Tim believes the tornado is about to overtake them.
“We’re gonna die,” he says, gripped by a pure animal fear.
He sounds like a man who has just discovered his own terrible mistake. They have pushed too far, tempted fate. All that’s left now is to learn the cost of violating chasing’s one rule.
Seimon tries to reassure him: What he’s experiencing isn’t the tornado itself. It’s likely the outer circulation—too close, but still escapable.
The minivan tunnels blindly through walls of violent gale-driven rain. The bright-yellow highway dividing lines fade beneath gray currents. “Oh, my God,” Tim mutters. He shoves the accelerator to the floor.
“Slow down, Tim,” Seimon urges. “Slow down. Slow down. Winds at one hundred miles per hour.”
To the right, a power pole cants into their lane. More fall. Others bow like pliant saplings, looking as though they might topple into the road at any moment. “Power lines down. Left side,” Seimon directs. “You don’t want the power poles to come down on you.”
Tim swings into the oncoming lane to avoid them.
“Beautiful,” Seimon cries. “Winds easily over one hundred miles per hour now. The power poles are bending! I’ve never seen that in my life! They’re bending. More power lines down. Slow down. Slow down.”
The headlights of cars shine in the gloom ahead, behind a series of looming poles and their arcing transformers. Tumbleweeds skitter before them. Then, as quickly as the rain curtains had enveloped them, the sky clears. The light pales again. Rain falls gently.
Tim and Seimon regard each other with wide eyes and manic, adrenal grins.
“You did it,” Seimon says. “Well done, my friend. Well done.”
“That was fucking close,” Tim sputters.
“That was beautiful,” Seimon says, as Tim finally begins to throttle down, to relax his grip on the wheel. “That was perfect.”
As soon as the storm passes, they navigate back down the highway, now strung with electrical lines, past fields littered with power poles. Tim gets out and strides over to his turtle. He fixes the conical point between his knees and pries open the lid covering the data recorder’s switch. The red light strobes. He looks to either side, at the nubs where telephone poles have been snapped a foot or two off the ground. “We’ve got telephone poles down to our north, and lots of telephone poles down to our south,” he observes.
His heart must still be hammering in his chest, though he sounds calmer now. They crossed a line today, and he knows it. The tornado was weakening when it reached them, but at any moment that could have changed. The 100-mile-per-hour current they struggled through might have intensified into a 150-mile-per-hour gust strong enough to batter the minivan into the ditch and an end-over-end roll.
Yet as Tim balances the turtle between his thighs and deactivates the data recorder, all seems forgotten. The fact of their escape eclipses the terror of the moment. They made it out alive, with one hell of a story to tell. On to the work at hand.
Whether the tornado core passed over the turtle will become a point of debate. Based on video provided by other chasers, Tim maintains that it did. Others, most notably Joshua Wurman, the founder of the Center for Severe Weather Research, say that HITPR caught an oblique slice of a dissipating-though-dangerous tornado. Nonetheless, Wurman, one of the most prominent atmospheric scientists in the field, wants to include Tim’s data in his mobile-radar analysis of the same storm. For the first time, the turtle is yielding information that’s useful to other researchers.
In the paper that Tim coauthors with Wurman, he describes a forty-five-millibar barometric-pressure drop, indicating the passage of intense winds—as well as a series of peaks and valleys in the pressure trace, consistent with the movement of several suction vortices. The measurements are encouraging but by no means groundbreaking. Bill Winn, a VORTEX researcher and physicist at New Mexico’s Langmuir Laboratory, had gotten a probe within less than half a mile of a violent F4’s center in Texas eight years before.
Nevertheless, Tim is getting closer. Twice now, here and in Pratt, Kansas, he has succeeded in getting his turtles in front of tornadoes. They just haven’t been hit head-on. Yet.
That’s precisely what starts to worry Seimon.
After the close call in Stratford, he decides that he will not venture back into the path with Tim. Reluctantly, he withdraws from the mission. He has grown rather fond of Tim over the years, and he’s still inspired by the dream of a historic intercept—but Seimon can’t justify the risk of entering “no-man’s-land” again. After several years of working near tornadoes, they have no horror story to tell. They’re getting good at this, and they came out of Stratford without so much as a scratch. But it quite easily might have ended differently. The tornado ran over that turtle a mere eighty seconds after it was deployed.
It’s simple statistics, Seimon believes. Whether their chances of getting hit on a given deployment attempt are twelve percent or even just two, if they play the odds long enough, eventually they will lose. “You can only roll the dice so many times,” Seimon says, “before things go wrong.”
He turns to other plans instead. He’ll go back once more to the unexplored glaciers of the Cordilleras. He’ll finalize the research for his long-neglected thesis. He has met a woman named Tracie, whom he plans to marry. He doesn’t intend to die before the wedding.
Tim doesn’t tell Kathy about how close he gets in Stratford, or how close he needs to be to pull this quest off. He may have stumbled too close, he’ll admit to himself; but he still thinks he can find the right balance. Each storm is teaching him something. They might not be yielding the right data quite yet, but they’re still showing Tim their tricks. A chaser—like a lion tamer—learns only in dangerous proximity. He’d never be able to voice the lessons, but he’s developing an animal sense of how the twister moves, how it evolves,
