On May 25, 1997, Tim and Porter drive through northwest Oklahoma, near the city of Woodward. To the north, storm cells are popping up. They cross into Kansas and soon park next to a wheat field ten miles north of the border. Just south of Rome, Kansas, at a dogleg in the Arkansas River, their necks crane to the west, across cottonwood-lined creeks and tracts of wheat and sorghum, toward the bluff crags of a thunderstorm. They can’t see it yet, but the NOAA weather radio indicates that somewhere behind the far line of trees, beneath all that rain-sheathed darkness, a tornado moves east-northeast. Tim centers his camera frame and begins to narrate: “There’s a reported tornado on the ground right now.”
From this distance, he can see the broad span of the storm, from its base to its mushrooming anvil. “A classic,” he exclaims. “We have monster rotation here. Likely, we’re going to have to move east. Just a little bit, that is. Time: 7:32. This is an incredibly impressive storm.”
As it nears, a form emerges out of the murk in the west. It’s like the trunk of a great tree, the color of a livid bruise: hundreds of yards across, its canopy fans into restless clouds. With the inflow at his back, Tim can feel it breathe. He watches the wind thresh the wheat at the edge of the road and sees a cold blue glow spill through the clouds above the tornado. As windrows of dust kick up above the tree line, the tornado undergoes a sudden and detectable hardening. It’s feeding, growing stronger. “No question about it,” Tim announces. “That is a huge, huge tornado.”
He stands there for a while longer, projecting its heading with his eyes. Then he piles into the Dryline Chaser and, for the first time, drives toward its path. He and Porter reposition onto a gravel road adjoining an unfenced, fallow field, and when he’s satisfied, Tim stops and steps out into the wind. The dark shag on his head tosses in the rising gale. He wears blue jeans, a white T-shirt, an unbuttoned denim jacket, and running shoes. He opens the minivan’s rear hatch, revealing a compartment bursting with luggage. After retrieving a large, stiffened case, he sets it gently down onto the road, pops the latches, and uncovers the humped profile of the snail, which Tatom has painted bright orange for visibility. With the snail tucked securely under his left arm, Tim sets out.
This time, he isn’t following at a cautious distance. The tornado is coming for him, and instead of running away, Tim is jogging in the direction of the darkness. It lurks just across the field, beyond the windbreak trees, as Tim jumps off the road and onto bare dirt.
He kneels, lowers the shell, and drives the geophone’s prongs into the silt loam. Lightning stitches the horizon, and there he is, crouching in the furrows as this shadow like something out of a fable rumbles and moans. He points toward the tornado with his left arm and angles his right arm to the northeast, gauging trajectory. He says something, but whatever it is gets lost in the wind and thunder. Tim rises and hustles back to the minivan. There’s a change in his voice when he speaks again; it’s never sounded like this on a chase before. Usually he’s full of glee and boyish astonishment. Now his voice sounds forceful, deadly serious, that of a man at dire work: “Time: 7:45. Snail deployed.”
They wait for a moment until dust hangs like a curtain in the air and Tim knows that the big winds are on their way. They bail ten miles to the southwest and to safety, parking at a Motel 6 near Interstate 35, in South Haven. The power is out and the motel and its parking lot are dark. To the north, electrical transformers arc briefly like lightning bugs in the night.
The next morning, Tim and Porter return to the deployment site near Rome. Trees with nude branches lean against a nearby house. Power poles are strewn across the field like felled timber. Tim calls Frank Tatom with the news. He’s talking fast. The snail was close, and the instrument survived. More important, it’s still recording.
In fact, of all the snails in the fleet Tatom has entrusted to various chasers, Tim is the only one who gets near a tornado. He’s good at this. What’s more, he has flourished in the excitement, the danger, and the purpose. This can’t be the end, Tim thinks. He has gotten a taste of what it means to become something more than just a watcher, and Tatom has shown him the way.
The federal government ultimately declines to fund a full seismic tornado-detection network, concluding that radar’s early-warning capabilities are superior. Nevertheless, Tim can’t help notice that Tatom had enticed the government to pay for the development of his dream instrument. What is stopping Tim from creating one of his own—a different device capable of prying loose the secrets his inquisitive mind has sought over countless miles of plains highway?
Tim knows that for all the work that went into the landmark TOTO project a decade before—and for all the people it inspired, from Tim himself to the scriptwriters behind Twister—the storm scientists in charge never actually succeeded in getting a direct hit with their probe. They failed to pierce the tornado core, and no one has succeeded since. Their dream of seeing into the heart of the tornado was never realized.
In Tim’s mind, if their failure has proven anything, it is that the field could use an engineer’s touch. The TOTO probe looked like an oil drum and weighed about as much as a full one. The snail’s largest component is
