The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  He knows there is only one way to gather such data, and he certainly has no intention of attempting to do so himself. He’s well aware that the danger and difficulty inherent in probe intercepts has been a stumbling block from TOTO to VORTEX. In most quarters of the scientific community, a probe intercept has come to be considered quixotic, likely reckless, and almost certainly impossible.

  The two aerospace engineers who report to Gallus have only a limited awareness of this fact. What they do know is that the profile of the vortex is incomplete. Without measurements from the boundary layer of an actual tornado for comparison, their simulator is based on theory—a glorified guesstimate.

  “You’re asking for too much,” Gallus says when they push him. He doesn’t know what the solution is, but he knows a dead end when he sees one. “We don’t have wind information at the ground,” he says. And they probably never will.

  That’s why Gallus can’t help but chuckle when he reads an email that has been forwarded to him by the Iowa-chapter president of the National Weather Association. Gallus and his colleagues have been busily rounding up guest speakers for the Seventh Annual Severe Storms and Doppler Radar Conference, scheduled for March 2003 in Des Moines. A man named Tim Samaras has written the organizers and made an offer that, to Gallus, betrays more than a little hubris.

  Tim has essentially invited himself to the conference, and he’s asking for the chapter to cover his costs. If so, Tim proposes, he will present data he has collected from tornadoes using his turtle probes. He confesses that, as of this writing, he has yet to place one directly inside the core, but Tim is confident he will do so soon.

  The email gets passed around among the leadership at NWA. That a prospective speaker has invited himself is the least outlandish aspect of the proposal. It is the nature of his mission that raises eyebrows. Among seasoned field scientists, stating one’s intent to deploy a probe inside a violent twister will surely be met with reflexive skepticism. Especially when the proposer is unassociated with any of the top universities or private research organizations. Gallus and many others have never heard of this Samaras fellow. Yet, standing in the shadow of the field’s top minds, he proclaims that he will accomplish what they never could?

  Tim has been told before that he is wasting his time, that the probe intercept is impossible. But even though they have their doubts, Gallus and the others can’t deny the brief pang of excitement at this sign that the dream has not died off completely. Because if by some wild chance Tim does manage to prevail, his data will be priceless.

  As Gallus finishes reading Tim’s email, he can’t help thinking, This guy is a yahoo. Yet Gallus has to admire his pluck.

  * * *

  Months later, in a cheap motel room, Tim gazes into the screen of his laptop with road-weary eyes. He and Pat Porter are up again at the crack of dawn, surrounded by a metastasizing accumulation of dirty laundry, in another tiny town somewhere in Nebraska. Tim scans an alphabet soup of acronymed weather models, searching for some clue above the Great Plains. The men scarf down their breakfast—a diner staple of eggs, biscuits, and bacon—as the day’s atmospheric variables flip over in Tim’s mind like a Rubik’s Cube. He’s anxious to get on the road.

  Storm chasing is a gamble, and for several weeks now Tim has played the odds, wagering thousands of dollars in gas, lodging, food, and an obscene number of miles ticking ever higher on the odometer of the family Dodge Caravan. He has spent his days behind the wheel, watching the hours transform the land. In theory, the objective is simple enough: find a tornado, get in front of it, drop the probes, and move the hell out of the way. In practice, Tim has come to terms with the fact that he is hunting ghosts. He got close in Pratt. He got close in Stratford. But the last few years have been a litany of busts and near misses. Perhaps he was wrong to believe that anything sets him apart from past hunters. Maybe the biggest issue with TOTO wasn’t the probe but the foe—unpredictable, untouchable, unbeatable.

  Another season is drawing to a close. The date is June 24, 2003, and a storm-killing high-pressure ridge will soon smother the plains with hot and bone-dry weather. The tornadic activity is shifting north, into Canada.

  Added to nature’s own encroaching deadline are the financial considerations. This year, he was able to get the National Geographic Society to underwrite his campaign to field the turtles, but without strong results there likely won’t be a second grant. This is the last day National Geographic Magazine’s embedded photographer, Carsten Peter, can remain on the road with Tim. Peter has already begged his editor for two extensions; the clock has run out.

  The small team finalizes the day’s target, and at around eleven that morning, they step outside into a warm, gusting wind out of the south. Slate-bellied clouds give the sunlight straining through a dingy cast. Tim and Porter climb into the minivan and head north; the photographer and his guides, Gene and Karen Rhoden, a husband-and-wife storm-chasing team, follow behind in an SUV. They plot a course for the Nebraska–South Dakota border, picking their way along a tangle of state roads and federal highways through the gently undulating, grassy dunes of the Sandhills. That afternoon, they are treated to their own private air show: a pair of dogfighting jets from Offutt Air Force Base dive and bank and launch flares that streak across an acetylene-blue sky.

  Tim doesn’t say much on the drive. As he steers for South Dakota, he begins to second-guess himself. Rhoden and the others had pressed for a play on the northern system of storms, which are likely to form somewhere near the border. Tim agreed, but he knows it risks missing an epic tornado farther south, in central Nebraska, Kansas, or Oklahoma. He’s been burned this way before. Normally he wouldn’t beat himself up—or even give doubt room to creep in. But Carsten Peter has just canceled yet another flight home to stay on, and NatGeo has invested thousands of dollars in his mission. They’re expecting . . . something. Tim knows his dream intercept is possible. Getting it is simply a matter of finding the right storm. On this day, though, the sheer size of the plains seems especially daunting.

  A few miles after crossing the Missouri River into South Dakota, they gas up and prepare for the chase. The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, has issued a tornado watch. Portions of Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and South Dakota are under the gun. Particularly around southeastern South Dakota, the weather service describes the atmospheric instability as on the “extreme” end of the scale. It looks like the Rhodens were right—and, moreover, like there’s serious potential today. Once the sun begins to sink toward the horizon, an eighty-mile-per-hour jet stream will kick in from the west, and the storms will quickly intensify from severe to tornadic.

  The harbingers are all around them as they head north: cumulus towers form, white as bleached cotton and smooth as polished marble; they loom like precipitous atolls over a cerulean sea. This means that warm, moisture-suffused air—TNT as far as the chasers are concerned—is convecting toward the upper-level winds that will transform gentle giants into glowering supercells.

  By six that evening, thunderheads congeal into a line stretching from western Minnesota across the southeastern corner of South Dakota, and into Nebraska. As projected, they grow explosively in this charged environment, erupting into the lower atmosphere like a caldera’s rising ash column. Within twenty minutes, the first tornado touches down.

  At 6:16, Tim starts tracking a northeast-bound twister near Woonsocket, South Dakota, a former rail junction in the melon and wheat country east of the James River. They’ll need to drive fast to get ahead of it, but this is a storm that could redeem the season. Roughly a mile out, they behold the prototypical vortex: its funnel is gracefully tapered, its hue ever changing with the angle of the light. When Porter zooms in on the tornado at ground level, the camera reveals staggering violence. Scarcely detectable suction vortices lick out of the earth like tongues of fire and vanish almost as soon as the eye can register what it sees. With the sun behind the plume, the particulate looks as black as coal dust. Judging by the way
this tornado chews through windbreak trees like a wood chipper, it is deadly, by its nature unpredictable—an exceedingly nasty specimen for the turtles if they can get ahead of it.

  Tim approaches from the east, then swings north onto a dirt road, racing parallel on a path he hopes will eventually bring them into intersection.

  “Okay,” he says, “let’s get ready.”

  He guns the minivan over the narrow South Dakotan back road, which is wide enough to admit only one vehicle comfortably. His eyes dart between the terrain ahead and the slender column scoriating the crops. In the camera frame is Tim’s recognizable hawk-nosed profile. The tornado is just off to their northwest, but Tim is gaining on it. In another moment they’re dead even. “I gotta wait until I get the right angle on it,” he says. The tornado continues to move steadily to the northeast. He just needs to guess where it will cross.

  “Help me with some roads,” Tim instructs. Most likely, he wants to be certain that the road doesn’t dead-end ahead, as these farm lanes occasionally do.

  Porter consults the computer monitor displaying the DeLorme road map. “You’ve got an east-west coming up right up here,” he says.

  “I wanna go north.”

  “You’re fine north.”

  Within half a mile, Tim begins to brake. He glances over his shoulder toward the tornado to his eight o’clock and brings the minivan to a halt. He steps out onto a rust-red gravel road, wearing jean shorts hemmed at the knees, white socks pulled to his calves, and a sweat-stained Henley T-shirt. Porter rounds the front and resumes filming. The sound of it never fails to bring him up short, as though all the winds of the world are converging on a single point, here in South Dakota.

  The twister has kept to the fields the entire chase, and this may well be the only road it crosses in its life cycle. But now, with sight lines unblinkered by the minivan, Tim can detect in its behavior all the signs of a tornado in terminal “rope-out.” This is the phase in its development during which the funnel contracts, and the trunk begins to wander like a crooked vine until its imminent death. The trouble with deploying on a vortex in this end stage is that these are its most erratic moments. There is often a certain amount of stability found in a tornado’s maturity, a kind of straight-ahead churning. A roping tornado, however, is like wildfire—a small change in the wind and it may veer unpredictably. Still, if the twister doesn’t dissipate first, there’s a chance it could pass over Tim’s current position with plenty of room for escape. If this is the day’s last gasp—maybe even the final tornado of the season—he’s sure as hell going to deploy on it.

  Tim pulls a turtle from the minivan and hesitates near the tall grass at the edge of the dirt road, the conical shell braced against his abdomen. He’s watching, waiting for the tornado to make the next move. He props the probe on its rim, flips the activating switch on the underside, and carefully lowers the device onto the gravel.

  He dives into the minivan to retrieve a second probe, stowed upside down, its point secured by a hole cut into the floorboards—this he places some twenty yards down the road. “All right, let’s go,” he shouts, sprinting toward the minivan. “Let’s go!”

  But as soon as they begin to drive away, the funnel fades. Porter can only see the disembodied tantrum of soil and grass whipping at the surface. “Ah, I think it’s dissipating,” he says.

  Tim won’t believe it. “Not yet!”

  Another hundred yards down the road, Porter can scarcely detect the surface-level rotation.

  Tim brakes hard. “I’m going to deploy another probe.”

  As he steps out and looks back to the southwest, he sees the funnel receding into the clouds directly above. “Damn luck,” he curses, and presses another probe into the gravel, hoping that what weak vorticity remains will find his instrument. It has been an entirely frustrating intercept. The vortex finally approaches a single passable road, and it’s already roping out.

  The weight of yet another near miss settles heavily on Tim’s shoulders. Another season may have just come to an unceremonious end. The weather pattern in the days and weeks ahead shows all the signs of settling into summer doldrums. He knows it is entirely likely that NatGeo will pull its funding. He may have no choice but to forge ahead on his own next year, again without financial support. How much longer can he make this work on a shoestring? The damn thing was so close you could smell the ground-up vegetation, you could hear the roar. Tim begins collecting his turtles, a morose expression on his face.

  Gene Rhoden, the NatGeo guide, pipes up, “Tim, I see a golden color on the horizon.”

  Tim turns and gazes out to the east at the trailing edge of a thunderstorm catching the mellow light of the setting sun. The clouds are painted with the bright watercolor strokes the plains are famous for, but from this far out he can’t judge the storm’s strength. Tim ducks into the minivan and consults weatherTAP, a streaming radar service, on his salvaged cathode-tube-ray monitor. Suddenly, the fatigue dispels. The storm structure on the screen looks vigorous.

  The day isn’t over yet.

  Tim throws the mud-daubed minivan into gear and tears off down the road to collect the rest of his probes. Then he hits the straight-shot pavement of Highway 14 and pushes the Caravan’s six cylinders to some ninety miles per hour.

  As they pass into the shadow of this new storm’s anvil, the cab is filled with the vicious, singing hiss of wind-driven rain against glass. The sunset’s warm apricot glow is replaced by dusk, the ambient light filtering through the clouds now sourceless and cool. The minivan approaches a low rise and a copse of cottonwoods, beyond which they are driving into the blind. As they pass beyond the trees and onto the table-flat tracts of soybeans and corn, the rain slackens, the sight lines clear, and the occupants of the minivan fall momentarily silent. The rain-soaked windshield is a phantasmagoria of liquid shapes, but there is no mistaking the profile before them.

  “Wedge tornado on the ground,” Tim says. “Oh, my God. It’s huge.”

  “We gonna deploy on that thing?” asks Porter, his voice betraying more than a little trepidation.

  “Damn right.”

  They approach from the west down Highway 14, the main route between Huron and Manchester. The tornado is half a mile to the south of the road and moving steadily northeast, refracting sunlight like a prism. One moment the mile-wide funnel is the color of sand. The next, it is smoke, ash, sod. Tim slows up, pulling into the oncoming lane. His distance narrows to hundreds of yards, but the approach is all wrong. There is the intuitive trimming along the margins of safety, and then there is the bet whose odds are unknown. From here, Tim can’t discern the tornado’s heading or ground speed with any certainty. This isn’t the weakening Stratford twister. This is unlike anything he’s ever seen. The tornado before them is the giant of plains legend, the breed a chaser may see once in his life. Even so, he won’t chance a slapdash deployment. “I’m sorry, guys,” Tim says. “This is too close for me. I’m not going in there.”

  On the radio, they hear the incongruously cheery sound of a plinking mandolin. Tim studies the DeLorme map and reconsiders his options. There is another way, though the risk is still high. He’ll have to leave the sure footing of pavement for a gamble on gravel. He drives thirty feet up the road and takes the next left, leaving the highway. “We’ve got some gridded roads,” he reasons. “I’m going to go north.” He’ll use 424th Avenue, a dirt farm lane, to get ahead.

  But before he drives much farther, Tim slows. Through the passenger window, no more than a third of a mile out, he sees the hamlet of Manchester, a huddle of oak, cottonwood, and whitewashed two-story farmhouses surrounded by wheat fields, the seed heads wicking gold in the sun. The minivan rolls to a stop.

  “It’s going north,” Porter says. Neither speaks for a moment.

  “It’s going to take the town,” Tim replies.

  They watch the pretty old houses, the barns, the constructs of men standing pitiful and small in the growing shadow. First, a power pole lea
ns and falls. A barn cants over, then its roof sails away. In milliseconds, the rest of the structure follows. A cottonwood, some one hundred feet tall, that has given shade to generations is flung to the earth. Now the tornado comes to the closest house. It isn’t the roof that fails first. The entire two stories of it buckle so quickly as to be nearly imperceptible. The steeply pitched roof comes to rest on the ground. Then it is lofted several hundred feet into the sky. They hear none of the crack of splintering lumber, just the toneless, high frequency of white water, omnidirectional and immense. The funnel fills with white drywall, shingles, shredded pieces of insulation, large tree branches. They hang suspended, glittering in the sun. The destruction of Manchester—established with its own post office shortly after South Dakota’s statehood a century before—takes only seconds.

  As Tim and Porter resume the chase and gain distance, they glimpse the storm’s totality playing out over a span of miles. The clouds are drawn to the core like water to a sink drain, then pulled into the tornado and centrifuged out. It is a sight into which one could lose oneself, but there is no time to linger. This road extends in a straight line to the north, but it won’t intersect with the tornado. The storm is still bearing away from them to the northeast. That means Tim has to take the upcoming right, eastbound on 206th Street, and haul ass in front of the wedge over to 425th, the next north-south road. If he leaves enough distance between them and the tornado, he can drop the probe and turn north onto 425th before it’s too late.

  In other words, they are about to enter a race they can’t afford to lose. One flat tire, one spinout in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and they’re done for. But Tim may never get another chance like this—not this season, maybe not ever. He studies the map. “There’s another crossroads in about a mile. That’s where we’re headed to. We’re gonna be sitting in rain for a little bit.”

  Tim hits the gas, and the race of his life begins.