The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  By 1995, the Dryline Chaser is now recognizable in the empty northeastern tip of the Texas Panhandle and all the far-flung locales that have been calling him. On the afternoon of March 25, Tim and Porter are filming in Lipscomb County as the sky starts to boil in ways most people hope never to witness. The wind blasts Tim’s back and he peers upward to see something burrowing through the bottom of the storm, fine tentacles sweeping and probing the air. Next comes a sign that even a newbie couldn’t miss: that first welter of dust kicking up out of the prairie. “There it goes,” he intones. Each time he’s caught on tape, there’s wonder in his voice, as though this is his first time.

  Tim and Porter are soon racing down county roads. They cross the border into Oklahoma, the odometer maxed out at ninety, the mesquite fence posts blurring past, and the tornado falling away across a prairie that stretches to the limit of the eye.

  The two can disappear this way into the interior of the continent for days or a week at a time. As the obsession deepens, Tim develops his own vernacular to describe what he’s witnessing. He calls sheer vertical tornadoes cigars. The inflow stratus are beavertails. He talks about storms the way a collector might describe a Shelby Mustang. “Hard knuckles on the anvil,” he enthuses. “Striations on the side. This is more than just a classic!”

  And he is a collector, after a fashion—but of images and experiences, not things. The trophy is the right forecast. It’s being able to say he was there—that in the vastness of the plains, he found the needle. The euphoric rush of pulling up just in time to see the cloud wisps gather and descend—it’ll never get old.

  If he’s that lucky, he can also tend to more earthly concerns. Tim usually sells the footage to local television stations to cover his costs. At the end of the chase, he drops a line to his buddy Mike Nelson, the chief meteorologist over at Denver’s NBC affiliate, KUSA. Often, Tim is calling in from Limon or some other town at the edge of the state: “I got some great stuff out in Kansas. Would you like it?”

  And at 9:30 p.m., he shows up at the station’s front door with a tape, just in time to turn it around for the ten o’clock news. If it’s from Tim Samaras, Nelson knows it’s good. Tim is one of the few guys who shows up with images of the thing in action, not the wrecked houses of its aftermath. Around the station, he has become something of a folk hero, this friendly dude who appears periodically bearing unbelievable video. Nelson occasionally hosts Q-and-A seminars on weather, and Tim is a regular guest. An introvert no more, when he talks about tornadoes, his voice comes alive.

  He once sends Nelson a video intended to dispel any illusions the audience might hold about the glamorous life of a chaser. He has the camera rolling inside his motel room in western Kansas, panning over its modest furnishings. Then he zooms in on a framed picture of the actor Michael Landon, best known as the father in Little House on the Prairie. The sticker on the frame reads MICHAEL LANDON SLEPT HERE. Tim’s hand can be seen gently nudging the frame aside to reveal a gaping hole in the drywall.

  Such is life in pursuit of tornadoes. The miles are long, the food is often gastrointestinal dynamite, and the lodging is humble. Tim wouldn’t change anything.

  * * *

  When the spring and early summer have passed, and the sky quiets down, life regains familiar outlines in the Samaras household. Tim drops the kids off at school on his way to work. To Amy’s profound embarrassment, the family minivan bristles with all manner of satellite receivers and lengthy antennae, each wobbling as the garish vehicle comes to a stop in front of her gawking classmates. While Kathy helps lead Amy’s Girl Scout troop, Tim becomes the leader of Jenny’s troop. He’s believed to be the first male troop leader in the state. The little girls in his charge have mostly been raised by their mothers, and Tim’s style of den-mothering is new to them. They don’t knit or bake. Instead, they build model rockets.

  Tim is also a popular attraction on Career Day, when Jenny proudly parades her father in front of her spellbound classmates, none of whom can claim a storm-chasing dad. He’s equally effective when it comes to homework, especially with any assignment that might involve engineering. Tim is often far more invested in Jenny’s science projects than she is, and the result—say, a tiny car powered by a mousetrap—always betrays a degree of technological sophistication she worries her teachers will find suspicious. Either that, she laughs, or they believe they’ve discovered a budding prodigy.

  The childhoods of Amy, Jenny, and Paul fill up with uncommon sights. During one Fourth of July, Tim ignites a small chunk of solid propellant he’d scavenged from a Titan rocket. The kids watch from the safety of the living-room window as the fuel hisses and sends up a pale blue pillar of flame—a small taste of his work on the test range. As they get older, he also gives them glimpses of his all-consuming passion. They don’t see much when he takes Amy chasing. But when he brings Paul and Jenny with him on a brief jaunt near Aurora, they find a funnel cloud hovering like a white proboscis over the foothills.

  “Paul,” Jenny’s breathless voice can be heard saying in Tim’s recording, “can you see it?”

  Kathy has never chased with Tim and has no real desire to do so. What could possibly be so enjoyable about driving for days on end from dawn to dusk? She’ll never find out, and she’s fine with that. She has instead come to understand Tim’s chasing as another odd wrinkle of the one-of-a-kind man she loves—a mostly harmless preoccupation whose biggest cost is Tim’s absence once May and June arrive.

  It is often said of Tim that to chase as frequently as he does, he must have an incredibly tolerant boss and, more important, a saintly wife. Chasing has been known to place an insupportable strain on even the sturdiest relationships. “I have had numerous girlfriends leave me because of storm chasing,” says Ben McMillan, a friend of Tim’s. “You’re a normal person eight months out of the year, but then spring comes and your life completely changes.” Infidelities have also been known to occur on the road, a testament to how the long weeks away can corrode.

  But Tim and Kathy are a special pair. They both know how lucky they are to have found each other. When he’s gone, Tim does all he can never to make her worry. Before he settles in for the night in Kansas or wherever, he calls to let her know that he is safe, and to tell her about his day. And she tells him about hers, sending along updates from their two beautiful girls and son. The connection holds strong, whether they’re next to each other on the couch or separated by hundreds of miles of flatlands.

  Kathy tries as best she can not to dwell on the inherent danger of her husband’s pastime. She considers it, or course, but always returns to the same conclusion: This is Tim, the deliberate, conscientious man she can depend on. “I believed in him, and I knew him, and I guess I just had complete faith that he would stay safe,” she says.

  For now, there’s little to fear. Tim has no reason to place himself in danger. Chasing is about tape, film, and experience—it’s about testing himself against the inconceivable complexity of the atmosphere. But soon, he will need more—and he’ll be able to do more. As anyone who knows him would tell you, Tim has never been content merely to observe. Ever since he was a boy, his need to understand has been compulsive, consuming. Tim Samaras can’t help but take something apart just to figure out what makes it tick. And over the last few years, he has built up a skill set that could allow him not simply to acquaint himself with the field of tornado science, but to drive it forward.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  THE SPARK

  AS A STORM assembles, as the clouds darken and swirl, scientists are often blind to what sets a serious thunderstorm apart from an extraordinary tornado. It could be as subtle as a shift in the direction of the wind, or a break in the clouds that lets the sun shine through. The direct causes are rarely recognized as they happen. The triggers of an EF5 may become clear only after the sky has exploded.

  In the spring of 1997, Tim receives an unexpected phone call. As it rings, he has no idea that this conversation could ch
ange the course of his life, or that he sits amid a vast sea of forces just one nudge away from alignment. He’d never be able to know it at the time—but the click, as he picks up his phone, is the shift that sparks the storm.

  The man on the other end of the line is a mechanical engineer from Huntsville, Alabama, named Frank Tatom. He runs his own firm specializing in the dynamics of turbulent flow and explosive damage, and he has found Tim’s name in a search for tornado chasers across the Midwest. He has a proposal that he thinks Tim will want to hear.

  Eight years ago, Tatom begins, a violent twister entered the southern sector of Huntsville before the sirens could sound. Nobody saw it coming. The tornado cut across highways choked with rush-hour traffic, killing eleven people. Another eight died in their homes and businesses. Two other victims held on for a while before succumbing to their injuries in the hospital. Huntsville looked like a war zone. The damage path was a half mile at its widest, and nearly nineteen miles long.

  Tatom had been reeling just like everyone else, but amid all the heartbreak and pain, one story struck an odd note to his engineer’s ear, if only for its inexplicability. A man working at a service station told Tatom that minutes before the tornado arrived, he had the hood up on a woman’s car. Suddenly, the ground beneath his feet began to tremble. Even the motor in front of him seemed to vibrate like a tuning fork. He didn’t know what was coming, but he grabbed the woman and pulled her into the service station. “The man took her to his office, threw her down near the counter, and jumped on top of her,” Tatom relates to Tim. Then, they heard the roar, faint at first but soon deafening. The building took a direct hit, and the two were flung into the street, rattled but miraculously alive.

  The story made Tatom’s hair stand on end, and the more he looked around, the more he discovered the man’s experience wasn’t unique. The choir leader at Trinity Methodist felt the vibrations through his feet as he sheltered in the church basement. Both a police officer and the city’s emergency manager reported the same sensations. Tatom went to the nearest US Geological Survey office. The geologists there confirmed a low-frequency seismic signature—a series of apparent shock waves that accompanied the storm.

  In the years following the tornado, Tatom couldn’t stop thinking about the vibrations on that terrible day. Could the wind really have caused the earth to tremble? He and an expert in soil dynamics and seismic signals at the University of Alabama decided to chase down the hypothesis. With their combined expertise, in 1993, Tatom and Dr. Stanley Vitton concluded that the tales of tremors weren’t at all far-fetched. In fact, they surmised, the most violent tornadoes transferred a jaw-dropping amount of force into the earth—the energy equivalent of half a ton of TNT per second.

  Tatom’s bold idea finally clicked into place: What if seismic sensors could have warned Huntsville back in 1989?

  Tatom has since devised a prototype instrument package he calls the snail. Its components are quite simple: an aluminum basin from Walmart houses a battery, and a recorder microprocessor that’s connected by cable to a geophone—a sensor used to detect seismic signals with three sensitive transducer prongs plunged into the ground. Theoretically, the device should be able to detect tornadoes at a distance of twenty-five miles. The idea is to position snails at intervals around the city as a kind of early-warning network.

  By the time he calls up Tim, NOAA and the Department of Commerce have already awarded Tatom a Small Business Innovation Research grant to take the snails to Phase I: production and testing. He now needs to prove his concept by deploying the snail near a violent tornado. This is where Tim comes in. Tatom is just an engineer, he explains—a man of equations and microprocessors and laboratories. He knows nothing whatsoever about hunting twisters. But Tim’s prowess as a chaser precedes him.

  Can you get my invention close to a tornado? Tatom asks. Can you help me find out if it actually works?

  What he’s proposing sounds a great deal like the NOVA documentary Tim saw years ago, in which scientists lugged their high-tech TOTO probe across the plains in pursuit of scientific knowledge. It’s the very notion that started Tim chasing.

  Send the snail, Tim replies.

  Before the spring storm season arrives, a single snail—number five in the fleet—is delivered to his doorstep in Lakewood. Examining the instrument, fashioned out of household fixtures and seismic sensors, Tim may as well be looking into his future. If the phone call was the spark, this glorified sink basin is the first rising thunderhead. He practices deploying the snail and its geophones in his yard, closely watching the weather patterns for the shape of the year’s first tornado. He won’t wait long.

  Tim and his brother-in-law, Pat Porter, gear up to hit the plains on Memorial Day weekend. Tim is more excited than he has ever been about a chase; this one will be unlike any he has ever embarked on. Gathering footage and sending ham radio updates to SKYWARN have never required proximity. Deploying the snail, however, will mean heaving aside nearly every piece of chaser wisdom he’s ever absorbed. What happens to the first and only rule—don’t get too close—when close is exactly what Tatom needs?

  Tim has never considered himself a daredevil. He has always avoided entering the rain and hail core that directly surround the funnel. He stays out of the tornado’s way. But if he is to succeed now, he may well have to deliberately enter the path. Tim has enjoyed storms for roughly a decade now, but there’s something newly electrifying about working for Tatom. It’s not just the adrenaline rush, though that’s undeniable. What strikes Tim now is a new sense of purpose. It is time, he decides, to use his storm-tracking skills for more consequential ends.

  * * *

  On May 25, 1997, Tim and Porter drive through northwest Oklahoma, near the city of Woodward. To the north, storm cells are popping up. They cross into Kansas and soon park next to a wheat field ten miles north of the border. Just south of Rome, Kansas, at a dogleg in the Arkansas River, their necks crane to the west, across cottonwood-lined creeks and tracts of wheat and sorghum, toward the bluff crags of a thunderstorm. They can’t see it yet, but the NOAA weather radio indicates that somewhere behind the far line of trees, beneath all that rain-sheathed darkness, a tornado moves east-northeast. Tim centers his camera frame and begins to narrate: “There’s a reported tornado on the ground right now.”

  From this distance, he can see the broad span of the storm, from its base to its mushrooming anvil. “A classic,” he exclaims. “We have monster rotation here. Likely, we’re going to have to move east. Just a little bit, that is. Time: 7:32. This is an incredibly impressive storm.”

  As it nears, a form emerges out of the murk in the west. It’s like the trunk of a great tree, the color of a livid bruise: hundreds of yards across, its canopy fans into restless clouds. With the inflow at his back, Tim can feel it breathe. He watches the wind thresh the wheat at the edge of the road and sees a cold blue glow spill through the clouds above the tornado. As windrows of dust kick up above the tree line, the tornado undergoes a sudden and detectable hardening. It’s feeding, growing stronger. “No question about it,” Tim announces. “That is a huge, huge tornado.”

  He stands there for a while longer, projecting its heading with his eyes. Then he piles into the Dryline Chaser and, for the first time, drives toward its path. He and Porter reposition onto a gravel road adjoining an unfenced, fallow field, and when he’s satisfied, Tim stops and steps out into the wind. The dark shag on his head tosses in the rising gale. He wears blue jeans, a white T-shirt, an unbuttoned denim jacket, and running shoes. He opens the minivan’s rear hatch, revealing a compartment bursting with luggage. After retrieving a large, stiffened case, he sets it gently down onto the road, pops the latches, and uncovers the humped profile of the snail, which Tatom has painted bright orange for visibility. With the snail tucked securely under his left arm, Tim sets out.

  This time, he isn’t following at a cautious distance. The tornado is coming for him, and instead of running away, Tim is jogging in the directio
n of the darkness. It lurks just across the field, beyond the windbreak trees, as Tim jumps off the road and onto bare dirt.

  He kneels, lowers the shell, and drives the geophone’s prongs into the silt loam. Lightning stitches the horizon, and there he is, crouching in the furrows as this shadow like something out of a fable rumbles and moans. He points toward the tornado with his left arm and angles his right arm to the northeast, gauging trajectory. He says something, but whatever it is gets lost in the wind and thunder. Tim rises and hustles back to the minivan. There’s a change in his voice when he speaks again; it’s never sounded like this on a chase before. Usually he’s full of glee and boyish astonishment. Now his voice sounds forceful, deadly serious, that of a man at dire work: “Time: 7:45. Snail deployed.”

  They wait for a moment until dust hangs like a curtain in the air and Tim knows that the big winds are on their way. They bail ten miles to the southwest and to safety, parking at a Motel 6 near Interstate 35, in South Haven. The power is out and the motel and its parking lot are dark. To the north, electrical transformers arc briefly like lightning bugs in the night.

  * * *

  The next morning, Tim and Porter return to the deployment site near Rome. Trees with nude branches lean against a nearby house. Power poles are strewn across the field like felled timber. Tim calls Frank Tatom with the news. He’s talking fast. The snail was close, and the instrument survived. More important, it’s still recording.

  In fact, of all the snails in the fleet Tatom has entrusted to various chasers, Tim is the only one who gets near a tornado. He’s good at this. What’s more, he has flourished in the excitement, the danger, and the purpose. This can’t be the end, Tim thinks. He has gotten a taste of what it means to become something more than just a watcher, and Tatom has shown him the way.