On storm days, Tim is out the door a little after lunch, beating rush-hour traffic with Pat Porter, his brother-in-law, to catch thunderstorms inundating the southern and eastern suburbs. The Denver Convergence-Vorticity Zone—a place where the terrain often creates its own swirling winds—is a favorite hunting ground. Or they post up at Barbecue Point, a flat crossroads near Aurora, where a lightning strike once roasted a couple of cows.
After the initial shock, Kathy acclimates to all of Tim’s carrying on about storms. He doesn’t start blowing money they don’t have to spend. He remains a good husband and an attentive father. As far as vices go, chasing clouds each year when storms roll around isn’t all that bad. Yet she can’t help noticing that this love affair with the sky is deepening. He’s joining the ranks of a distinctly fanatical club.
The lengths to which some chasers will go to preserve their freedom during the plains storm season, lasting from April through June each year, is nothing short of astounding. One weather nut scheduled his wedding for the dead of winter expressly because it meant that his anniversary would never conflict with his chasing. Another refuses to accept the leash of any nine-to-five gig that would limit his ability to fully enjoy the sacred month of May. “You can have a nice, cushy job, but to me it’d be a nightmare not to be able to have an adventure,” says chaser Dan Robinson. “I don’t want the big house and picket fence.”
Tim begins to schedule his vacations at the beginning of May through the end of June. A few years in, word of his abilities has already begun to reach beyond the insular world of chasers. His face ends up on a 1992 cover of the local alt weekly Westword, which contains profiles of him and a few other Denver storm geeks. “Some call it a hobby, some call it an addiction,” Tim tells the reporter. “I think it’s more of an obsession with me.” He says he dreams of buying acreage out where the storms darken the plains of eastern Colorado and erecting an antenna farm for his ham radio.
The beast of Last Chance notwithstanding, by the midnineties Tim has outgrown the meager twisters of Colorado, and the casual day chases in his backyard. He starts roaming farther and farther afield, in pursuit of the “Panhandle magic” of the Lone Star State, and the storied monsters of Oklahoma—the stuff he’s seen only on tape. It is as if he’s fallen under the tornado’s spell, which lures him away from home each spring and lies dormant in the fall.
By 1995, the Dryline Chaser is now recognizable in the empty northeastern tip of the Texas Panhandle and all the far-flung locales that have been calling him. On the afternoon of March 25, Tim and Porter are filming in Lipscomb County as the sky starts to boil in ways most people hope never to witness. The wind blasts Tim’s back and he peers upward to see something burrowing through the bottom of the storm, fine tentacles sweeping and probing the air. Next comes a sign that even a newbie couldn’t miss: that first welter of dust kicking up out of the prairie. “There it goes,” he intones. Each time he’s caught on tape, there’s wonder in his voice, as though this is his first time.
Tim and Porter are soon racing down county roads. They cross the border into Oklahoma, the odometer maxed out at ninety, the mesquite fence posts blurring past, and the tornado falling away across a prairie that stretches to the limit of the eye.
The two can disappear this way into the interior of the continent for days or a week at a time. As the obsession deepens, Tim develops his own vernacular to describe what he’s witnessing. He calls sheer vertical tornadoes cigars. The inflow stratus are beavertails. He talks about storms the way a collector might describe a Shelby Mustang. “Hard knuckles on the anvil,” he enthuses. “Striations on the side. This is more than just a classic!”
And he is a collector, after a fashion—but of images and experiences, not things. The trophy is the right forecast. It’s being able to say he was there—that in the vastness of the plains, he found the needle. The euphoric rush of pulling up just in time to see the cloud wisps gather and descend—it’ll never get old.
If he’s that lucky, he can also tend to more earthly concerns. Tim usually sells the footage to local television stations to cover his costs. At the end of the chase, he drops a line to his buddy Mike Nelson, the chief meteorologist over at Denver’s NBC affiliate, KUSA. Often, Tim is calling in from Limon or some other town at the edge of the state: “I got some great stuff out in Kansas. Would you like it?”
And at 9:30 p.m., he shows up at the station’s front door with a tape, just in time to turn it around for the ten o’clock news. If it’s from Tim Samaras, Nelson knows it’s good. Tim is one of the few guys who shows up with images of the thing in action, not the wrecked houses of its aftermath. Around the station, he has become something of a folk hero, this friendly dude who appears periodically
