That probably isn’t good, Lee thinks.
At this moment, M1 can be seen in a video taken by another chaser named Chris Collura, who is at times no more than fifty yards behind. The tornado is just to the northwest in one instant, and in a blink it’s gone. All that can be heard is a low, moaning westerly wind. There’s a hollow resonance to the sound, as if the empty fields themselves shape its register. What they hear next affirms that something has gone terribly wrong.
The low moaning jumps up the scale in Collura’s video until it arrives at a pitch so high the camera’s microphone defaults to stuttering silence. Lee and Finley look from the road ahead to the fields through the driver’s window. What had been a single wedge off to the west has undergone a radical metamorphosis. This can’t be the same tornado. Its borders no longer possess the clean, discrete curvature of a classic vortex. It looks as though the entire mesocyclone has fallen to earth. So wide is the funnel—if such a word even applies here—that it will not fit into the viewfinder of Collura’s camera. As it roars northeast at more than forty miles per hour, half a mile separates Lee and Finley from a terrifying species of tornado they’ve never before seen. Collura angles his car into the wind. A broken window sprays the interior with glass. The dim afternoon darkens further, and all he can do is shout, “Son of a bitch! Fuck! My God. My God.”
Ahead of M1, power poles quiver like tuning forks and suddenly pitch over. Black transmission lines lace the road. Lee and Finley career into the muddy ditch, tires spinning uselessly as the Cobalt slides to a stop. The tornado just beyond the window looks more like a sandstorm—its towering bluffs turning day into night. It’s so big they can’t tell whether it is moving toward them or away.
The only thing that’s certain is that they can no longer move. M1 settles into the muck. All of the day’s promise has evaporated into panic. For the first time since she was a little girl, cowering from Minnesota thunderstorms, Finley is afraid.
But even as the dark wall moves to within 800 yards, it is already hooking to the north, away from them. Lee and Finley can hardly believe what they have witnessed. What had been a moderately sized tornado one second became a monster in the next. Even before they have had a chance to look at the data, they know they’ve sampled a highly unusual rear-flank downdraft. The spike their temperature sensor has collected is the warmest they have yet observed, lending further credence to their theory: This particular RFD may have behaved like an engine’s injector, dosing the tornado with jets of buoyant air. The result was explosive upscale growth—a fundamental phase change. More practically, it just threatened and spared their lives all within a few heartbeats; the RFD was what hurtled them into the ditch, and what steered the tornado away.
Finley and Lee’s reprieve is momentary at best. New storms are building and will soon track their way, with M1 hopelessly mired in axle-deep mud. Before long, Tim’s friend and mesonet operator Tony Laubach appears, driving M3, with Chris Karstens, an Iowa State grad student, in M2. Lee and Finley are further chagrined to see that a low-hanging power line has snagged Karstens’s anemometer and torn it from the rack. On TWISTEX’s first encounter with a high-end tornado, it is clear they have come up against something for which they were not prepared. Everyone feels a bit helpless, milling around the floundering Cobalt.
Then they see Tim and Carl maneuver around the downed power lines toward M1 in the 4x4. The two step out, grinning like kids. Carl gawps at the departing storm to the north. “Oh my gosh,” he shouts. “That whole thing’s a tornado!”
Tim lugs the winch hook and cable over to the Cobalt. “Man,” he says, as he fastens the hook to the undercarriage of M1. “We got a great view of this amazing transformation from a stovepipe into that huge wedge. Looked like the whole meso dropped right down to the ground.”
Lee and Finley, still shaken from the encounter, saw it, of course—and they hope never to see its like that close ever again. Tim strides back to the truck, activates the winch, and begins to pull M1 from the ditch. As the sedan lurches out of the mud, they hear a loud and disconcerting bang. The Cobalt is back on the road, but Tim has accidentally yanked one of the sedan’s springs out of the control arm. As the sky continues to boil, M1 is crippled.
While Tim works, Carl monitors radar. The danger isn’t imminent, but they need to get moving soon. There is another supercell headed their way, and it has a hook echo.
Lee and Finley are prepared to abandon M1 to its fate if it comes to that—but Tim has another plan. He retrieves a length of clothesline from the truck, loops it over the spring, and orders one of the grad students to stand on it. If he can fully compress and load the spring, he can fit it back into place. But none of them are heavy enough. Lee can almost envision the gears in Tim’s analytical brain turning the problem over and over.
At last, Tim strikes on the solution. He jacks up the rear end of the Cobalt, places the coil beneath the frame, and lowers the vehicle, using the sedan’s weight for compression. After lashing it with a slipknot, he shimmies beneath M1, fits the spring back into place, and cuts the cord with a pocketknife. He stands, wiping himself off, covered head to foot in viscous clay off the dirt road.
