But during his senior year, Dr. Bill Gallus told Karstens about an opening in the graduate meteorology program. He was looking to recruit research-oriented students to analyze data collected by Tim Samaras, and to conduct field work with TWISTEX. Karstens leapt at the opportunity. Gallus had intended to cycle students in and out of TWISTEX in two-week intervals, but Lee and Finley found the young man to be a quick study and a dependable mesonet driver. Karstens was desperately needed behind the wheel of M2, and he was only too happy to oblige; he idolized Tim.
As the season has gotten under way, there have been things the young man has noticed about Tim that might sound inconsequential in any other context, but for which Karstens is deeply grateful. When the power converter on his mesonet blew out shortly before a deployment, Tim cheerily repaired it within seconds. It was bizarre, Karstens thought, that when a malfunction could cost them a data set, and everyone else was tense and irritable, Tim’s presence was lidocaine on a raw nerve. The more time he spends around Tim, the more Karstens sees his unorthodox background as an asset, not a hindrance. Earlier, the radios were giving Lee and Finley fits, so Tim figured out how to amplify the range without cranking the wattage and shedding electrical interference into their sensors. There seems to be no end to the patches, upgrades, and repairs he can perform in the field.
Tim is also, in a very real sense, keeping the team on the road through the funding he secures. Over the last few seasons, over thousands of miles, Tim’s fundraising has sustained TWISTEX, even if the money has never gone quite far enough. The team is something of an outlier in this way. The other research groups have either full backing from a university or a big grant from the National Science Foundation. But TWISTEX’s existence depends on Tim’s charisma and connections to attract benefactors such as National Geographic.
Despite this role, Tim is careful not to let his whim or ego drive the team. Karstens has come to admire the deft authority he wields over the mission. When the team discusses potential chase targets, Tim listens to everyone in turn; and once he’s heard every voice, he makes a final call. “No one really ever questions it,” Karstens says. “He makes sound, logical decisions, and people listen.” The young man can sense a connectedness running through the group, a tightness that feels like family. Karstens notices that Tim considers each of them his responsibility. Even though the veteran chaser has grown accustomed to operating in proximities that once frightened him, the prospect of losing a team member to a tornado haunts him. “I don’t think I could live with myself if anything happened to anybody on the project,” Tim says.
The night after Quinter, this potential is on everyone’s mind. After traveling back through plains towns in the viridescent half-light of decaying storms, they’ve gathered at an Applebee’s in Hays, an hour’s drive east of Quinter. Finley downs a few drinks to steady her nerves. It is sheer luck that the tornado turned to the north, and they know it. Even Laubach, known for gleefully punching through supercell hail cores, says he didn’t want to get anywhere near the thing.
As is customary, they begin sharing videos of the chase among themselves, then with other chasers. From different locations, each lens captured some feature that was invisible to the rest. Storm chasers have practically commandeered Applebee’s, the only place in town still open at this hour. Most of them know each other, and as the din of conversation fills the bar, breathless intercept tales are told and retold. The day could have been deadly, yet all around, video cameras and laptops proudly display footage and images—the closer and more terrifying, the better.
Finally, a man looms over the TWISTEX team, bellies up to the table, and places his laptop confidently at the center. Doug Kiesling looks like a nightclub bouncer, a towering man with a gift for weaving remarkable, expletive-laced tapestries about the storms he’s seen. He has cultivated a reputation as the guy who always gets the killer shot, even if it means getting a little too close. He cues up his video of the day, and the group is stunned to see that he had been within a hundred yards or so of the Quinter tornado at its most vicious. On the screen, he’s putting his car in reverse and backing away rapidly as rain and gravel blast the side of his vehicle. The stovepipe is gone, and a darkness in the west fills the camera frame. They hear him exclaiming, rather calmly, all things considered, “I’m about to get hit by a fuckin’ wedge.”
Some applaud his narrow escape, and everyone agrees he has a remarkable piece of chase footage on his hands. The Weather Channel has apparently purchased the video already. But what it captures sends a chill through Tim’s team.
The old axiom holds that they are far more likely to get killed on the road, on the way to a storm, than in a tornado itself. And it’s miraculously true: no chaser has yet died in a tornado. But chasers continue to get closer and closer, goaded by the prospect of social-media glory, YouTube notoriety, and the modest sums earned by selling video rights to TV news.
For TWISTEX, the evening wears, as Lee puts it, “two faces.” Meteorologically, they witnessed an incredible event—a tornado that seemed to assume remarkable power and proportions nearly instantaneously. They managed to squeak away with a captivating data set. But a hundred-mile-per-hour gust drove Lee and Finley into a ditch; a weak tornadic circulation apparently ran over the top of M2 before the vehicle was struck by a power line. They feel their size in relation to the storm, and they’re shaken to the core.
Tim is troubled not just by what
