At this impromptu gathering of men and women who are drawn to tornadoes like moths to light, Tim finds himself considering the odds game Anton Seimon faced back in Stratford, Texas. How long will the luck hold? How long before storm chasing’s darkest day finally comes? Who’s it going to be?
The hour grows late, but the beer is still flowing, and the mood in the bar is joyful. Tim takes it all in. What he says next to a NatGeo journalist who has been shadowing Tim this season has the ring of inevitability, of the borrowed time storm chasers have been living on: “Someday,” he says, “somebody’s gonna get bit.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“YOU HAVE MY ONLY SON”
IN 2008, TWISTEX welcomes its youngest member to the team: nineteen-year-old Paul Timothy Samaras, a budding filmmaker and photographer. In his eyes, Tim is a giant. Fourteen years after his father first took him and Jenny to see a funnel cloud near Aurora, Paul wants to understand the nature of the work that has drawn Tim so far from home over so many years. If he can, in some small way, he’d like to become a part of Tim’s world. The truth is, Paul isn’t sure exactly what he wants to do with his life, and joining his dad on the hunt seems as good an answer as any.
Nearly a week after Quinter, he gets his first taste of the narrow escape. Near Tipton, Kansas, Paul pours from the truck alongside Tim and Carl, a video camera held at his chest, eyes fixed on the display monitor. He circles around to the probe deck at the rear, the frame bobbing as his feet pound over asphalt. His microphone registers the tap of rain against the camera, and the rasping of Velcro straps from the truck. Through his lens dance the dark silhouettes of working shoulders, a father seen through the eyes of his son. Beyond them, suspended mist and rain gather beneath a wall cloud like a load of cinders. Tim squats and places HITPR in the grass just off the side of the road. The frame moves on to Carl, who labors under the bulk of the much-heavier media probe.
The tornado is now just off the edge of the frame, a presence implied but unseen. Then comes Tim’s urgent voice: “Let’s go, man!” And all three of them appear now in the lens of Tim’s invention. Through the ground-level perspective of the media probe, Tim is seen shoving the probe deck back into the truck bed. There is Paul behind him, still filming. He’s lanky in a billowing black T-shirt and baggy jeans, his dark hair wild and blown by the rising wind, like his father’s when he was young.
Roughly thirty seconds have elapsed since they stopped here. Carl’s voice is tinged with panic: “Let’s go! It’s coming!”
Tim raises the tailgate but leaves the camper-shell window open and runs. Finally Paul lowers the camera and scrambles into the backseat. Rain skates over the road. The rear bumper dips as the front end lifts and the GMC’s eight cylinders redline. The tornado core soon flares into view. Vegetation and debris appear as oscillating streaks. A faint multiple-vortex structure washes over the probes.
Paul would have seen the spectral merry-go-round suction vortices dancing over the fields toward them at roughly thirty-three miles per hour. He would have heard their waterfall rushing. He might even have caught the scent of threshed grass. This is his father’s world, in the tarnished light under the clouds. The beating in Paul’s chest when they make good their escape—this is his father’s adrenal high. Next to it, the days are but interludes once the skies go quiet.
Later on, the media probe’s footage astonishes Bruce Lee. “They had fifteen seconds on that one,” he says. “They deploy, and we see them leave, and the tornado runs it over in fifteen seconds. That’s how close they pushed it.”
When they hook a U-turn after the tornado has passed and return to the deployment site, Tim kneels in the stinging rain and lifts the media probe onto its rim. “All recording except for one camera,” he shouts over the wind, and hoists the hundred-pound device to his waist.
One of the two HITPRs has malfunctioned. But the other and the media probe log direct hits—Tim’s first since the footage he gathered near Storm Lake, Iowa. The three are ecstatic and can hardly wait to plug in to the media probe to review images from within the whirlwind itself.
Paul has witnessed every second of the deployment. Nothing will stop him now from following his father onto the plains.
Paul, like Tim at that age, is searching for a path. As a boy, he had been so different from the young man he became. Back then, he was wild and loud and outgoing, an active kid who glided up and down the streets playing roller hockey. In his teens, that boy disappeared. “Something just flipped when he went to high school,” his sister Jenny says, “like some switch just turned off.”
Paul stopped playing sports. He spent hours alone in his room on the computer. He had friends who were like brothers, but he was no social butterfly. To his family’s knowledge, Paul seldom if ever dated, and there had never been a steady girlfriend. Perhaps there
