Tim pauses and consults the DeLorme road map—he remembers the probe had been geotagged upon deployment. According to the map, the turtle is in the other direction. He passed it? Tim whips the minivan around and returns to the farmstead. The row of poplar he’d deployed next to is gone, and all that had been green is now the same monochrome mud gray. Harold’s house is the very farmstead he’d deployed next to. He simply had not recognized the area in its current desolation.
“There it is,” Porter yells. “It’s still there!”
The minivan comes skidding to a halt, and Tim strides purposefully toward the turtle, a bewildered look in his eyes as he glances over his shoulder at Porter. The probe is in the path, surrounded by a degree of damage that could only have been caused by the tornado core. History has been made on a dirt road in South Dakota.
Tim bends and examines HITPR, then grins, pointing. “There it is. I’m not going to touch it. I need to get some shots.”
Peter, the National Geographic photographer, comes running up, breathlessly repeating, “This is amazing! This is amazing! This is amazing!”
Porter informs Peter that he is standing on fallen power lines, mercifully carrying no current. Tim begins to recount the event, as though he were a quarterback re-creating a bootleg play. His words come fast as he acts out the scene for the photographer. “That tornado was right there, and Pat says, ‘We don’t have time, you gotta go.’ And I said, ‘I’m gonna put it right here.’ I reached out and slammed it down, made the corner, and we took off.”
Without another word, Tim heads back to the minivan, his sneakers making sucking sounds in the mud. He returns with a camera and snaps a few photos. “Now, the sixty-dollar question: Is the little light still blinking in there?”
He grips the turtle’s soil-spackled rim, lifts it, and pauses for a moment, regarding an unbelievable sight. Underneath the HITPR is a perfect circle of dry gravel road. All around it, the gravel has been scoured away by the tornado, leaving nothing but the rain-soaked roadbed. But beneath the device, the road is pristine. A small red light flashes.
“Yes, it is!” Tim shouts. “Look! The gravel is still here, right underneath it!”
He kneels in the mud, his probe balanced on its rim in front of the indisputable evidence that it hadn’t budged an inch. A few yards away, on the other hand, Harold’s house has been shredded and cast into an adjacent field. Some eight inches from the device is a deep gash in the road. Something big and tumbling had come very close to destroying the turtle. “These are F4, F5 winds,” Tim says.
“I think it’s F3 from what I see,” Rhoden ventures. “That house is not anchored whatsoever. Certainly no higher than F4. Could be stronger, but no stronger than an F4.”
“Well”—Tim grins, tapping his fingernails against the mild-steel skin—“I can certainly tell you.”
That night, in a Huron, South Dakota, motel, Tim plugs his laptop into the turtle’s data card. He is surrounded by the Rhodens, Porter, and Peter. They are all exhausted, wet and filthy, but the room hums with excitement.
In the lamplight of the shabby room, Tim’s eyes dart over the numbers registering the pressure drop HITPR has recorded. “I’ve heard estimates of seventy, maybe eighty millibars.” he says, looking up into Gene Rhoden’s camera. “But not one hundred. Not one hundred millibars.”
What Tim’s turtle has measured is, as he’ll come to describe it, the eardrum-shattering equivalent of stepping into an elevator and launching 4,000 feet up in ten seconds. Today, HITPR has collected data that never existed before now—it was always an estimate, a theory, an assumption, a blank space in the equation. Tim just filled that space with something real and precise. The pressure drop the turtle logged, using technology Tim had developed on the test range years before, is the steepest pressure deficit on record, confirming what scientists believed but could never prove. With a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and a few assumptions about the vortex structure, the probe’s pressure ports registered winds in excess of two hundred miles per hour, well within the F4 range.
Tim used to be just a tinkerer with a high school diploma. Now he’s the man with the impossible data, the first to step forth into an untouched—and supposedly untouchable—frontier.
Even now, in the giddy afterglow, when he should be cracking a Coors and toasting a watershed moment in scientific history, Tim speaks as though he is matching wits with his detractors and doubters.
“Certainly, you can open some of this up for speculation,” he says. “Now, even if we were to hedge that . . . even if you average these small points down here, you’re still going to average out close to one hundred [millibars].”
“It’s amazing,” Rhoden says.
“This is absolutely amazing.”
“You’ve done it, Tim.”
He looks up at them from the motel desk and his eyes gleam. “I think everybody did well today. It’s fantastic.”
Tim stays up late talking, telling and retelling the story of the day. No one in the room likely gives much thought to the danger they had courted today. Not now. They’re all too wired. Tim dreams about what the numbers in his computer could mean—to forecasters, to structural engineers, and to folks like Harold, whose farmhouse stood for only an instant next to the turtle. Tim can tell them how fast the wind was at the surface. He can tell them about how the temperature steadily fell and the humidity increased as the tornado passed over HITPR. At last, he can tell them about the structure of the vortex. For researchers such as Bill Gallus,
