By the time the sun rises on the eleventh, Veterans Day, thirty-six have been killed. Deadly, destructive, unpredictable. Tim has been in the presence of the fastest wind on earth more than almost anyone else alive. But when a tornado leaves the empty fields and enters a town, he is still astounded by the way the air—without an igniting charge or an explosive compound—can act like a bomb’s shock front. Sometimes people know it’s coming, and sometimes they don’t. In either scenario, the best we can do is hunker down as people always have and hope the wind will miss. A chaser can either stand by, or he can do something about it. Tim doubles down on the probe.
CHAPTER NINE
STRATFORD, TEXAS
THE 2003 TORNADO season arrives like a reset. A new year, fresh with possibility. Tim is able to venture back out instead of watching helplessly from afar. He keeps a close eye on the predictive weather models, as they show early promise. Then May 15 dawns like a gift from the storm gods.
The Texas Panhandle sky is flooded with combustible atmospheric fuel from the Gulf of Mexico, and the unstable mass is on a collision course with dry western air and a howling, fifty-knot current moving east at 18,000 feet. Tim knows only that something could happen, not that it will. But the potential is enough to prompt him and Anton Seimon to pile into the minivan and depart from his Lakewood driveway at nine in the morning.
The road trip to the target is a rump-numbing haul no matter what. It’s the sound track, though, that makes it feel like an eternity to Seimon. Gone are the Clapton CDs that were once in heavy rotation. Tim insists they listen exclusively to the Weather Channel, which he streams via satellite. Through Colorado and into Oklahoma, the saw-toothed mountains melt into the southern plains to Muzak, “this Kenny G stuff,” Seimon says, punctuated by on-the-hour weather updates.
In the heat of the chase, Tim communicates on only one frequency, and this single-minded enthusiasm either infects a man or exhausts him. Tim inveighs endlessly about the mission, his customized chase vehicle, and epic storms of yesteryear, as though there were no life outside the chase. By his way of thinking, they’re currently bearing down on a storm that’s about to expend a nuclear warhead’s worth of energy. What else could possibly be as interesting?
In the many thousands of miles that Tim and Seimon have traveled together over the last two years, the pair have spoken surprisingly little about family or work—delving neither into Tim’s explosives expertise or Seimon’s expeditions into the Andes. It’s not that Tim is uninterested or intensely reserved. On and off the road, he’s one of the most genial guys any of his friends know. He’s generous with advice for the newbies who look up to him, and a cheerful troubleshooter for any chaser whose ham radio is on the fritz. But underneath all that there’s an undeniable edge to Tim—and it rises to the surface just when cumulus clouds harden into anvils.
In recent years, skepticism has been growing about the viability of Tim’s mission. Folks such as Erik Rasmussen had demonstrated initial excitement, and even offered assistance. But as more seasons pass and “close” is all Tim has to show for his efforts, the meteorological community’s curiosity fades back into its prior cynicism. Tim has something to prove. To the doubtful academics and researchers, to anyone who questions whether a mere chaser can bring home storm science’s holy grail, Tim wants to show off just what he can do.
Seimon understands the frustration—“We both have had to swim against the tide at different points,” he says—and wants to help Tim channel it. He’s ready to stick with Tim, even through the Muzak. Both men are “absolutely mesmerized by the atmosphere,” Seimon says. “And when you’re clear about that, everything else is a detail to be worked out.”
With the windows down, the pair enters the Texas Panhandle under a rapidly graying afternoon sky. Tim and Seimon listen to the moaning of power lines in the wind, savoring the subtle shifts in pitch as the gale slackens and swells. The stage is just about set. A line of thunderstorms now develops before them, stretching south to north, from Dalhart, Texas, to Boise City, Oklahoma. Within a few hours, fifty miles of supercells will pop up along the dry line, strung like pearls.
At a little before six that evening, Tim’s chase vehicle enters the crossroads hamlet of Stratford, Texas, one of those lonely, wind-scoured outposts afloat on an unbroken ocean of grain. Bewhiskered by quivering antennas, and the white orb of a portable satellite dome, the Dodge Caravan cruises down an empty US Route 287.
Clouds as dull as slag have choked off the light of a late-spring sun, bringing an early dusk to the Panhandle. The asphalt is wet and shining like obsidian from the passing storm. Tim guides the minivan through town, craning his neck for a glimpse of the western horizon through the gaps between trees and the little houses with dusty hardpan lawns.
That’s when he catches sight of it: a lowering too deep to be the wall cloud of the mesocyclone, too solid, too big, too well-defined, for a false-alarm “scudnado.” Though Tim glimpses the shape only for an instant, his every instinct signals tornado.
