Tim composes a long email to Winter, explaining the results of the test and its methodology—perhaps to introduce some order to a development neither can control. He writes to say that he understands that Winter is a grown man with his own family: “The DNA test shows I’m your biological father, but I know that doesn’t make me your dad. I know you have a dad. If you want to be friends, or if you want to sever ties, I will understand. I know the circumstances are very hard, but I want you to know that I’m proud and happy to find out that you are my son.”
They continue to correspond, and before long Tim invites Winter, his wife, and children to Lakewood, to meet the “Samaras clan,” as Tim refers to the extended family. That July, Winter arrives in Colorado with his wife and three children in tow. The young man looks like a bundle of jittery nerves in advance of his crash introduction to a whole new wing of the family. Tim’s brother Jack has flown in from Savannah, Georgia, just to meet Winter; and Tim’s other brother, Jim, will be driving up from Lone Tree, Colorado, with his family. When the Winter clan arrives at Tim’s bungalow, the introductions are dizzying as they meet Samaras after Samaras after Samaras. But soon enough Winter seems to relax.
While Kathy tends to Winter’s wife and children, Tim shows him around the shop where he builds his gadgets and probes. Tim holds forth about the enormous antenna in his backyard, which he uses as an amplifier for his ham radio, and to scan for signals from outer space. As they stroll around the bungalow, the two men must be searching each other for the their own genetic echoes. Winter doesn’t have Tim’s prominent Greek Albanian nose at first glance. But he did as a child, before a serious car accident forced him to get facial reconstructive surgery that permanently altered his profile. Beyond that, the subtle clues add up. Neither man is particularly tall. Both possess generous plumes of chest hair. There is something to the eyes as well, a certain crystalline intensity. They come to see it, that Winter is Tim’s son.
The two move on to Tim’s new chasing rig. Gone is the minivan after Manchester, replaced by a vehicle more suited to an adventurer’s hair-raising exploits. The black GMC 4x4 pickup sports a throaty exhaust system and a hail-dimpled paint job. Winter notices there is a gaping hole in the camper top, opened up by a softball-size hailstone. He laughs. “Why haven’t you fixed that?”
“It’s a war wound,” Tim replies proudly. “You don’t repair those.”
The next day, Tim takes Winter by Applied Research Associates, so he can see where Tim works. Little by little, he introduces his son to his world. The Samaras clan envelops the Winters as though they are their own. Winter and Paul trade Star Wars references with matching fluency. Tim reads stories to his new seven-year-old grandson, Nick, as the boy sits in his lap and pulls at his eyeglasses. Jack holds the tiny hands of Winter’s year-and-a-half-old daughter, Haley, and helps the wobbling toddler walk across the living-room floor. Before long the kids are calling them Grandpa Tim and Grandma Kathy. That night, they order pizza, and Winter looks on in amazement as Tim and Jenny douse their slices in generous slicks of hot sauce. Winter notes that he has always seasoned his pizza the same way.
After three days, Tim and the others bid their visitors good-bye. Tim will see Winter and his family again next year for his fiftieth birthday, when the chaser will whip up a batch of his famed green-chili burritos. Tim speaks of consulting with a geneticist to find out whether a fascination with severe weather is a heritable trait. How else, Tim wonders, to explain Winter’s lifelong curiosity in isolation from his biological father?
Thereafter, they’ll see each other sporadically. When Tim swings through Des Moines for a conference—or finds himself lured by the promise of an Iowa storm—he’ll often grab breakfast or lunch with Winter. The young man confesses to having difficulty forgiving his mother for keeping her suspicions from him all these years. Tim’s perspective is both measured—How could she have truly known?—and hopeful: “Don’t look at what could have been,” he says. “We need to live in the now. We need to accept it.”
While the time they’ve lost bothers Winter, Tim assures him that they have the rest of their lives to make up for it. Both men are still young, far from the twilight of their days. Yet, as Tim well knows, even the brightest day can curdle over, plunged deep into shadow by the advance of the storm.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TWISTEX TAKES THE GRAVEL ROAD
IN FEBRUARY 2007, after a quiet but successful season for Tim’s new team, Dr. Josh Wurman tries again. He pulls Tim into a quiet room at the Radisson Hotel in Aurora, Colorado, during the 9th Annual National Storm Chaser Convention to deliver big news: VORTEX2 is back on. It has received the green light for two years of generous funding in 2009 and 2010. Nearly every field scientist in the country will be jockeying for a spot in VORTEX2 in the coming months. And Wurman still wants Tim to design the mission’s fleet of wind-speed-measuring probes.
Wurman lays out for Tim all the advantages of joining the historic effort. And he is characteristically blunt about Tim’s prospects should he
