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CONTENTS
Prologue
PART ONE
1: The Watcher
2: A Boy with an Engineer’s Mind
3: This Love Affair with the Sky
4: The Spark
5: Catching the Tornado
6: The Cowboy Science
7: A Turtle in the Wild
8: The Toreador
9: Stratford, Texas
10: Manchester, South Dakota
PART TWO
11: Doubling Down
12: A Team of Upstarts
13: TWISTEX Takes the Gravel Road
14: Quinter, Kansas
15: “You Have My Only Son”
16: Warnings
17: Bowdle, South Dakota
18: A Dead End, a New Chance
PART THREE
19: Chase Nirvana
20: A Shift in the Wind
21: El Reno, Oklahoma
22: The Dragon’s Tail
23: The Crossing
24: The Last Ride
25: How Far from Daylight
26: Ground Truth
27: The Signs
28: Tim’s Legacy
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Index
For Kathy and Laurie
PROLOGUE
MAY 27, 1997
THE FIRE DEPARTMENT’S siren sounded over Jarrell, Texas, just after 3:30 p.m.—a shrill, oscillating note, like an air-raid alarm, swelling and fading and swelling again. It filled every street and pressed in through the windows of every house in the little Czech farming town some forty-five minutes north of Austin. The siren was only ever used to call volunteers to the station, but anyone who had been paying attention that afternoon knew this time was different. They had ten minutes, maybe twelve at the outside.
The TV meteorologists were already tracking the tornado near Prairie Dell, four miles to the north of Jarrell. It writhed like a coach-whip snake at first, its thin form roping liquidly over prime farmland, where the Hill Country gives way to Blackland Prairie. For a time it seemed to track neither north nor south, but to trace a languid orbit in place.
Then came the shift.
The graceful ribbon was suddenly gone, replaced by this other thing—an inchoate, gray miasma, not so much a tornado as a wall of smoke, leaching up out of the earth. The twister was on the move now, bearing southwest on a collision course with Jarrell.
When it finally appeared on the northern horizon at about 3:40 p.m., it was a sight townspeople would resummon in their dreams for years to come. Bristling with debris and blackened with rich soil scoured from the fields, it looked ancient and immutable, its sooty wings spread wide. What it looked like was the end of the world.
The tornado was as wide as thirteen football fields laid end to end. Little Jarrell could have disappeared inside it, swallowed and gone. But the town that day was largely spared. The darkness passed to the west, away from the most densely populated parts of town. The trouble was, there were still people in its path, and more than usual on a Tuesday afternoon. School had let out for summer on the Friday before.
Double Creek Estates, a collection of modest single-story, wood-frame-and-brick starter homes, was huddled in the lowlands just northwest of downtown. Like most everywhere else in Texas, the houses didn’t have basements; the water table was too high, and the limestone bedrock too shallow. With no choice but to shelter aboveground, the residents did as they had always been instructed: they sought out hallways, bathtubs, closets. They gathered their children into these spaces and listened to the wind, then the breaking glass, the groaning wood, and finally the raw sound of it, a deafening, toneless static, until the roofs and the walls surrounding them fell away.
To say that the neighborhood was flattened would be to imply that there were ruins left to pick through in search of survivors. For National Weather Service surveyors cataloging the indexes of destruction, the tornado was notable for how few injuries it produced: one serious and ten minor along the periphery of the path. All else was fatality. Aboveground, inside the core, the odds of survival were nearly zero. The Hernandez family was the outlier—they lived only because Gabriel and his wife had insisted on carving a belowground shelter out of the limestone by hand.
Their home and some thirty others had not simply been razed; the foundations had been scraped clean, in some cases even of plumbing. The lawns surrounding them weren’t littered with debris. The remainder of the structures—the frame, brick, drywall—had been “granulated,” to quote one surveyor, and strewn over long distances downwind.
Eventually the clouds burned away, and the sun shone again. The carcasses of hundreds of cattle, some of them with the hide stripped clean of every follicle, lay mud-plastered in barren fields that were recently green. They were strewn through the woods, where even some of the oldest oaks had been pulled up, root and trunk. Many of the trees that still stood were swaddled in stiff sheet metal blown from nearby buildings and had been denuded and nubbed off at the top, like totem poles. The countryside reeked with decay, as if a suppurating wound had been opened on the land itself. And in a sense, one had.
The Jarrell twister produced what is to this day regarded as the most extreme damage researchers have ever encountered. More than five hundred feet of asphalt had been peeled away from the county roads where the tornado crossed, exposing the crushed-stone bedding beneath. Eighteen inches of topsoil had been suctioned from the lush fields of wheat and cotton, transforming them into vast muddy scars pooled with stagnant water. The people that saw these phenomena understandably wondered how the wind could do such things.
A couple of weeks later, once the debris had been cleared away, and the remains had been recovered as thoroughly as could be expected, my family and I drove slowly among the naked foundations. We lived not far from Jarrell, and during a recent summer, when I was fourteen or so, I had stocked shelves in the town’s general store. As the blocks of concrete and tracts of bare soil slipped past, I could have believed that no one had ever lived in Double Creek. For all I
