The Man Who Caught the Storm Read online

  By noon the summer sun presses down. The sagging fog begins to heat, and the dense haze disperses, along with the morning chill. The faultless dome of heaven takes on a hard, lacquered blue, and the windless air stirs as a steady breeze sweeps up out of the southeast. A skein of fluffy clouds sets adrift on the horizon.

  The average citizen sees a sunny day. Tim Samaras sees a fine afternoon for a tornado.

  In all likelihood, Tim has been tracking this setup and planning his chase for days. He’s already en route to the plains from his home in suburban Denver. As the sun reaches its peak, his hail-battered Datsun pickup enters the storm chaser’s cathedral. There is none of the verticality of trees or mountains here to modulate the wind or break his sight lines. Once the sheltering Front Range fades from the rearview mirror, he’s naked to the lungs of the earth, in an unadorned country where the passage of miles can feel more like a few hundred yards.

  Today looks fit for a picnic. The wind is picking up, but temperatures are mild, edging into the upper seventies. If he were to stand outside long enough, he’d probably get a sunburn. But Tim sees fair weather through uncommon eyes. He sees rain and wind and potential violence in an untroubled sky. While others bathe in the rays, Tim waits and watches the scattering of clouds. The atmosphere, he knows, is drinking in the sun’s radiation, like a drunk about to get mean.

  By midafternoon, the benign, almost friendly looking clouds begin to curdle, and the fields beneath them darken. When the feathered tops of fluffy cumulus suddenly take on a polished hardness and start building toward the troposphere like columns of wildfire smoke, his chase begins. The day’s first storm pops less than an hour east of his home in Lakewood, Colorado, but it doesn’t distract him. He’s more interested in the storm that doesn’t exist yet. Chasing is prognostication and timing. It’s predicting where the tornado could happen, and being there at the precise moment that it does. His guide is a subtle map of invisible boundaries—diffluent and converging rip currents of air, surges of southeastern moisture, western aridity, and polar cold. The clues point farther east, to the place where the morning fog has lifted and the wind now freights vapor over a parched, cloud-shaded prairie. The blue Datsun picks its way along a lonely stretch of US Route 36. Tim scans the storm towers, listens to the squawk of the weather radio, and waits for the magic hour.

  As the sun settles low behind him, a storm to the southeast catches his eye. It’s isolated, rising above the cloud deck like a mountain peak surrounded on all sides by foothills. The storm appears to be closing in on a tongue of moist, unstable air, which might as well be a stand of drought-killed trees before a forest fire. Tim leaves the highway and steers south. By 7:45 p.m. he parks along a gravel road in the remote ranch country, somewhere south of a little town called Last Chance. The rain is coming down hard now, so he keeps to the cramped cab of the Datsun into which he has tucked his lean, five-foot-seven-inch frame. He feels the truck beneath him rocking gently. He watches dingy curtains of soil and water strafe across tufts of buffalo grass and grama. The storm has come to him.

  At a minute before 8:00 p.m., there isn’t another soul in sight except for the monster that is just now emerging from the dust and darkness. Tim has the big show all to himself, and what a show. This might be shaping up to be the biggest storm of his chasing career thus far. An anvil cloud never fails to evoke in his mind the pyrocumulus of an atomic bomb, its head a tumescent riot of burls and bulges. He could spend hours letting his eyes roam across every pulsing shred of cloud, every rotating square foot throwing shadow over miles of high plains. The storm’s edifice luminesces every other moment like a paper lantern. By the end of its life cycle, the tower of electricity and ice and hurricane-force gale will have dispersed the energy equivalent of a twenty-kiloton nuclear warhead. This storm isn’t anywhere near finished yet. Tim is no meteorologist, but he knows a long-tracker when he sees one.

  Though the uninitiated could easily mistake the darkness beneath the cloud for rain, he would be gravely mistaken. All around, the storm is alive, pulsing, almost animate, yet the shadow beneath appears depthless, without feature or flux. If there’s one thing Tim has learned, it is that looks lie in Tornado Alley. Behind the dark wall, there’s more than just rain. Hiding inside, Tim’s now certain, is a serious tornado.

  With one hand, Tim focuses the camcorder on the eastern horizon, and with the other, he lifts the handset to his mouth.

  “WJ0G,” he says, his voice raised slightly over the sharp drum of rain against the roof. A burst of static follows from the ham radio.

  “G, go ahead.”

  “Okay, I’m going to have to confirm it’s still on the ground. The whole base is rotating, and the base is almost touching the ground . . . the whole rotating wall cloud.”

  “WJ0G, N0LVH confirm. . . . Can you provide a location?”

  “Okay, it’s definitely south of Lindon, and it’s almost directly to my east now. I’m probably five miles south of the highway.”

  Tim isn’t a newbie—nor is he an old hand yet—but his forecast today is as spot-on as a professional’s. And like a pro, he knows well enough to give this one a wide berth. Getting too close to a rain-wrapped tornado is a bit like piloting a dinghy into a blind fog. Usually, the craft sails through without incident. But there’s always a chance that the dinghy takes the bow of an oil tanker broadside. The tornado behind the veil is the one you never see coming.

  Fortunately, and by some stroke of impossible luck, no chaser has ever died this way. For the watchers like Tim, there is simply no good reason to get that close. Besides, he prefers to look at the storm in all its mammoth totality, its increasing scales of movement like the turning of gears. He also understands that the tornado isn’t the thing, it’s the consequence, the eddy in the stream. It exists on both visible and invisible spectra. Its behavior is governed by forces too complex and too grand to track in real time. The day a chaser forgets this may be his last. There’s only one rule out here: Never get too close or too cocky. Never be too sure you’ve seen the worst the storm can deliver. The sky can always show you something you haven’t seen yet.

  With a few years of chasing experience, Tim has taken the rule to heart.

  He is a compact man, lean even as a father of three at the age of thirty-five. He has thickly tendoned forearms shot through with heavy veins, and the rough hands of a mechanic. His most defining facial characteristic is a prominent nose, which at first proceeds gently from his face before plunging at the bridge, lending him a hawkish, though not-at-all unfriendly appearance. His dark hair is beginning to recede ever so slightly at the temples, but its retreat makes him look more distinguished. These days he wears a beard, thick and glossy.

  A Coloradan with a Greek Albanian father and a Hispanic mother, Tim has a westerner’s reflexive congeniality; he will pause, even at the most inopportune moment of the chase, to provide the locals who approach him with pertinent meteorological updates.

  He has never chased outside his home state and plans to make a pilgrimage to Texas soon. The Lone Star State is hallowed ground where the real fanatics go, as a friend puts it, “to see the hand of God passing over the earth.” It will be the first, Tim hopes, of many such trips to come. An initiate into this wandering brotherhood, he has taught himself how to read a weather map and how to identify the morphological features of storms. Tim believes his apprenticeship under the tamer Colorado skies has prepared him for the kind of tempest that belongs to history, the kind spoken of with reverence. Usually, they’re known by the tacit shorthand of location and, if there’s been more than one, a date. Mention Lubbock, Texas, to a chaser—or the great Tri-State twister; or Andover, Kansas; or Woodward, Oklahoma—and nothing else need be said by way of explanation.

  Witness one of the giants, and the outside world—the life at home and all its worries—falls away. Maybe it never fully comes back. Nothing else will ever feel quite like standing inside the lungs of a storm. As long as a chaser lives, he won’t forget the way
the inflow presses at his back; or the grit sandblasting his calves; or the air itself, which carries a latent charge; or thunder like the report of an 800 mm railgun caroming off the clouds.

  Every time he chases, even if he misses the tornado, Tim learns. He’s good, and someday soon he might become great. He’s honing his forecasts, which are as much an art as a science. He’s mastering the way the most revered chasers channel their awe, fear, and adrenaline into a useful kind of hyperawareness.

  This moment near Last Chance is cause for celebration. For this, Tim would gladly pay a dozen busts and near misses. For this, he’d drive any number of miles.

  The tornado shows itself now, emerging briefly from behind its curtain of rain. It isn’t one vortex, but several, each briefly resolving against the horizon, where the edge of the storm meets the day. It isn’t the iconic funnel so much as a shaft through which vortices move, each narrow and often transitory, yet deceptively violent.

  Just as quickly as it emerged, the vortex disappears again. The storm drags a broad slug of rain across the intervening fields, and there is little else to see now apart from atomized water, blowing dust, and the storm anvil splayed for miles above Tim’s head. For now, he remains in the Datsun, keeping his distance. He could get closer and angle for a clearer view—he could try to pierce the rain veil and punch the hail core—but he doesn’t. Not today, not with this tornado.

  There are scientists out there who once ventured behind the veil, who didn’t watch so much as hunt. They sought knowledge, not thrills. They roamed the plains with purpose, or at least they used to. He saw them in a documentary a few years back, and their exploits are the reason he’s out here now. It’s why he chases, though he probably couldn’t even articulate for himself all of the reasons their work has touched him so. He isn’t an atmospheric scientist like them; he didn’t even go to college. He’s just a watcher waiting for the rain to pass.

  Within another five minutes, he steps out onto the gravel. The wind whips through his legs. Behind him, the sun breaks through the western clouds, and in the light, the storm blanches from carbon gray to an immaculate white.

  “My God,” he says.

  The storm is vast. It’s like looking up at the mountains west of his home, only the anvil soars far higher. The bulbous cloud has been smoothed and hardened by the wind like the jagged face of the Front Range. With the sun at his back, the contrast is weak, but he can just make out the pale suggestion of a single vortex a mile or so out. The tornado is both mirror and crystal: it reflects or refracts depending on the viewer’s position relative to the sun. Dark as granite when backlit, it can be wan as milk with the light behind the viewer. The funnel can mimic the verdure of the crops beneath, or the brown-black of soil.

  Tim isn’t sure whether he believes in a higher power. Whether the sight before him is the work of God or a simple disequilibrium, it is undeniably a magnificent work to behold. Yet as much as the tornado invites a sense of mysticism, Tim tries to resist the impulse. Back in the real world he’s an engineer of an odd sort; he places his faith in the tactile, the quantifiable. What separates him from most chasers is that he believes everything on this planet—including the godlike mystery on the plains before him—can be measured. He wagers that, with the right tools and steady nerves, even the deepest unknown can be plumbed and understood.

  Today is not the day to test this belief. The storm is too dangerous, and Tim has much more still to learn. But his curiosity is boundless, and at Last Chance there is some part of him that is plotting, imagining how to part the rain, to pierce the core, to touch the tornado’s flux and fury.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  A BOY WITH AN ENGINEER’S MIND

  AS A KID, it wasn’t enough for Tim Samaras to see that the gadgets around him worked. He had an irrepressible need to know how and why. The bane of his mother’s household appliances, he dismantled her blender to see why the blades spun so fast. At ten years old, he autopsied the television set in an attempt to determine how colors and shapes flashed across the screen. That these things worked perfectly fine before he took them apart was not something he seemed capable of taking for granted.

  Rather than reprimand the boy, his parents gave in to his tinkering. His father, Paul—to save himself repeated trips to Sears—kept Tim supplied with cast-off junk to deconstruct. He went so far as to take out an ad in the Rocky Mountain News, seeking used electronics. So long as the gadget was free, Paul Samaras would show up at your doorstep, a salvager combing the Denver suburbs for the benefit of a little boy with an engineer’s mind. Mostly he returned to Tim with antique radios—the kind with the big dials—clutched under one arm.

  Tim’s bedroom was his laboratory, and a hazard to bare feet, strewn as it was with transistors and diodes and capacitors. Here, he brought the silent radios back to crackling life. Though Paul was a stern and authoritarian presence in the house, he actively abetted Tim’s hobbies. The father had always wanted to become a ham radio operator. The trouble was, he never got around to passing the code tests required by the FCC. Tim found his father’s manuals, studied them, and became a licensed amateur at twelve years old, call sign WN0JTV. He built his first transmitter using the horizontal output tube from an old television set. The accomplishment filled Paul with pride, and he soon erected a used two-and-a-half-story Hy-Gain antenna tower next to the house in Lakewood, to amplify the signal his son could receive and broadcast. Since the yard was small, with little room to bury radial wires to ground his antenna, Tim would occasionally sneak out of his bedroom window at night and excavate small trenches in the neighbors’ yards for burying his lines. The two-thousand-volt transmitter emitted such a powerful signal that it often infiltrated the electronic organ next door. The little neighbor girl would be in the middle of practice when an awful shrieking and hissing would pour through the organ’s speakers, provoking her mother to fits of obscenity.

  On special nights, though, Tim’s radio fell silent, and the family gathered for one of its favorite films. Paul would drag the dinner table into the living room, and Tim’s mother, Margaret, would serve supper in front of the TV. On one such Sunday at six o’clock, six-year-old Tim took his seat next to his brothers, Jim and Jack. The house echoed with the roar of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, then the first strident chords of The Wizard of Oz.

  Tim was entranced by the film—but not by Day-Glo Technicolor, or the timeless parable. Sepia-toned Kansas was what rooted him in his chair that evening. He couldn’t take his eyes off the tornado as it roped over the fields toward Dorothy and Toto. A skirt of sod swirled around the twister. The wind howled, the windows shattered, and Dorothy’s little farmhouse took flight. Tim could scarcely believe such things existed on the plains east of his home. He would watch the opening moments again and again throughout his childhood. The rest of the film made him sleepy—even the Munchkins and those terrifying flying monkeys. The fantasy didn’t hold the same magic he beheld in that vision of raw power and menace.

  Three years later, Tim caught his first real glimpse of Dorothy’s tempest, from his own backyard. It wasn’t the awe-inspiring image he had hoped for, just a small funnel cloud, never in contact with the ground. Still, he sprinted into his neighbor’s yard and mounted the swing set, angling for a better view. The thin, introverted boy clutched the metal bars and craned his neck as this snake in the sky undulated languorously over the city in the storm’s half-light. It was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen.

  As he grew, whenever his dual interests in technology and severe weather could align, Tim’s eyes would alight. When storms blew over the Rockies, he’d run wire from his window to a power pole outside, attempting to conduct the ambient electrical charge to a lightbulb. When the storm was far off, he’d tune his radio to the dead space between stations and press his ear against the speaker. If he was quiet, he could hear static crashes, the whispers of distant lightning in pulsed white noise.

  By the time he was old enough t
o drive, he’d take his 1967 Ford Galaxie 500, “a huge frickin’ boat,” his brother Jim says, and park it at the make-out spot on an outcropping near Red Rocks. Tim wasn’t a bad-looking young man: slight of build, with a thick head of dark, nearly black hair, and a fine olive complexion. But he didn’t come here for the girls. He had simply outgrown watching storms in his backyard. From his perch at Red Rocks, the clouds were practically right on top of him, racing close above the giant amphitheater of pink sandstone.

  For spending cash, he clocked after-school hours at an electronics repair shop, hunched over busted CBs, two-ways, and FM radios. The idle tinkering in his bedroom had evolved into a knack for figuring out what was wrong with all range of gadgetry. Before he graduated from Alameda High School in 1976, he was managing the shop. With his skills there was no telling what doors might open were he to attend college. His parents even offered to pay. Their only condition was that he live at home and make his marks. But Tim had no interest in school; he couldn’t tolerate sitting still at a desk. He believed he could teach himself anything he needed to know.

  It was this imperturbable faith in his own faculties that led Tim to Larry Brown’s office in 1978. Brown headed up an outfit of explosives experts at the Denver Research Institute, an applied-engineering firm housed in a trio of boxy, formalist buildings atop a former army barracks on the University of Denver campus. Brown had placed an ad seeking an instrumentation engineer. The gig entailed working with state-of-the-art electronics designed to quantify the destructive force of military ordnance—bombs, that is—among other highly explosive odd jobs. Tim approached Brown’s desk wearing jeans that were ripped at the knees, and a T-shirt. He projected an aura of easy confidence, but he wasn’t cocksure.

  “I’d like a job,” he said.

  “Well,” Brown replied, “I need a résumé.”