As Tim fills out the roster of his team, Anton Seimon, his old chase partner, is frankly relieved to see him prepare an expedition with a group of trained meteorologists and scientists. “Carl is a very good forecaster, and a clear thinker. The people he worked with before Carl, to put it bluntly, were his next-door neighbor and brother-in-law, or anybody willing to drive a car,” Seimon says. “What business they had getting in front of tornadoes is an open question.”
Between Carl Young, Cathy Finley, Bruce Lee, and Bill Gallus, Tim has a formidable reservoir of talent. If Lee and Finley can sample the rear-flank downdraft while Tim and Carl pierce the vortex with turtles and media probes, their team could pull off a scientific coup that vastly exceeds their modest number.
Tim has dreamed of collaborating with great minds, and now he has found his crew. The days of vanishing into the plains with nothing but a friend, a minivan, and a few turtles are over. It is decided: 2006 will constitute a sort of trial run, to ensure they have the right chemistry. Come 2007, the inaugural season will commence.
As new collaborators and chase companions drift into Tim’s orbit, drawn by a shared worship of the sky, 2006 brings a connection of an altogether different sort—a surprise not even the savvy forecaster could see coming over the horizon.
On March 24, 2006, Tim watches a twenty-eight-year-old Iowan named Matt Winter enter the banquet hall of the West Des Moines Marriott. Winter and his mother thread through the crowd of chasers and meteorologists at the 10th Annual Severe Storms and Doppler Radar Conference, looking slightly lost. In this crowd, Tim can see that Winter, who works in compliance for an online job board, is a little out of place. What the young man knows of meteorology has been gleaned from a few books, mostly chaser memoirs and beginner’s texts. He considers himself more of an armchair enthusiast, content to follow the exploits of his favorite chasers, and to track tornadic events from the safety of his computer or television. Tim is one of the chasers he’s most enamored of.
Winter’s mother, Sherry, had previously arranged with Tim for her son to attend the conference and meet him. Long before Tim had settled down with Kathy, he and Sherry had been sweethearts, though it has been decades since they last saw each other. After Tim had secured invitations for them, the young man reached out by email, just to introduce himself. Tim had asked if Winter was a chaser or a meteorologist, or if he had attended Iowa State. Winter explained that he wasn’t a chaser, though he’d been fascinated by weather ever since he was six, when he watched as a massive storm’s eighty-five-mile-per-hour winds blew down trees in his babysitter’s neighborhood. Like Tim, Winter did not have a college degree. The young man had started a family. He wrote that he had three children, whom he was raising with his wife, Soun. The conversation never delved any deeper than that, but they resolved to meet in Des Moines.
At the conference, Tim has only a few minutes before his presentation, but he happily greets Winter and his mother. They make small talk, and Tim promises to give Winter a copy of Driven by Passion, a new compilation DVD of Tim’s best tornado sightings. With that, he makes his way to the stage, and Winter and Sherry take their seats at a table reserved for them near the dais.
Over the next half hour, Tim rolls video clips, regales the audience with war stories, and flips through carefully composed slides of plains twisters he’d chased during the 2005 season. He is not generally known as a speaker who gets hung up, whose words are punctuated by long, uncomfortable silences. Yet, on several occasions, Tim grows quiet, and his gaze seems to settle on Winter. The young man shifts uncomfortably in his chair.
Sherry, Tim soon learns, has come to believe something he himself may have begun to realize during his speech, as he peered down from the lectern at Winter’s face. The day after the conference, she tells her son, “The more you got wrapped up in weather and tornadoes, the more I suspected it.” There is a strong possibility, she says, that Tim is his father.
Tim and Sherry had dated in 1977 when they were both practically kids, around twenty years old. They went on a road trip together to Montana at one point. Then, without warning, she had ended the relationship. She left Colorado “abruptly,” as Tim describes their parting, and returned to Iowa, where she reconnected with the man Winter knows as Dad. Soon, she was pregnant with her first son, Matt. Given the timing, she had always known there was a chance Tim might be the father, but she had hoped, for the sake of her future husband and the life they were trying to make together, that Tim was not. “It was a tiny suspicion,” she had explained to Winter. She had never told Tim until recently.
Not surprisingly, Winter takes the news hard. Tim is his hero, but he isn’t sure whether he should be thrilled or furious. Soon thereafter, Tim gets in touch. He tells Winter that he intends to purchase a DNA test to find out once and for all whether Sherry’s suspicions are true. The kit arrives in the mail after a few days. In Colorado and Iowa, both men run swabs over the insides of their cheeks and drop the samples in the mail. Less than two weeks later, the results are in: there is a 99.97 percent chance that Tim is his father.
In Colorado, Tim has been
