After graduating, Paul enrolled in Red Rocks Community College. He took a few astronomy courses, but found that his appetite for school was as weak as his father’s. Paul seemed adrift, like any number of young men his age, looking for his own way, trying on and discarding possible lives. At first, he was obsessed with animated films. He went so far as to get a menial job at the local movie theater so that when his shift was up, he could duck into a movie. He could usually be found watching the latest Pixar epic—Wall-E or The Incredibles—over and over. His mother or one of his sisters often joined him, but he could never stand to wait for their schedules to line up, so he’d go see them alone the first time.
Paul wondered whether he, too, might someday be able to create worlds of his own, as beautiful and melancholy as Wall-E’s. At his request, his parents bought him a new computer and enrolled him in an online course called Animation Mentor, founded by animators who had worked for Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic. Paul completed the course—in fact, he was quite talented—but he never sought work in the industry, never created those films. Doing so would have meant relocating to California, and Paul couldn’t leave behind the only world he’d ever known. It would mean abandoning the best friends with whom he could debate the finer points of death metal and the video game Halo. It would now mean abandoning the storms and chasing with Tim.
Paul decides to remain in Colorado instead and continues to live in the Lakewood home that has sheltered him since he was born. Instead of animation, he shifts to photography. No one is certain precisely how he settled on the craft, but his mother suspects he watched the National Geographic magazine photographers who’d sometimes shadow his father. One day, Paul simply picked up Tim’s DSLR and started shooting.
Photography makes sense for him. Though he is quiet and reserved, he absorbs everything around him with big watchful eyes, like his mother’s. He takes photographs of tangerine sunsets, the deeply folded mountains to the west, and his charismatic tabby cat, Meekers. He handles videography and photography for both of his sisters’ weddings, along with the birth of Amy’s little girl.
His video camerawork, shaky at first, gradually smooths out. The frame now glides over its subjects, dives in close, and backpedals seamlessly for the broad shot. As Tim’s father had encouraged him to keep tinkering with appliances and his ham radio, Tim in turn supports Paul’s passion. In fact, he has put Paul in charge of creating his latest tornado compilation DVD, which he’ll sell on his website and at ChaserCon. Since 2004, when Tim put out a two-disc set of his best tornado sightings, called Driven by Passion, he has seen a great many storms. It is time, he tells his son, for a new entry, Driven by Passion II.
The young man is thrilled to be given the responsibility, and he immediately sets to work wading through untold hours of chase video. He composes ominous musical cues with a synthesizer and cleanly splices together footage shot by Tim, Carl, and eventually himself. Each storm is given a neat opening dateline to anchor the viewer in time and place. Best of all, the episode legend on the inside flap is set against a photograph Paul himself has taken. It is a once-in-a-lifetime shot of a monstrous tornado, folds of condensation and dust spiral up its broad flanks like frayed bandaging. Kathy urges Tim to put Paul’s name on the cover. “He needs credit for this,” she tells him. Paul is content with his name featured prominently in the credits: “Produced by Paul Samaras.”
Driven by Passion II is no Pixar epic; to Paul, the DVD is something more. It is the highlight reel of a chaser’s life. An accounting of what his father has done, and how. In the world of storms, Tim is an icon. A friend of the family, Sharon Austin, asks Paul if he ever feels lost in the wide span of his father’s shadow. “No,” he replies. “I’m just happy to be a part of things.”
After immersing himself in Tim’s footage, Paul hits the road with TWISTEX more and more often. At first he is relegated to observing from the backseat of the probe truck or a mesonet. But his talent is unmistakable, even if his presence in the group is muted. Paul is a hard guy to get to know, says Lee and Finley’s former student Matt Grzych: “He’s a shy guy, but an incredible photographer. He took some of the best tornado images I’ve ever seen.”
With the TWISTEX team, Paul is finding not only direction, but a second family. In a video shot by one of the mesonet drivers, Ed Grubb, he and copilot Tony Laubach pull to the side of the road behind Tim’s truck, near Campo, Colorado. Hail piles in pristine drifts up to their ankles and smokes in the mid-May air. Tim, Carl, and Grzych compress the ice pellets into dripping balls and hurl them at M3. Hailstones soar back and forth across the ditch in coordinated fusillades. Laubach scores a direct hit against Tim’s back. Tim returns fire, and given his form, it becomes clear that his Little League days had in fact been spent studying the clouds. They laugh and holler, and by the end of the fight all are soaked in ice water.
And there, at the edge of the frame, Paul, TWISTEX’s documentary eye, peers through the lens of his DSLR, the faintest smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. The image speaks volumes. He’s not the guy to join the hurly-burly, but he is one of them nonetheless, taking it
