This is the first time Tim has ever taken orders on a chase, and he finds the arrangement chafing. Every chaser makes his or her fair share of bad calls, but it’s just harder to abide them when the mistake is someone else’s. For an independent worker like Tim, it’s like being muzzled. There are growing “tensions,” Seimon says, “difficult personalities.” The streak of fruitless days stretches on. As they tick by, even the NatGeo guys are fed up.
Eleven days into the mission, Tim calls a meeting in a fit of pique. With Pietrycha and Seimon gathered in his shaded Lakewood driveway, the white minivan loaded with probes and luggage, Tim unburdens himself. He says he’s prepared to back out of the effort and go independent. He doesn’t shout—he rarely, if ever, raises his voice—but he’s forceful: The mission cannot continue this way. If he is to remain aboard, he wants greater input in the selection of targets, and the freedom to follow his own instincts. “I don’t work this way. I can’t work this way,” he says. Seimon is stunned. He understands Tim’s frustration as well as any, but they had all agreed at the outset to defer to Rasmussen. “He came across as a hothead,” Seimon says. After a little begging and cajoling, the three strike an agreement that will keep Tim aboard and allow a greater measure of autonomy.
Following the powwow, their fortunes do not improve. Even with more independence, Tim doesn’t come close to a worthwhile deployment in the first twenty days. On June 11, near Benson, Minnesota, frustrations reach a climax. At the rear of the convoy, Seimon briefly glimpses a large tornado, half-hidden in the rain. Judging by the radio traffic, it doesn’t seem as though anyone else has seen it. Seimon knows he isn’t supposed to occupy radio bandwidth during operations, but feels compelled to cut in. He argues that they should be chasing this confirmed tornado by sight alone. But the convoy keeps moving. Rasmussen is guiding them from afar with radar. The trouble is, the radar updates only once every five minutes or so; they’re making their most time-sensitive decisions with outdated information. To Seimon, it feels as if they’re driving away from the objective. To Tim, it runs completely counter to how he chases: if the visible facts on the ground change, respond to them.
The convoy knocks itself out of position. It’s left flailing in the tornado’s wake, forced to navigate around an obstacle course of fallen trees and power lines in a hopeless stab at catching a storm fleeing at forty miles per hour.
The next day, the group is in far-western South Dakota, tailing a storm that’s dropping tornado after tornado—some six in all—none of which crosses a navigable road. When the storm finally passes over US 385, just south of the Black Hills, the tornado lifts, leaving them to clutch at a chaos of nontornadic winds. Even when the team manages to cohere and cooperate, it seems, the tornadoes refuse to do the same.
A week later, Tim’s hopes for the season are dashed altogether. The team becomes separated, leaving Tim, Seimon, and the NatGeo crew in Nebraska for the night, while Pietrycha and the mesonets stay three hours east, in South Dakota. After 15,000 miles and a month of nearly continuous chasing, everyone is fried. The crew needs sleep, and there should be time to rendezvous in the morning.
Dawn arrives with news of potential in southern Minnesota. They may yet salvage the expedition in its final days. But as the two groups drive throughout the morning, the window shifts. The warm front that will force storm development surfaces farther northeast, in Wisconsin. If Pietrycha hurries, he’ll make it just in time for the intercept. But there is no way Tim and Seimon can cover that amount of ground. To make matters worse, they’ve lost contact with Pietrycha again, and the guidance he’s getting from a forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Dodge City, Kansas. Hopelessly out of striking range and operating in the blind, Tim ends up puttering around St. Cloud.
Only later does he learn about the half-mile wedge that raided Siren, Wisconsin. It uprooted hardwoods and sheared through homes. The town’s warning system remained silent—damaged by a lightning strike just a month before—and three people were killed. The only flickering bright spot is that Pietrycha was there, in position with his mesonet team. They gathered a vanishingly rare and complete set of measurements, a scientific coup. It’s one solid building block toward an eventual, potentially lifesaving understanding of the storm—a small but valuable success for Pietrycha and the expedition.
For Tim’s own mission, however, the entire season is a bust. From May 20 to June 20, he has traveled some 15,000 miles and spent weeks away from his wife and children. Yet for all his restless traipsing, the turtle remains untested. Tim limps back to Colorado and returns HITPR to its place in the basement.
In the off-season, a notion begins to harden into conviction in Tim: he is a chaser who doesn’t need another man’s forecast to find tornadoes. He vows to trust in his own cunning beneath the storm. He won’t tether himself to a cumbersome entourage, no
