The Man Who Caught the Storm

by Brantley Hargrove

  They jump back into the truck, and Tim navigates down the town’s few streets, his ropy forearms slick, and his dark hair matted against his skull. Carl uses the interlude between deployments to check his laptop. “Ah, this storm has got incredible rotation,” he says, noting the storm-relative velocity. “The chance for this to have a big tornado is high.”

  In the soft afternoon rain, nothing moves in Quinter, a cluster of corrugated aluminum buildings and wood-frame homes. The town’s sirens are silent, and the windows of the houses show no signs of life. It looks as if everyone has picked up and moved on, the way warblers are known to depart days in advance of a bad storm. Tim pulls off road again next to an empty lot and begins unloading media probes and turtles onto the freshly mown grass. If anyone is looking from out of the dark windows, they must watch him with a mixture of curiosity and misgiving. He is drenched, winded, ducking through the rain, planting squat cones of uncertain purpose around town in inscrutable configurations. If any onlooker understood the meaning behind his actions, and what they foretell, they would surely flee.

  Tim and Carl once more climb into the truck and drive to the western edge of Quinter. The wedge tornado has veered, and they watch it move against the limpid sunset. The outline in the distance now tracks toward the uninhabited fields to the north-northwest—away from town and the probes that lie in wait.

  They give chase past rolling irrigators strung over the dead-level fields, looking for another deployment angle and finding none along the tornado’s careering path. It resembles a swaying elephant’s trunk, trawling the horizon. Then the tightly coiled circulation pulls apart and drifts indolently through the sky, like gray-black ink dispersing in water. The storm pulses and the vortex darts earthward again, boring down into the empty fields, kicking up a sod annulus that rises along the updraft. The loose drifts of dirt end up getting recycled, entrained in the downdraft and knitted into tubes of dense vorticity.

  Tim knows he can’t safely deploy on this tornado; it’s erratic and he doesn’t think they can get ahead of it with enough time to drop the turtles. “I don’t know,” he says, “this is getting pretty dangerous. Very, very dangerous. One slip and we’re all dead.” It’s a feeling in his gut, intuited through experience, distance, and pace. He and Carl are out of the game, spectators, not participants, in the first big TWISTEX field operation.

  He may have missed the strongest tornado the team has seen since its inception, but he is fine with that today. Tim will push—and has pushed—beyond what other chasers will tolerate to gather the data he needs. But there are clear limits. He’s conscious of the danger the mesonets encountered earlier. And with nothing but dirt roads to maneuver on, he’s not about to risk their lives on a twister tracing an oddball track.

  He and Carl chase for the remainder of the afternoon for the pure enjoyment of it, until the storms contain nothing more than straight-line wind and rain. Then they head back to the southeast to rendezvous with Bruce, Cathy, Karstens, and the others.

  * * *

  A few years ago, Tim unveiled his first media-probe footage—gathered from a tornado near Storm Lake, Iowa—at the National Weather Association conference in Des Moines. His current mesonet driver Chris Karstens, an Iowa State undergraduate at the time, was sitting in the audience. Before the video began, the attendees were instructed to stow all phones and video cameras. These images were licensed to National Geographic, but the conference attendees were to be given a first glimpse.

  Karstens felt privileged, as if he was taking part in something historic. The house lights dimmed, and a hush fell over the crowd. On the screen, Tim’s nose hovered over the probe as he carried it down the road. Then a minute or so passed and the debris cloud edged into view. Rocks and twigs and farm equipment flew across the frame, and it all seemed so impossible, so thrilling. No one had ever before collected video and audio from inside a twister. This was landmark footage from Tim’s first successful deployment of the media probe. “He was doing things nobody else was able to do,” Karstens says.

  At the end of the video, the audience stood and the room echoed with applause. How incredible would it be, Karstens wondered then, to work with Tim Samaras? To tackle the fundamental mysteries of the poorly understood tornado boundary layer? Karstens quickly brushed the thought aside. He had student loans to pay and was in the middle of his junior year and an internship at a local news station.

  But during his senior year, Dr. Bill Gallus told Karstens about an opening in the graduate meteorology program. He was looking to recruit research-oriented students to analyze data collected by Tim Samaras, and to conduct field work with TWISTEX. Karstens leapt at the opportunity. Gallus had intended to cycle students in and out of TWISTEX in two-week intervals, but Lee and Finley found the young man to be a quick study and a dependable mesonet driver. Karstens was desperately needed behind the wheel of M2, and he was only too happy to oblige; he idolized Tim.

  As the season has gotten under way, there have been things the young man has noticed about Tim that might sound inconsequential in any other context, but for which Karstens is deeply grateful. When the power converter on his mesonet blew out shortly before a deployment, Tim cheerily repaired it within seconds. It was bizarre, Karstens thought, that when a malfunction could cost them a data set, and everyone else was tense and irritable, Tim’s presence was lidocaine on a raw nerve. The more time he spends around Tim, the more Karstens sees his unorthodox background as an asset, not a hindrance. Earlier, the radios were giving Lee and Finley fits, so Tim figured out how to amplify the range without cranking the wattage and shedding electrical interference into their sensors. There seems to be no end to the patches, upgrades, and repairs he can perform in the field.

  Tim is also, in a very real sense, keeping the team on the road through the funding he secures. Over the last few seasons, over thousands of miles, Tim’s fundraising has sustained TWISTEX, even if the money has never gone quite far enough. The team is something of an outlier in this way. The other research groups have either full backing from a university or a big grant from the National Science Foundation. But TWISTEX’s existence depends on Tim’s charisma and connections to attract benefactors such as National Geographic.

  Despite this role, Tim is careful not to let his whim or ego drive the team. Karstens has come to admire the deft authority he wields over the mission. When the team discusses potential chase targets, Tim listens to everyone in turn; and once he’s heard every voice, he makes a final call. “No one really ever questions it,” Karstens says. “He makes sound, logical decisions, and people listen.” The young man can sense a connectedness running through the group, a tightness that feels like family. Karstens notices that Tim considers each of them his responsibility. Even though the veteran chaser has grown accustomed to operating in proximities that once frightened him, the prospect of losing a team member to a tornado haunts him. “I don’t think I could live with myself if anything happened to anybody on the project,” Tim says.

  The night after Quinter, this potential is on everyone’s mind. After traveling back through plains towns in the viridescent half-light of decaying storms, they’ve gathered at an Applebee’s in Hays, an hour’s drive east of Quinter. Finley downs a few drinks to steady her nerves. It is sheer luck that the tornado turned to the north, and they know it. Even Laubach, known for gleefully punching through supercell hail cores, says he didn’t want to get anywhere near the thing.

  As is customary, they begin sharing videos of the chase among themselves, then with other chasers. From different locations, each lens captured some feature that was invisible to the rest. Storm chasers have practically commandeered Applebee’s, the only place in town still open at this hour. Most of them know each other, and as the din of conversation fills the bar, breathless intercept tales are told and retold. The day could have been deadly, yet all around, video cameras and laptops proudly display footage and images—the closer and more terrifying, the better.

  Finally, a man
looms over the TWISTEX team, bellies up to the table, and places his laptop confidently at the center. Doug Kiesling looks like a nightclub bouncer, a towering man with a gift for weaving remarkable, expletive-laced tapestries about the storms he’s seen. He has cultivated a reputation as the guy who always gets the killer shot, even if it means getting a little too close. He cues up his video of the day, and the group is stunned to see that he had been within a hundred yards or so of the Quinter tornado at its most vicious. On the screen, he’s putting his car in reverse and backing away rapidly as rain and gravel blast the side of his vehicle. The stovepipe is gone, and a darkness in the west fills the camera frame. They hear him exclaiming, rather calmly, all things considered, “I’m about to get hit by a fuckin’ wedge.”

  Some applaud his narrow escape, and everyone agrees he has a remarkable piece of chase footage on his hands. The Weather Channel has apparently purchased the video already. But what it captures sends a chill through Tim’s team.

  The old axiom holds that they are far more likely to get killed on the road, on the way to a storm, than in a tornado itself. And it’s miraculously true: no chaser has yet died in a tornado. But chasers continue to get closer and closer, goaded by the prospect of social-media glory, YouTube notoriety, and the modest sums earned by selling video rights to TV news.

  For TWISTEX, the evening wears, as Lee puts it, “two faces.” Meteorologically, they witnessed an incredible event—a tornado that seemed to assume remarkable power and proportions nearly instantaneously. They managed to squeak away with a captivating data set. But a hundred-mile-per-hour gust drove Lee and Finley into a ditch; a weak tornadic circulation apparently ran over the top of M2 before the vehicle was struck by a power line. They feel their size in relation to the storm, and they’re shaken to the core.

  Tim is troubled not just by what he’s seen today but by the scene around him—a giddy celebration of tempted fate. But even as he frets over the danger evident in clip after clip, the arc of his own history bends toward ever greater proximity to the lethal winds. The greatest intercept of his life was no less a nail-biter than Kiesling’s, though Tim would like to believe that the risks he takes serve a higher calling. Years ago, he was inspired by men who hunted tornadoes for science. He’s one of them now. But the truth about implacable nature is that it doesn’t distinguish between those who approach for knowledge, and those who approach simply to see something beautiful, frightening, or titillating.

  At this impromptu gathering of men and women who are drawn to tornadoes like moths to light, Tim finds himself considering the odds game Anton Seimon faced back in Stratford, Texas. How long will the luck hold? How long before storm chasing’s darkest day finally comes? Who’s it going to be?

  The hour grows late, but the beer is still flowing, and the mood in the bar is joyful. Tim takes it all in. What he says next to a NatGeo journalist who has been shadowing Tim this season has the ring of inevitability, of the borrowed time storm chasers have been living on: “Someday,” he says, “somebody’s gonna get bit.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  “YOU HAVE MY ONLY SON”

  IN 2008, TWISTEX welcomes its youngest member to the team: nineteen-year-old Paul Timothy Samaras, a budding filmmaker and photographer. In his eyes, Tim is a giant. Fourteen years after his father first took him and Jenny to see a funnel cloud near Aurora, Paul wants to understand the nature of the work that has drawn Tim so far from home over so many years. If he can, in some small way, he’d like to become a part of Tim’s world. The truth is, Paul isn’t sure exactly what he wants to do with his life, and joining his dad on the hunt seems as good an answer as any.

  Nearly a week after Quinter, he gets his first taste of the narrow escape. Near Tipton, Kansas, Paul pours from the truck alongside Tim and Carl, a video camera held at his chest, eyes fixed on the display monitor. He circles around to the probe deck at the rear, the frame bobbing as his feet pound over asphalt. His microphone registers the tap of rain against the camera, and the rasping of Velcro straps from the truck. Through his lens dance the dark silhouettes of working shoulders, a father seen through the eyes of his son. Beyond them, suspended mist and rain gather beneath a wall cloud like a load of cinders. Tim squats and places HITPR in the grass just off the side of the road. The frame moves on to Carl, who labors under the bulk of the much-heavier media probe.

  The tornado is now just off the edge of the frame, a presence implied but unseen. Then comes Tim’s urgent voice: “Let’s go, man!” And all three of them appear now in the lens of Tim’s invention. Through the ground-level perspective of the media probe, Tim is seen shoving the probe deck back into the truck bed. There is Paul behind him, still filming. He’s lanky in a billowing black T-shirt and baggy jeans, his dark hair wild and blown by the rising wind, like his father’s when he was young.

  Roughly thirty seconds have elapsed since they stopped here. Carl’s voice is tinged with panic: “Let’s go! It’s coming!”

  Tim raises the tailgate but leaves the camper-shell window open and runs. Finally Paul lowers the camera and scrambles into the backseat. Rain skates over the road. The rear bumper dips as the front end lifts and the GMC’s eight cylinders redline. The tornado core soon flares into view. Vegetation and debris appear as oscillating streaks. A faint multiple-vortex structure washes over the probes.

  Paul would have seen the spectral merry-go-round suction vortices dancing over the fields toward them at roughly thirty-three miles per hour. He would have heard their waterfall rushing. He might even have caught the scent of threshed grass. This is his father’s world, in the tarnished light under the clouds. The beating in Paul’s chest when they make good their escape—this is his father’s adrenal high. Next to it, the days are but interludes once the skies go quiet.

  Later on, the media probe’s footage astonishes Bruce Lee. “They had fifteen seconds on that one,” he says. “They deploy, and we see them leave, and the tornado runs it over in fifteen seconds. That’s how close they pushed it.”

  When they hook a U-turn after the tornado has passed and return to the deployment site, Tim kneels in the stinging rain and lifts the media probe onto its rim. “All recording except for one camera,” he shouts over the wind, and hoists the hundred-pound device to his waist.

  One of the two HITPRs has malfunctioned. But the other and the media probe log direct hits—Tim’s first since the footage he gathered near Storm Lake, Iowa. The three are ecstatic and can hardly wait to plug in to the media probe to review images from within the whirlwind itself.

  Paul has witnessed every second of the deployment. Nothing will stop him now from following his father onto the plains.

  * * *

  Paul, like Tim at that age, is searching for a path. As a boy, he had been so different from the young man he became. Back then, he was wild and loud and outgoing, an active kid who glided up and down the streets playing roller hockey. In his teens, that boy disappeared. “Something just flipped when he went to high school,” his sister Jenny says, “like some switch just turned off.”

  Paul stopped playing sports. He spent hours alone in his room on the computer. He had friends who were like brothers, but he was no social butterfly. To his family’s knowledge, Paul seldom if ever dated, and there had never been a steady girlfriend. Perhaps there was nothing more to this introversion than an escape from the petty cruelties of adolescence. “High school was hard for him,” his mother says. It was easier not to stick his neck out.

  After graduating, Paul enrolled in Red Rocks Community College. He took a few astronomy courses, but found that his appetite for school was as weak as his father’s. Paul seemed adrift, like any number of young men his age, looking for his own way, trying on and discarding possible lives. At first, he was obsessed with animated films. He went so far as to get a menial job at the local movie theater so that when his shift was up, he could duck into a movie. He could usually be found watching the latest Pixar epic—Wall-E or The Incredibl
es—over and over. His mother or one of his sisters often joined him, but he could never stand to wait for their schedules to line up, so he’d go see them alone the first time.

  Paul wondered whether he, too, might someday be able to create worlds of his own, as beautiful and melancholy as Wall-E’s. At his request, his parents bought him a new computer and enrolled him in an online course called Animation Mentor, founded by animators who had worked for Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic. Paul completed the course—in fact, he was quite talented—but he never sought work in the industry, never created those films. Doing so would have meant relocating to California, and Paul couldn’t leave behind the only world he’d ever known. It would mean abandoning the best friends with whom he could debate the finer points of death metal and the video game Halo. It would now mean abandoning the storms and chasing with Tim.

  Paul decides to remain in Colorado instead and continues to live in the Lakewood home that has sheltered him since he was born. Instead of animation, he shifts to photography. No one is certain precisely how he settled on the craft, but his mother suspects he watched the National Geographic magazine photographers who’d sometimes shadow his father. One day, Paul simply picked up Tim’s DSLR and started shooting.

  Photography makes sense for him. Though he is quiet and reserved, he absorbs everything around him with big watchful eyes, like his mother’s. He takes photographs of tangerine sunsets, the deeply folded mountains to the west, and his charismatic tabby cat, Meekers. He handles videography and photography for both of his sisters’ weddings, along with the birth of Amy’s little girl.