“I wanna go north.”
“You’re fine north.”
Within half a mile, Tim begins to brake. He glances over his shoulder toward the tornado to his eight o’clock and brings the minivan to a halt. He steps out onto a rust-red gravel road, wearing jean shorts hemmed at the knees, white socks pulled to his calves, and a sweat-stained Henley T-shirt. Porter rounds the front and resumes filming. The sound of it never fails to bring him up short, as though all the winds of the world are converging on a single point, here in South Dakota.
The twister has kept to the fields the entire chase, and this may well be the only road it crosses in its life cycle. But now, with sight lines unblinkered by the minivan, Tim can detect in its behavior all the signs of a tornado in terminal “rope-out.” This is the phase in its development during which the funnel contracts, and the trunk begins to wander like a crooked vine until its imminent death. The trouble with deploying on a vortex in this end stage is that these are its most erratic moments. There is often a certain amount of stability found in a tornado’s maturity, a kind of straight-ahead churning. A roping tornado, however, is like wildfire—a small change in the wind and it may veer unpredictably. Still, if the twister doesn’t dissipate first, there’s a chance it could pass over Tim’s current position with plenty of room for escape. If this is the day’s last gasp—maybe even the final tornado of the season—he’s sure as hell going to deploy on it.
Tim pulls a turtle from the minivan and hesitates near the tall grass at the edge of the dirt road, the conical shell braced against his abdomen. He’s watching, waiting for the tornado to make the next move. He props the probe on its rim, flips the activating switch on the underside, and carefully lowers the device onto the gravel.
He dives into the minivan to retrieve a second probe, stowed upside down, its point secured by a hole cut into the floorboards—this he places some twenty yards down the road. “All right, let’s go,” he shouts, sprinting toward the minivan. “Let’s go!”
But as soon as they begin to drive away, the funnel fades. Porter can only see the disembodied tantrum of soil and grass whipping at the surface. “Ah, I think it’s dissipating,” he says.
Tim won’t believe it. “Not yet!”
Another hundred yards down the road, Porter can scarcely detect the surface-level rotation.
Tim brakes hard. “I’m going to deploy another probe.”
As he steps out and looks back to the southwest, he sees the funnel receding into the clouds directly above. “Damn luck,” he curses, and presses another probe into the gravel, hoping that what weak vorticity remains will find his instrument. It has been an entirely frustrating intercept. The vortex finally approaches a single passable road, and it’s already roping out.
The weight of yet another near miss settles heavily on Tim’s shoulders. Another season may have just come to an unceremonious end. The weather pattern in the days and weeks ahead shows all the signs of settling into summer doldrums. He knows it is entirely likely that NatGeo will pull its funding. He may have no choice but to forge ahead on his own next year, again without financial support. How much longer can he make this work on a shoestring? The damn thing was so close you could smell the ground-up vegetation, you could hear the roar. Tim begins collecting his turtles, a morose expression on his face.
Gene Rhoden, the NatGeo guide, pipes up, “Tim, I see a golden color on the horizon.”
Tim turns and gazes out to the east at the trailing edge of a thunderstorm catching the mellow light of the setting sun. The clouds are painted with the bright watercolor strokes the plains are famous for, but from this far out he can’t judge the storm’s strength. Tim ducks into the minivan and consults weatherTAP, a streaming radar service, on his salvaged cathode-tube-ray monitor. Suddenly, the fatigue dispels. The storm structure on the screen looks vigorous.
The day isn’t over yet.
Tim throws the mud-daubed minivan into gear and tears off down the road to collect the rest of his probes. Then he hits the straight-shot pavement of Highway 14 and pushes the Caravan’s six cylinders to some ninety miles per hour.
As they pass into the shadow of this new storm’s anvil, the cab is filled with the vicious, singing hiss of wind-driven rain against glass. The sunset’s warm apricot glow is replaced by dusk, the ambient light filtering through the clouds now sourceless and cool. The minivan approaches a low rise and a copse of cottonwoods, beyond which they are driving into the blind. As they pass beyond the trees and onto the table-flat tracts of soybeans and corn, the rain slackens, the sight lines clear, and the occupants of the minivan fall momentarily silent. The rain-soaked windshield is a phantasmagoria of liquid shapes, but there is no mistaking the profile before them.
“Wedge tornado on the ground,” Tim says. “Oh, my God. It’s huge.”
“We gonna deploy on that thing?” asks Porter, his voice betraying more than a little trepidation.
“Damn right.”
They approach from the west down Highway 14, the main route between Huron and Manchester. The tornado is half a mile to the south of the road and moving steadily northeast, refracting sunlight like a prism. One moment the mile-wide funnel is the color of sand. The next, it is smoke, ash, sod. Tim slows up, pulling into the oncoming lane. His distance narrows to hundreds of yards, but the approach is all wrong. There is the intuitive trimming along the margins of safety, and then there is the bet whose odds are unknown. From here, Tim can’t discern the tornado’s heading or ground speed with any certainty. This isn’t the weakening Stratford twister. This is unlike anything he’s ever seen. The tornado before them is
