the sidewalks, front yards, and driveways. Tim had grown up less than two miles away; in fact, his parents still lived nearby. Tim and Kathy’s children could eventually attend Alameda High School, as he had. It was the perfect place to start a family.
In December 1981, they were married in a small chapel at the University of Denver, with Larry Brown and the full DRI crew on-site to celebrate. From the start, Tim believed that if they waited for the right time to have children, the right time would never come. So, in April 1983, Amy was born. Jenny followed in December 1984. With Kathy staying home to raise the babies, money was tight. To keep up with the mortgage, Tim worked Saturdays and some nights at a radio-repair shop near Broadway and Eighth, as he had in high school. Given the nature of his job, he was also frequently away from the family. Six days a week he was working, though it never seemed to wear him down. When he was home, especially on Sundays, he was in full-swing dad mode, changing diapers and making up games for the girls. “He’s always gone at a hundred miles per hour,” Kathy says.
Their family of four was all Tim could ask for. Then, on April Fool’s Day 1988, he return
ed home from the test range to some surprising news. Kathy declared that another Samaras was on the way. Tim wasn’t convinced at first; they had taken every precaution. They asked the doctor to confirm the test, and when there was no longer any doubt, he shrugged: “Okay, I guess we’re having three!”
Kathy went into premature labor that September and was placed on bed rest and medication. On October 31, the doctor took her off the drugs. Though the child’s due date was December 3, she expected to go back into labor within days. The contractions came on Tim’s birthday, November 12, and within hours the couple welcomed Paul Timothy—all six pounds, twelve ounces of him—into the world. Tim now had a little boy he could dress up as a foam tornado for Halloween, replete with cutout bolts of lightning.
* * *
It was around the time of Paul’s birth that the old familiar urge returned. It had gripped Tim as a young man and had since been subsumed by the demands of adult life. Now, he began to look up at the sky again.
Kathy had long ago accepted that Tim would never be like other husbands. His work was unusual and potentially hazardous, and she knew there were some things he wasn’t supposed to talk about. He could not, for example, go into much detail about the Patriot missiles he tested. He traveled often, and there was always some project pulling him away. But this new thing was perplexing. Why couldn’t he take up golfing, bowling—hell, even model airplanes like his father? Why did he have to start driving off in search of what everyone else runs from?
What was he looking for out there? What did he expect to find?
CHAPTER THREE
* * *
THIS LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE SKY
THE URGE RETURNS the way it first began: with a tornado on television. “Tornado!,” a 1985 episode of NOVA on PBS, shadows a team of storm-chasing scientists. They race across the plains, hauling with them a hardened weather instrument dubbed the Totable Tornado Observatory, or TOTO for short. Their goal: to deploy it into the toughest environment imaginable, the heart of a tornado. These men don’t wait for the beast to come to them, they hunt it down—they chase.
This is an altogether novel idea for Tim. Nothing has gripped him like this since he was a kid, when The Wizard of Oz rooted him in his chair at his parents’ dining table.
He wants do what these men do.
Because a smart man does not simply decide one day to take off after a tornado-warned storm, Tim’s forays into chasing emerge gradually. In the late 1980s, Tim is like the swimmer dipping his toe in to test the water. Whenever the big black clouds form over Denver during the late-spring afternoons, he starts to drive out to the edge of town to watch, the way he did when he was in high school. He doesn’t know how to forecast. He can’t tell the difference between a garden-variety rainmaker and a dangerous thunderstorm. He cranes upward at the underside of its gusting advance, watching the clouds flow and break like waves across the surface of the ocean.
Then one day, while his son is still in diapers, this isn’t enough. Tim doesn’t stop at the edge of town. He keeps driving, farther out—and the next time, farther still.
He begins to tackle tornadoes in the methodical way he does everything else: he studies them, figures out how they work, just as he did many years before with his mom’s blender. For the first time in his life he enjoys going to class and sitting at a desk. In 1990 he enrolls in a six-week, forty-hour basic meteorology and storm-spotting course through SKYWARN, a program that trains chasers to become the National Weather Service’s eyes and ears on the ground.
Tim learns all about the parts of the storm he has seen but couldn’t name: that a storm’s monstrous rotating cloud base is called a mesocyclone; that the tornado emerges from the wall cloud, which forms at the bottom of the thunderhead. He learns why Tornado Alley is such a powder keg, with two powerful currents of air—one from the west, dry and warm out of the Rockies; one from the southeast, moist and volatile out of the Gulf of Mexico—colliding here each spring. The atmospheric boundary where they meet is called the dry line, a north-south fissure from Texas to the Dakotas, which acts as a reliable factory for severe storms.
There’s a sequence, Tim learns, to thunderhead formation. At the dry line, the air current out of the west will often sit atop the air from the Gulf, in what’s called a capping inversion or a cap. The top layer then acts like the lid on a heating pot, blocking the lower-level air from rising until it has soaked up enough of the sun’s energy to boil over. The cap can sometimes snuff out a brewing storm, or it can be the starting gun for the biggest behemoths of all. If the volatile Gulf air can break the cap, it races upward, sometimes clocking more than one hundred miles per hour. Thunderheads like mountains in the sky form in moments—all out of a remarkable alchemy of humidity, temperature, pressure, and flow. All out of ingredients that the diligent chaser can monitor and log.
Tim teaches himself rudimentary forecasting the same way he taught himself electrical engineering. Before a chase, he plots a weather map on paper, with an arrangement of dew points and surface observations, usually gleaned from a call to NWS Boulder. After that, it’s a matter of identifying the time and the place where the sky will explode, like a mountain of ammonium nitrate. To be able to predict, drive out, and reap the reward of that first crash of thunder overhead: it’s better than hearing any number of radios crackle back to life.
In the years before smartphones, radar apps, or even the Internet, SKYWARN is the only outlet through which a chaser on the move can access real-time weather updates—short of finding a pay phone. The group has installed a liaison in the Boulder weather service office, who relays the latest information. One must simply set the ham radio frequency to 146.94 kilohertz and tune in.
Before long, Tim is finding himself in the right place at the right time. He’s racing those big black clouds, antennas swaying like reeds from the roof of the Datsun, accompanied by only the sound of Morse code bleating from his ham radio and the baritone wind over the Colorado plains. Weather service radar can detect tornadic circulation within the storm, but that doesn’t always mean a tornado is on the ground. That’s where SKYWARN comes in. The organization’s trained spotters provide what’s known as ground truth. Tim starts volunteering for the role, and he quickly develops a reputation as a spotter whose reports are reliable. He isn’t one of those guys who cries “twister” when he sees stray tatters of cloud or dense rain shafts. No, he’s got an eye for this.
In the early years, his excitement seems directly proportional to the amount of gadgetry in the Datsun. The stuff accumulates like mounds of coral. When there is no room left in 1994, Tim colonizes a used blue ’91 Dodge Caravan he dubs Dryline Chaser. He mounts a crude satellite receiver that allows him to access some low-resolution radar feeds midchase. By adjusting the elevation and azimuth of the dish, he can pick up the Weather Channel from even the most lonesome corners of the state. Next, he defiles the interior of the minivan by sawing a hole into its dash to hold a nine-inch VGA monitor and 486 PC. Now he has at his fingertips an electronic DeLorme map with every nameless dirt road. More than likely, much of this gear is found lying around the shop or scavenged at the Aurora Repeater Association’s annual Swapfest. Tim is, if nothing else, a bit of a cheapskate. He can cobble together working instruments out of what looks like junk. Over at DRI, they call it kludging, which means being resourceful and making an invention work with what you have at hand. But for all the half-improvised, battery-draining toys in the Dryline Chaser, he considers the CD player to be his most essential tool. Neil Young and Eric Clapton stay in heavy rotation.
On storm days, Tim is out the door a little after lunch, beating rush-hour traffic with Pat Porter, his brother-in-law, to catch thunderstorms inundating the southern and eastern suburbs. The Denver Convergence-Vorticity Zone—a place where the terrain often creates its own swirling winds—is a favorite hunting ground. Or they post up at Barbecue Point, a flat crossroads near Aurora, where a lightning strike once roasted a couple of cows.
After the
initial shock, Kathy acclimates to all of Tim’s carrying on about storms. He doesn’t start blowing money they don’t have to spend. He remains a good husband and an attentive father. As far as vices go, chasing clouds each year when storms roll around isn’t all that bad. Yet she can’t help noticing that this love affair with the sky is deepening. He’s joining the ranks of a distinctly fanatical club.
The lengths to which some chasers will go to preserve their freedom during the plains storm season, lasting from April through June each year, is nothing short of astounding. One weather nut scheduled his wedding for the dead of winter expressly because it meant that his anniversary would never conflict with his chasing. Another refuses to accept the leash of any nine-to-five gig that would limit his ability to fully enjoy the sacred month of May. “You can have a nice, cushy job, but to me it’d be a nightmare not to be able to have an adventure,” says chaser Dan Robinson. “I don’t want the big house and picket fence.”
Tim begins to schedule his vacations at the beginning of May through the end of June. A few years in, word of his abilities has already begun to reach beyond the insular world of chasers. His face ends up on a 1992 cover of the local alt weekly Westword, which contains profiles of him and a few other Denver storm geeks. “Some call it a hobby, some call it an addiction,” Tim tells the reporter. “I think it’s more of an obsession with me.” He says he dreams of buying acreage out where the storms darken the plains of eastern Colorado and erecting an antenna farm for his ham radio.
The beast of Last Chance notwithstanding, by the midnineties Tim has outgrown the meager twisters of Colorado, and the casual day chases in his backyard. He starts roaming farther and farther afield, in pursuit of the “Panhandle magic” of the Lone Star State, and the storied monsters of Oklahoma—the stuff he’s seen only on tape. It is as if he’s fallen under the tornado’s spell, which lures him away from home each spring and lies dormant in the fall.
The Man Who Caught the Storm Page 3