The mesonets are finished for the day. They head for the nearest town. Tim and Carl, meanwhile, pile back into the truck and tear off toward Quinter. They’re still in the hunt as their taillights recede beneath the shadow of the storm.
Minutes later, on the outskirts of town, Tim steps out of the truck and walks to the rear, shoulders stooped against the cool shock of rain. He pops the hatch to the camper top and lowers the tailgate. His instruments—the turtles, the media probe—are stowed top-down in cutouts on a sliding plywood deck. With a single practiced motion, he seizes HITPR’s rim with his fingertips and lifts it over his head. He takes off scuttling toward the entrance of a park on the north side of town. The tornado is now approaching from the south. Behind him, Carl Young’s camera sweeps over the outlines of a playscape, a few picnic tables, and an embroidery of small shade trees at the end of a narrow road. The camera frame centers on Tim, who balances the probe on its rim, activates the data recorder, and sets it down gingerly onto wet grass.
They jump back into the truck, and Tim navigates down the town’s few streets, his ropy forearms slick, and his dark hair matted against his skull. Carl uses the interlude between deployments to check his laptop. “Ah, this storm has got incredible rotation,” he says, noting the storm-relative velocity. “The chance for this to have a big tornado is high.”
In the soft afternoon rain, nothing moves in Quinter, a cluster of corrugated aluminum buildings and wood-frame homes. The town’s sirens are silent, and the windows of the houses show no signs of life. It looks as if everyone has picked up and moved on, the way warblers are known to depart days in advance of a bad storm. Tim pulls off road again next to an empty lot and begins unloading media probes and turtles onto the freshly mown grass. If anyone is looking from out of the dark windows, they must watch him with a mixture of curiosity and misgiving. He is drenched, winded, ducking through the rain, planting squat cones of uncertain purpose around town in inscrutable configurations. If any onlooker understood the meaning behind his actions, and what they foretell, they would surely flee.
Tim and Carl once more climb into the truck and drive to the western edge of Quinter. The wedge tornado has veered, and they watch it move against the limpid sunset. The outline in the distance now tracks toward the uninhabited fields to the north-northwest—away from town and the probes that lie in wait.
They give chase past rolling irrigators strung over the dead-level fields, looking for another deployment angle and finding none along the tornado’s careering path. It resembles a swaying elephant’s trunk, trawling the horizon. Then the tightly coiled circulation pulls apart and drifts indolently through the sky, like gray-black ink dispersing in water. The storm pulses and the vortex darts earthward again, boring down into the empty fields, kicking up a sod annulus that rises along the updraft. The loose drifts of dirt end up getting recycled, entrained in the downdraft and knitted into tubes of dense vorticity.
Tim knows he can’t safely deploy on this tornado; it’s erratic and he doesn’t think they can get ahead of it with enough time to drop the turtles. “I don’t know,” he says, “this is getting pretty dangerous. Very, very dangerous. One slip and we’re all dead.” It’s a feeling in his gut, intuited through experience, distance, and pace. He and Carl are out of the game, spectators, not participants, in the first big TWISTEX field operation.
He may have missed the strongest tornado the team has seen since its inception, but he is fine with that today. Tim will push—and has pushed—beyond what other chasers will tolerate to gather the data he needs. But there are clear limits. He’s conscious of the danger the mesonets encountered earlier. And with nothing but dirt roads to maneuver on, he’s not about to risk their lives on a twister tracing an oddball track.
He and Carl chase for the remainder of the afternoon for the pure enjoyment of it, until the storms contain nothing more than straight-line wind and rain. Then they head back to the southeast to rendezvous with Bruce, Cathy, Karstens, and the others.
A few years ago, Tim unveiled his first media-probe footage—gathered from a tornado near Storm Lake, Iowa—at the National Weather Association conference in Des Moines. His current mesonet driver Chris Karstens, an Iowa State undergraduate at the time, was sitting in the audience. Before the video began, the attendees were instructed to stow all phones and video cameras. These images were licensed to National Geographic, but the conference attendees were to be given a first glimpse.
Karstens felt privileged, as if he was taking part in something historic. The house lights dimmed, and a hush fell over the crowd. On the screen, Tim’s nose hovered over the probe as he carried it down the road. Then a minute or so passed and the debris cloud edged into view. Rocks and twigs and farm equipment flew across the frame, and it all seemed so impossible, so thrilling. No one had ever before collected video and audio from inside a twister. This was landmark footage from Tim’s first successful deployment of the media probe. “He was doing things nobody else was able to do,” Karstens says.
At the end of the video, the audience stood and the room echoed with applause. How incredible would it be, Karstens wondered then, to work with Tim Samaras? To tackle the fundamental mysteries of the poorly understood tornado boundary layer? Karstens quickly brushed the thought aside. He had student loans to pay and was in the middle of
