But by the time he arrived home, the sign had faded, and no explanation seemed enough to encompass what had happened. When he sat down with his children, they just couldn’t understand. They asked the questions he didn’t know how to answer:
“How could that happen to him?”
“Wasn’t he the best?”
“He was with Carl. Isn’t he good, too?”
“Yes” was all Winter could say. In his heart, he would always feel the same way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
* * *
THE SIGNS
ED GRUBB KNEELS on the front lawn of Kathy Samaras’s Lakewood bungalow and dismantles a mesonet station in the light of a late-winter afternoon. The grass is thatched with shade from the tall maples, and Kathy sits nearby in a wooden rocker with the sun on her face. On this day in February 2015, she wears short sleeves, though snow still clings to the shadowed eaves of a house across the street. The neighborhood is settled deeply into the weekday quiet, the neighbors at work, their kids at school.
Kathy, Ben McMillan, and I watch Grubb break the mesonet down into its constituent parts: anemometer, barometer, and the PVC pipe that inducts air through the temperature and relative-humidity gauges. Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley will receive the parts in Minnesota. It is unclear when or if TWISTEX will ever embark on another mission. Tim was the research entity’s sole fund-raiser, and no one so far has stepped into his role. Even if Lee and Finley secure a grant, the mission’s shape may be fundamentally different. Kathy retains possession of Tim’s probes, and she is deeply conflicted about having anyone else attempt the very thing that took the lives of her husband and son.
When Grubb’s task is finished and the parts are placed into the back of a friend’s SUV, Kathy goes inside and sits at her kitchen table in front of Paul’s Mac computer and a glass of iced tea. Her face is reflected in the darkened screen for a moment until she boots up the computer and begins to sift through its contents. The last person to have done so would have been Paul.
One of the first photographs she finds was taken on May 9, 2013, a few weeks before Tim and Paul were killed. In the frame, a single oil-well pumpjack attends a shaft of lightning stitching through the underside of a supercell down into some unheralded corner of the plains. There is a white Chevy Cobalt, one of the mesonets, parked in the foreground. Paul was shooting a long exposure, and Tim must have gotten out of the vehicle halfway through. He stands next to the Cobalt, looking up into the hardening clouds, his body translucent, spectral.
There’s a self-portrait of Paul, too. His black beard is thick and lustrous. Kathy wishes she had more pictures of him. The problem is, he was always the one behind the camera.
She opens the next file and finds clips from an unfinished documentary Paul was filming about his father. In one segment, Tim is in his shop, working on the clear dome turret for the Lightning Intercept Vehicle. He’s wearing faded jeans with gaping rips in both knees, and a denim shirt with National Technical Systems’ logo embroidered on the chest. His glasses tend to slip down his nose, and he pushes them back into place. He’s fifty-five years old here and still trim, but his cholesterol is a little too high. The hair at his temples has gone white. He wears it shaved close at the sides and a little longer on top, which gives him a distinguished, even professorial, bearing.
Behind the lens, Paul’s camerawork is graceful and effortless. The frame glides over the workbench and dives in for close shots of Tim’s hands. His fingers are thick, his nails dirty, like a mechanic’s. Big veins shunt across his thickly muscled forearms.
In another clip, Tim is holding his grandson Jayden, at his first birthday party, and smiles contentedly. Jayden reaches for Paul and the camera lens. “You’re putting fingerprints on the camera,” Tim lovingly scolds, then brings Jayden in closer, and the child laughs, his tiny hands outstretched.
One of the last videos Kathy plays is of Tim and Carl as they prepare for their final season. On May 17, Ed Grubb is squatting atop the probe truck, working on a mesonet station in the driveway of their house in Bennett. Tim is showing Carl around his shop and the recent improvements he has made to the vacuum system. He leads Carl to the truck and bemoans a side panel’s leaking compartment. In 2012, Tim had been forced to put their suitcases in garbage bags to keep them dry. But he is evidently excited about the high-speed camera he plans to mount to the dash for the PhOCAL project. “I want to put my Phantom camera in here—when we’re not chasing a tornado—if a late-season MCS [mesoscale convective system] drifts over central Kansas,” he says. “We’ll get a lightning hit on a wind turbine. That’s what they really want.”
At one point during the tour, Carl asks Tim whether he and his family will remain in this sprawling estate in the foothills. So far from town, the house can feel empty, especially with the girls moved out, and Tim and Paul so often on the road. Kathy has made clear that she doesn’t have an attachment to the land the way he does. “Uncertain,” Tim replies in the video. “The boss doesn’t like it out here. I love my wife more than I love this house, and if my wife doesn’t want to live here, that’s all there is to it.”
At this, Kathy brings her hands to her mouth and gasps. Grubb reaches out and takes her in his arms.
* * *
In the heat of midsummer, I find Kathy leaning on a shovel in the front yard in Bennett. She has just buried a field mouse whose body she’d found in the house that morning, and she is taking a moment to enjoy the solitude. “It’s so quiet out here,” she says. The sound of the wind over the high foothills east of Denver takes on a deep resonance.
She leads me into the four-car garage where Tim spent most of his time listening to Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin on satellite radio. “He’d get up and he could spend all day here,” she says. Nearly every square inch is devoted to his tools: band saw, drill press, lathe, Miller welder. The tubes inducting sawdust and metal shavings into his custom vacuum system crawl along the walls. Sunlight pours in through the garage-door windows. His workstation looks untouched, its Panasonic Toughbook still plugged in.
Tim’s shop was only supposed to fill one side of the garage—there’s a wall dividing it down the middle—but it had spilled liberally over to the other half. A mesonet rack is propped against a wall. A white Chevy Cobalt—Kathy thinks it’s M3—occupies one of the spaces.
We exit the garage through a back door into the house. At the threshold are Tim’s work boots and Carl’s Vans. The place looks as if they might return from a chase at any moment, and their things are both a comfort and a torment. Kathy has long since moved back to the bungalow in Lakewood. This place is too quiet now; it feels like the relic of a part of her life that is gone. Yet, giving anything away is as hard as the keeping. “It seems silly,” she says, “but it’s like giving part of Tim away. He used it and I can envision him working on it.” Somehow, she will have to clear everything out and ready the house for sale. Tim was a pack rat, so this is no mean task. It sometimes seems so enormous a job that it’s paralyzing.
The office is the way he had left it: orange HITPR on the floor, a panel of computer screens, and a massive hard drive whirring softly. A calendar on the wall is filled with appointments: a National Geographic talk in Maryland, the week after El Reno, and another in Chicago, October 7–8; a ham radio convention in Estes Park, June 29. The months during tornado season are devoid of appointments. His goals are listed on a dry-erase board:
Build camera platform.
Order five ball mounts.
We wander outside, where the probe truck is parked in the driveway. It is an impressive machine: powerful diesel engine, LEDs lining the windshield, spotlights mounted to the grill guard, and Tim’s good-luck charm, a McDonald’s cheeseburger, sitting on the dash, as stiff as a hockey puck.
The sight of the truck gets Kathy thinking. “I knew they were taking the car. I didn’t see what was in the car,” she says. “I didn’t think to ask why because they’d taken the cars before. That was my question to Gabe:
‘What if they’d been in the truck?’ ”
The answer didn’t prove as simple as the question, though. The diesel engine might well have allowed them to fight their way to daylight; or the GMC’s high profile might have presented the wind with an even bigger target to batter around.
There are a lot of what-ifs: about the car, the roads, the storm, the decision making; about the day of and the years prior. What if any one piece hadn’t been arranged just so?
Then there are the hints only obvious in hindsight. Over the years, Kathy saw more than one video clip that concerned her: “He’d come home and he’d have video and he’d be showing it,” she says. “There were times it seemed he was too close.” She would tell him as much, “and he’d go, ‘Oh, no, we were so many feet away.’ ” He’d tell her all the reasons it had been safe. She wasn’t sure she agreed with him—and it looks so clear now, staring back at it.
But why not trust him in those moments? He was an expert, so were his companions. And in all those years before 2013, no chaser had been lost in a tornado. Even in all the conversations they had about safety when Paul joined the crew, “We never ever discussed this ever happening,” Kathy says.
They’d had plans to travel, Kathy and Tim, to see the country together, to spoil their grandchildren—maybe even to see Paul settle down with the right woman. Tim had been talking about spending less time on the road in the coming years. He was getting older, and the field work was getting harder and harder on his body. What if he’d chosen to dial it back a few years earlier? Would they be on some beach together right now, far from the landlocked plains and its howling winds?
There’s a temptation to pick through each what-if. There’s a temptation for the mind to travel down the counterfactual path—be it out of longing or doubt or anger—to find a route that leads away from that fateful stretch of road, toward a world with Tim, Paul, and Carl still in it.
But Kathy recognizes the futility of these alternate realities.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, “if anything could have or would have been changed.” The outcome is the outcome. Wherever Tim and Paul are now, Kathy knows, that’s where they’ll be. No matter how you turn over the past.
It holds true even for the mother of all what-ifs—that tortuous question that everyone in Tim’s circle brushes up against at some point: What if I could have done something to stop him? It’s this hypothetical, in a sense, that underscores the wisdom of Kathy’s approach and the trouble of searching for the pivotal what-if.
Tim says on video that he would have moved back to Lakewood for Kathy. If she had asked, he would have agreed in a second. But what if she had gone beyond, and asked the harder question of him?
Imagine that she had known everything in advance: the risks he was taking; the dangers that even he could not see; the ultimate outcome toward which he was hurtling. Imagine it was all there to understand and reckon with, one year before or ten. Even knowing all, would she—or any friend or relative—have been able to halt Tim’s momentum, to convince him to turn back?
Would anyone, the world round, have been able to make Tim stop chasing?
Even the man, himself?
* * *
Kathy and I go inside. We walk upstairs and out through the master bedroom’s French doors, onto the balcony where Tim once said he could see storms clear to Kansas. A PhOCAL sprite camera is angled off to the east. We can see the snowcapped Front Range. A mourning dove pipes dolefully. Kathy looks out over the rearing foothills. “This, I’m going to miss. On nice days you can see the wind turbines,” she says. “This was his dream. It’s where he wanted to retire. But every time I get out here, I get sad. He’s not here. Paul’s gone.”
Kathy thinks about whether she will see her son and husband again. She believes in a hereafter, where they’ll be reunited someday. Tim had been doubtful about the prospect. “He thought, ‘If you’re dead, you’re dead, and if you live, you live,’ ” Kathy says. Whether or not there is an afterlife, he did have a very specific, very Tim request for the handling of his remains.
“The one thing he used to say is, ‘If I die before you do, take my ashes and have somebody put them up in a tornado.’ That’s what he used to tell me.” She pauses for a moment, as if she’s imagining what he might say now, after all they’ve been through.
“Well, he’s already been in the tornado, so I get to do whatever I want with his ashes.”
Twice now, Kathy has felt his presence, some signal that he’s been watching over her. The first was when Ben McMillan, Ed Grubb, and Tony Laubach sent her roses. Due to some delivery snafu, they arrived on their wedding anniversary. Tim had always brought her red roses on their anniversary.
The second time was last night. She was dreaming. Kathy opened the front door and Tim was standing there, looking as though he’d just returned from a chase, waiting to be let in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
* * *
TIM’S LEGACY
THE CORE OF a violent tornado was once a mystery to us, as unreachable as the surface of the sun. For decades, some of the scientific world’s brightest minds struck out for the plains like hunters. Their weapons of choice were Rube Goldberg contraptions in all shapes, materials, and sizes, designed for a single purpose: to extract knowledge from one of the harshest environments on the planet. But the tornado’s mysteries proved stubbornly elusive. Back in the early eighties, the barrel-shaped TOTO toppled in a weakly tornadic wind. “There are easier ways to do this,” Howie Bluestein had lamented. A second effort in the nineties, part of a multimillion-dollar, federally funded research expedition, used an aluminum-alloy tube mounted to a steel plate and caught a glancing sample at the edge of an F4. Others tried, each with their own particular gizmo, and each failed. The hunters moved on. Their quarry was too unpredictable, too dangerous. They sought other tools, even though they knew all too well there could be no substitute for probing the core directly. The only way to understand what happens in that place where houses fall and people die was to get inside it—then to emerge again, all the wiser. But maybe such a thing couldn’t be done.
No one—aside from his fellow chasers—had ever heard of Tim Samaras when he appeared on the scene with his “turtle.” Yet this nobody—a man whose academic pedigree began and ended with a diploma from Alameda High School—pulled off one of the most dramatic coups atmospheric science had ever seen. The core was not, as he proved, untouchable.
He spent the remainder of his life building on his breakthrough at Manchester, and pushing the in situ probe field forward. He succeeded with a frequency that no one has matched since. “What Tim was able to do,” says Tim’s TWISTEX partner Bruce Lee, “blows everybody else away.”
Lee once said that knowledge isn’t advanced by one spectacular measurement, or even two or three. Solving the mysteries of tornado formation, intensification, and decay is incremental work. It takes dogged persistence to track down and sample a menagerie of vortices, from the single-cell, to the two-cell, to the multiple-vortex, and every subspecies in between. One of the many tragedies of Tim’s loss is that he died before he could finish this work, to the extent that the labor of science is ever complete. Near the end of his life, he was developing a new anemometer design, one without moving parts, built to withstand high-end tornadic winds. But the design, in his exacting eyes, still required a few tweaks. He never got the chance to test it in a twister. In the late spring of 2013, before the anemometer was ready, the storms called him away.
One couldn’t be faulted for asking whether Tim failed, or whether his death stands as final proof that probe work is too dangerous, too impossible, to undertake.
The scientific community, however, has already answered these questions since his death. If anything, Tim Samaras reignited a whole new mode of study. Gabe Garfield puts it this way: “We weren’t seeing what was going on inside of the tornado where it matters most. Tim showed that it could be done. He laid an important cornerstone at the foundation, and ot
hers will build on that.” His work redefined what was possible for tornado researchers.
If there’s any one person who’s been the most diligent in building on Tim’s work, it’s none other than Josh Wurman. As often as he and Tim failed to see eye to eye, Wurman has continued down a path Tim blazed. The founder of the Center for Severe Weather Research has kept expanding his own fleet of pods, deploying them into the paths of tornadoes while simultaneously scanning with his Doppler on Wheels. Mobile radar provides the safety net for Wurman’s pod team that Tim lacked at El Reno—a precaution that Wurman and other researchers have come to see as a necessary foil to the hazards of probe work.
That Tim was willing to operate without a safety net for so long is an enigma to some. Even more vexing is that he saw his fate coming, at least on some level: “Somebody’s gonna get bit,” he had said, presciently, even as he pushed his limits further. The contradiction perhaps speaks to the double-edged nature of obsession, and how it both drove and doomed Tim. His devotion made possible unheard-of feats of scientific discovery, but it also inured him to the risks he was accruing—as he grew calm and comfortable under the anvil, as his son entered the same perilous territory. The effect of his own expertise was a kind of tunnel vision. Looking out, Tim was keenly aware of the looming threat, but blind to his own proximity.
After so many years of inching closer, he couldn’t appreciate how close to the dragon he had finally sidled. He could reach out and feel its presence—the warmth of its breath, the tick of its pulse. He could grab ahold of it, and it of him.
The Man Who Caught the Storm Page 25