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
