The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  As soon as they enter the rain curtains surrounding the tornado, the tires begin swimming over cake-batter mud. Even by Tim’s standards, this is madness. The road is a boggy mess. While he struggles to keep the minivan from sliding into the ditch, the tornado outline that had been so crisp begins to fray in the rain. There’s a corollary of rule number one: keep your distance, especially from rain-wrapped tornadoes.

  “We’re losing visibility of it. Are you going to deploy in the rain?” Porter asks in disbelief. This is like playing chicken with a train they can’t see. The minivan is fishtailing now; the road is getting worse.

  “Yep,” Tim replies.

  “You don’t have much time, Tim. Do not get stuck.”

  Tim doesn’t respond. The rain is easing up now. The ragged, dusty wall bearing down looks different; it has narrowed, hardened, its outlines growing laminar, almost glassy. At least they can see it again. Tim hits 206th and hooks the right turn east.

  “This is too dangerous,” Porter says.

  “It’s all right,” Tim says evenly. “It’s still about half a mile out.”

  As the tornado draws nearer, its smaller features—aspects of its ground-level flow, where radial winds hurtle into the vortex and suddenly turn and spiral vertically—come into view. They see the dust rise and wrap around its back side. Black sod hangs in suspension around the funnel like swarming flies.

  They are closing in on the intersection with 425th Avenue, and so is the beast. The road ahead, to Tim’s relief, is paved. They’ll be able to make their escape to the north in a hurry, staking their lives on the proposition that the tornado will continue to bear away to the northeast.

  “Here we go,” Tim says.

  He can see his deployment site, just before the turn.

  It is seconds away.

  Now.

  He slides to a stop near a dense row of poplar, behind which is a farmhouse neither of them notice. The minivan’s sliding door slams open, and Tim removes a probe.

  “Tim.” Porter’s voice takes on urgency as he watches dark shapes translate across the tornado’s face. “We don’t have time. We don’t have time. Seriously.”

  They are being tailed by Peter, the NatGeo photographer, whose guides are growing deeply uncomfortable. Tim is so focused on his goal, it seems to Gene Rhoden, that he has blinders on. Floating debris tumbles only a couple of hundred yards out, pieces of trees and the next farmhouse over. The smaller, granulated detritus has already begun to flutter just beyond Porter’s window, like large snowflakes.

  Tim is aware only of the tornado and his turtle. He switches on the data recorder and eyes the storm’s trajectory. He plants his probe firmly onto the loose gravel.

  Then he’s sprinting, kicking up mud in his wake. He flings himself back into the minivan and floors it. They swing left onto the paved road, and through the windows they hear the white noise. Only now it sounds like the thundering of Niagara Falls. As they pass the farmstead, they can barely see the house through the rows of lush trees and the minivan’s mud-spattered windows.

  “My God, Tim.” Porter exhales. “I hope you got it. Did you get it turned on?”

  “Yeah.” The tornado still bears down.

  “It is right on Carsten’s butt,” Porter says.

  Something, maybe insulation, falls into the road ahead. Behind them, they see only the headlights of the Rhodens’ vehicle shining against darkness. Porter watches closely through the rear window. “It just went through that house,” he says.

  After gaining some distance, Tim begins braking. The tornado is less than a mile behind them, but they’ve earned some breathing room. “Okay. I want to stop and look at it.” Tim steps out onto the wet asphalt and stares up at the thing he has just outrun, now a long, sinuous trunk boring into the prairie. It leaves the farmstead and crosses the road near the probe, ejecting the trappings of a life into a field of young corn. There is something about the way the ephemeral vortices within the circulation lash over the ground, like ripples on water. They can see soil moving radially to the center and propelling skyward at speeds that seem to violate natural law.

  “Listen to it,” Porter shouts, awestruck.

  Tim plants a new probe he has outfitted with cameras. His white socks are pulled high over mud-slathered calves, and his dark hair is wet and matted against his forehead. The tornado swings to the east, into the corn, and seems to hover in place. Meanwhile, Peter, the NatGeo photographer, deploys his own photographic probe, called Tin Man.

  Suddenly the tornado curves northwest, toward the caravan. Tim, Porter, Peter, and the Rhodens pile into their vehicles, laughing and hooting, and begin to flee. They speed north for less than a mile before slowing up again. Gradually the vortex constricts, transitioning into what Tim describes as a laminar tube, narrow and translucent, like spider silk lit up by the setting sun. Another metamorphosis, and the tube is replaced by a thin, tattered strand that hangs and twists in the air like frayed cable. Slowly, it all dissolves into blue sky, leaving an amputated skirt of dirt and rain on the ground to whip and gust what remains of the low-level rotation. That, too, then begins to fade. The most incredible tornado Tim has ever witnessed—the true giant for which he has searched more than a decade—has finally breathed its last.

  “That probe you put down, before the camera?” Porter says. “That took a direct hit.”

  Pink insulation flutters down onto the cornfields. “Good.” Tim stows another probe into its plywood drawer. “I hope it’s on the ground.”

  * * *

  They retrace their steps, scanning the road and ditches ahead for Tim’s turtles when they come to a freshly destroyed farmstead. Tim parks nearby and begins to pick his way through the wreckage. Debarked trees, blasted with topsoil, are piled atop one another like kindling. He passes a barren concrete slab. A mud-coated basset hound shakes itself off in the road. There is no sign of its owners. A few other chasers and locals have arrived. One of them calls to the animal: “Come here, doggie. We need to put you on a leash.”

  The dog rolls over onto its back, tail thumping between its legs.

  “Yes, you’re a good dog.”

  The Kingsbury County sheriff addresses Tim’s group. “Are you people the storm chasers?”

  “Yeah,” Tim says. The air is heavy with the scent of propane.

  “I don’t want people all over out here.”

  “I completely understand. Is everybody all right here?”

  “We’ve got a propane tank that’s leaking.”

  Far off on the horizon, Porter sees the slender profile of another tornado. “It’s hosin’ again.”

  The sheriff, Charlie Smith, squints into the distance and his eyes widen. “Oh, Christ! That’s over by my house.”

  “Was anybody home?” Porter asks, turning to the farmstead.

  “I don’t know,” Smith says. “I don’t know. I can’t . . . I hope Harold got out.”

  The sheriff goes shuffling off, looking lost, his utility belt clinking in the ruin of a home belonging to a man he can’t find. He stands at the edge of the exposed cellar and peers down at the wooden beams, planks, and cinder blocks that have collapsed into it. “Harold?” the sheriff calls.

  Tim steps warily onto the rubble and cranes his neck to look into its darkened interstices, confronted with his tornado’s work. No signs of life; no signs of death either. He seems to lose himself as he stares into the shadows of the cellar. Then he remembers his own role. He turns away and begins stalking toward the minivan. “I gotta go south and get my probe.”

  He passes a flattened farm truck, the cab shorn flush with the dash panel. Tree-root boluses the size of tractor tires are upturned and naked. He looks back toward the house and sees the funnel a few miles out, deep blue and lancing diagonally at the fields. He hears birdsong, and the mournful bawling of mortally wounded cattle. Tim and Porter step through a mosaic of lumber, all arrayed in the same direction, the wind field’s fingerprint left on the earth. “This looks like F
4, F5 damage to me,” Tim says.

  They climb into the minivan and drive away, in search of the turtle that Porter saw get hit. For all Tim knows, it has been carried off or smashed by debris.

  Porter’s wife—Kathy’s sister—picks this moment to check in. “Hey, guys, is this a good time?” she asks cheerily over the vehicle’s speakers.

  “No!” the two shout in unison, and hurriedly end the call, with a promise to phone later.

  As they scan the road ahead for signs of the bright cone, they find no trace of it. Back the other way, NatGeo’s Tin Man is wedged in the mud some 500 yards from where it was deployed, its glass ports smashed, the camera inside ruined. After everything, perhaps HITPR hasn’t survived, either, its shape unable to resist the strength of a giant. Perhaps these years have been wasted.

  Tim pauses and consults the DeLorme road map—he remembers the probe had been geotagged upon deployment. According to the map, the turtle is in the other direction. He passed it? Tim whips the minivan around and returns to the farmstead. The row of poplar he’d deployed next to is gone, and all that had been green is now the same monochrome mud gray. Harold’s house is the very farmstead he’d deployed next to. He simply had not recognized the area in its current desolation.

  “There it is,” Porter yells. “It’s still there!”

  The minivan comes skidding to a halt, and Tim strides purposefully toward the turtle, a bewildered look in his eyes as he glances over his shoulder at Porter. The probe is in the path, surrounded by a degree of damage that could only have been caused by the tornado core. History has been made on a dirt road in South Dakota.

  Tim bends and examines HITPR, then grins, pointing. “There it is. I’m not going to touch it. I need to get some shots.”

  Peter, the National Geographic photographer, comes running up, breathlessly repeating, “This is amazing! This is amazing! This is amazing!”

  Porter informs Peter that he is standing on fallen power lines, mercifully carrying no current. Tim begins to recount the event, as though he were a quarterback re-creating a bootleg play. His words come fast as he acts out the scene for the photographer. “That tornado was right there, and Pat says, ‘We don’t have time, you gotta go.’ And I said, ‘I’m gonna put it right here.’ I reached out and slammed it down, made the corner, and we took off.”

  Without another word, Tim heads back to the minivan, his sneakers making sucking sounds in the mud. He returns with a camera and snaps a few photos. “Now, the sixty-dollar question: Is the little light still blinking in there?”

  He grips the turtle’s soil-spackled rim, lifts it, and pauses for a moment, regarding an unbelievable sight. Underneath the HITPR is a perfect circle of dry gravel road. All around it, the gravel has been scoured away by the tornado, leaving nothing but the rain-soaked roadbed. But beneath the device, the road is pristine. A small red light flashes.

  “Yes, it is!” Tim shouts. “Look! The gravel is still here, right underneath it!”

  He kneels in the mud, his probe balanced on its rim in front of the indisputable evidence that it hadn’t budged an inch. A few yards away, on the other hand, Harold’s house has been shredded and cast into an adjacent field. Some eight inches from the device is a deep gash in the road. Something big and tumbling had come very close to destroying the turtle. “These are F4, F5 winds,” Tim says.

  “I think it’s F3 from what I see,” Rhoden ventures. “That house is not anchored whatsoever. Certainly no higher than F4. Could be stronger, but no stronger than an F4.”

  “Well”—Tim grins, tapping his fingernails against the mild-steel skin—“I can certainly tell you.”

  * * *

  That night, in a Huron, South Dakota, motel, Tim plugs his laptop into the turtle’s data card. He is surrounded by the Rhodens, Porter, and Peter. They are all exhausted, wet and filthy, but the room hums with excitement.

  In the lamplight of the shabby room, Tim’s eyes dart over the numbers registering the pressure drop HITPR has recorded. “I’ve heard estimates of seventy, maybe eighty millibars.” he says, looking up into Gene Rhoden’s camera. “But not one hundred. Not one hundred millibars.”

  What Tim’s turtle has measured is, as he’ll come to describe it, the eardrum-shattering equivalent of stepping into an elevator and launching 4,000 feet up in ten seconds. Today, HITPR has collected data that never existed before now—it was always an estimate, a theory, an assumption, a blank space in the equation. Tim just filled that space with something real and precise. The pressure drop the turtle logged, using technology Tim had developed on the test range years before, is the steepest pressure deficit on record, confirming what scientists believed but could never prove. With a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and a few assumptions about the vortex structure, the probe’s pressure ports registered winds in excess of two hundred miles per hour, well within the F4 range.

  Tim used to be just a tinkerer with a high school diploma. Now he’s the man with the impossible data, the first to step forth into an untouched—and supposedly untouchable—frontier.

  Even now, in the giddy afterglow, when he should be cracking a Coors and toasting a watershed moment in scientific history, Tim speaks as though he is matching wits with his detractors and doubters.

  “Certainly, you can open some of this up for speculation,” he says. “Now, even if we were to hedge that . . . even if you average these small points down here, you’re still going to average out close to one hundred [millibars].”

  “It’s amazing,” Rhoden says.

  “This is absolutely amazing.”

  “You’ve done it, Tim.”

  He looks up at them from the motel desk and his eyes gleam. “I think everybody did well today. It’s fantastic.”

  Tim stays up late talking, telling and retelling the story of the day. No one in the room likely gives much thought to the danger they had courted today. Not now. They’re all too wired. Tim dreams about what the numbers in his computer could mean—to forecasters, to structural engineers, and to folks like Harold, whose farmhouse stood for only an instant next to the turtle. Tim can tell them how fast the wind was at the surface. He can tell them about how the temperature steadily fell and the humidity increased as the tornado passed over HITPR. At last, he can tell them about the structure of the vortex. For researchers such as Bill Gallus, aiming to understand and protect against the near-surface winds of the tornado, these first-of-their-kind measurements are priceless.

  As of tonight, the tornado has kept its secrets long enough.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  DOUBLING DOWN

  THE YOUNG BOY in his bedroom, tinkering with old radios; the newbie chaser on the Colorado plains, casing an F0; the engineer at the test range, quantifying the raw violence of missiles and bombs. At every stage it was beyond a long shot to imagine this young man swooping down into the heart of the tornado, succeeding where decades of scientists had failed. Yet at each stage, he was gaining the skills he needed.

  Now he’s become the man who accomplished meteorology’s equivalent to the moon landing.

  In the aftermath, Tim is the toast of the weather world. National Geographic puts him on the cover, with a full story detailing his exploits. He travels to Chicago to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Next he’s on the CNN set, sitting across from Soledad O’Brien. He’s wearing a clean pair of khakis and a pressed Hawaiian-print button-down. His dark, coffee-colored hair is smooth and neatly parted, for once not windblown.

  For Tim, the most important event is the Conference on Severe Local Storms, the atmospheric-science equivalent to the Academy Awards, which he and Julian Lee attend over a year after Manchester. The conference is a kind of coming-out party for the bleeding edge of severe-weather research, attended by the most august atmospheric scientists in the world. Tim and Lee unveil the first data of its kind—pressure, temperature, and humidity measurements from inside the core of an F4. Tim’
s probe has proven so capable that in its data log one can see even the brief deviation in pressure caused by Harold’s farmhouse, as the tornado chewed through it and across the probe.

  Their reception at the conference is resounding; the conclave of scientists is completely won over by Tim’s findings. “It’s extremely valuable,” says Dr. Al Bedard, the senior NOAA scientist behind TOTO. “My perspective is that this was the first time a direct measurement was ever made.” After years of cool skepticism, Tim basks in recognition and praise. His spiritual predecessors—Bedard, Howie Bluestein, and Joe Golden, the very men who inspired him from the beginning—offer sincere encouragements for him to continue his work.

  Tim wants nothing more than to do just that. With the Manchester deployment, he has broken through the psychic hurdle that had dogged him and every severe-weather researcher from the very start. He has snatched fire from the god of the plains. And now, despite the clear dangers he faced in Manchester, South Dakota, and Stratford, Texas, his success only compels him to continue pushing forward. He bears the torch, and he can’t fathom quitting the odds game Anton Seimon left back in Stratford.

  Tim can return to the plains and do it again, he thinks. He can do it better. As long as he keeps the tornado in sight and establishes a reasonable buffer, the odds swing in his favor. He can capture an F5. He can invent new probes and collaborate with new scientists to gather more and more-complete data. Like the mountaineer who finally conquers an untouchable summit, Tim’s eye is already on the next peak.

  But the path forward is not so clear now. The big breakthrough has been made, and the next set of goals is different. Repetition, precision, and control are the keys to turning a daring exploit into sound science. Now that he’s proven what’s possible, he must leave behind his lone-wolf ways and collaborate. There are visionary scientists who can bend his ingenuity and chasing skill toward the field’s most pressing questions: What is the signal, the mechanism in the atmosphere, that distinguishes a standard supercell from one that creates a twister? What dread signs mark those unforgettable days when tornadoes measure a mile across and scorch the prairie for hours at a time? These mysteries and others have bedeviled mankind since before Tim was born. But if he can repeat his core deployment and collaborate with others studying different parts of the storm, they finally have a new and long-sought-after tool to crack open these questions after years of stasis.