As the months wear on, though, the distances feel longer and wearier. Due to the paucity of meal options in sparsely populated regions where tornadoes most often occur, Tim is forced to subsist on grub at greasy diners, or to scavenge food from the nearest Allsup’s convenience store when nothing else is open. He then calls Kathy and beds down for the night in some down-in-the-mouth motel with holes in the drywall and a dead cockroach awaiting him on the bathroom floor. If the next day’s target is far away, he catches only a few hours of fitful sleep before it’s time to hit the road again.
Over unspeakable miles of flyover country in a single season, the long sedentary hours exact their toll. Some chasers joke that they can practically feel the clots forming in their legs. Tim’s companions marvel at how ably he weathers the chase (and maintains his trim physique). The missed tornadoes and busts are the only vicissitudes that sap his resilience.
To Julian Lee, Tim reveals an entire subculture Lee scarcely knew existed. At some depopulated crossroads, they’ll find a dozen or so chasers who have all reached the same conclusion about the weather to arrive at precisely the same place. They pass the time as most chasers do, speculating on the timetable for storm initiation, studying road maps, plotting target locations, and telling war stories about storms of the past. Before long, everyone is facing the sky, appraising cumulus towers as though judging prized cattle. The “crispier” they look, the better. Inevitably, a debate breaks out over the strength of the tornado that has yet to form. It could be augured by a particularly curvaceous hodograph—the line trace that represents wind shear. Or it could all hinge on the penetrability of the cap, the layer of stable air that acts like a lid on storms.
Eventually, Mother Nature puts a stop to the arguing. The cap will break. The cumulus towers will become cumulonimbus mountains. And the chasers will light out, leaving contrails of dust down back roads.
Until Lee began chasing with Tim, he never fully understood that he already spoke the mathematical language of storms. Fluid mechanics is his specialty, and in the sky it finds one of its grandest expressions. The explosive, hundred-mile-per-hour vertical growth of towering clouds is an awe-inspiring manifestation of the simple tendency for warm, moist air to rise. The sky, he now sees, is an ocean of latent energy. Life depends on the benign expenditure of that energy. Yet a rare process can transmute it into a knife’s edge capable of horrific carnage. Chasing “gave me respect for how much energy is in the air we breathe,” Lee says. “It’s something I’d never worked out until talking to Tim and those guys. There were a lot of things I’d learned in textbooks about turbulent flow, wakes, and vortices that I could see in the lab, but I didn’t realize they happen at such a large scale in nature.” Out here, the experiments span state lines, evolving from one moment to the next with infinite variation.
The other thing Lee learns on the road is just how difficult it is to find tornadoes.
Tim misses an outbreak stretching from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic in April 2002. Six people die, and dozens of tornadoes, including a powerful F4 in Charles County, Maryland, cause hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage. But the hills and forests of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic are beyond his territory; Tim requires flat land and predictable, gridded roads on which to navigate.
On May 7 he gets a near miss on a probe—closer than he’s ever been—outside Pratt, Kansas. The nearest turtle measures a twenty-four-millibar barometric-pressure drop and a peak wind gust of seventy miles per hour at the northern edge of the funnel—it’s so close he could have hurled a rock into the tornado. But close isn’t enough. His probe must pierce the heart. “There’s a hell of a lot of disappointment,” Carter says. “You spend all that time and effort, and then you miss it, just by a little bit.”
But failure, in this case, isn’t without value. Tim is learning that to accomplish what no researcher has before, he must get closer than any has dared. Like the toreador who waits until the last moment to pivot from the bull’s horns, Tim will have to stand in the path just before escape becomes impossible. Carter isn’t sure whether this is a good thing. But whatever Tim’s reservations, he has now grown comfortable in proximities that would have terrified him a few years ago.
For all the many miles Tim and his ragtag crew cover, again, the 2002 season ends without success. Tim retreats to lick his wounds and gear up for next year’s battle. But the storm will not wait; fall holds a surprise event in bad terrain. In the early afternoon of November 9—an unseasonable month for an outbreak—the first tornado touches down in Arkansas. And they don’t stop coming. Dozens rake across the South and up through the lower Ohio Valley. One out of every six is what NOAA refers to as a “killer.”
At 5:40 p.m. on November 10, there are simultaneous outbreaks occurring in an almost-continuous line of supercells from Louisiana to Lake Erie. The mile-wide wedge that enters
