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
