Bowdle is a heady moment for TWISTEX.
Grzych and Carl’s appraisal of the day is less circumspect. The two are positively giddy. “VORTEX2 is freaking shitting their pants right now,” Grzych says.
“They lost big-time,” says Carl.
The following day, Tim and Carl return to the location where the Bowdle tornado reached peak intensity. They drive down Highway 12 and note the power transmission towers that lie in heaps of line and galvanized-steel lattice. They stop along the road, near what had once been an attractive little pocket of cottonwood trees. Corrugated aluminum is wrapped around the denuded trunks like shoddy armor. They approach what appears to be a sedan, eerily similar to the white Chevy Cobalts used by Lee and Finley’s mesonet. The front and rear ends have either been torn away or shoved into the cabin. An impact with some large object has caved in half of the roof.
“What we’re seeing here is a vehicle that did not originate in this grove of trees,” Carl observes. Indeed, the car had been parked at a home that once stood some seventy-five to a hundred yards away from here.
“It was at some point a missile,” Carl says.
“Yeah, this is certainly a good example of why you’re not safe in a car,” Tim says. “People who try to outrun tornadoes in a car like that? It’s not pretty.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A DEAD END, A NEW CHANCE
IN THEIR TWO head-to-head seasons with VORTEX2, Tim and his team have proven themselves beyond a doubt. While the probes fell short in 2009, the program surged back in 2010. At the same time, Wurman’s armada wasn’t able to close on any of the season’s major tornadoes. For TWISTEX’s more competitive members, the underdog crew might’ve even snuck out as the winner over the last two seasons. Next to their transmission-tower-eating Bowdle wedge, VORTEX2’s only complete intercept—the Goshen County, Wyoming, twister in 2009—looks like a dust devil. TWISTEX’s sheer agility allowed it to thrive even next to NSF muscle and the finest mobile tech money could buy.
None of their chases, though, would have been possible without Storm Chasers. In more ways than one, the Discovery Channel show has been a blessing. It kept the mission on the road when funding had all but vanished. And it brought a handful of more worldly benefits as well. For Tim, as Kathy refuses to let him forget, the show has raised his profile from relative unknown to minor celebrity. He had always been a hit at weather conferences, but once Storm Chasers arrived on basic cable, Tim started finding himself approached for autographs in airports. Kathy teases him about his graying hair and asks with mock sincerity whether he should color it before presenting himself to his multitudinous fan base. Tim makes a show of grumbling and says, “If I got gray hair, I got gray hair.”
The influx of funding also helps Tim and Kathy move away from their quiet Lakewood street—now too often congested with mesonets and the Discovery Channel support vehicles—and into a palatial brick compound with thirty-five acres in the foothills east of Denver, near Bennett. Tim found the new place by trawling foreclosure auctions, and the move is a long time coming. For years, he had lamented to Kathy that they’d outgrown Lakewood, that there was no room for a real shop, not to mention that the city had refused to grant him approval to lengthen his hundred-foot ham radio tower.
It’s been a constant dream of Tim’s to own acreage on the plains, where he can erect an antenna farm and chase storms to the east. Even so, the house is unlike anything a middle-class guy raised in a small bungalow would have dared to envision for himself. The couple’s new master suite has a second-floor balcony with stunning views of the Front Range in the west, and the high plains to the east. The entryway and the living room are bathed in the natural light of huge picture windows opening onto a two-story atrium. Though its extravagance appears at odds with Tim’s unshowy practicality, the house also includes several geeky amenities that appeal to him more than any luxurious frills: The basement is vast enough for a hoarder’s profusion of tools and gadgetry. And the expansive four-car garage will become the perfect setting for a state-of-the-art shop, replete with band saws, lathes, drill presses, a Miller arc welder, and a custom vacuum system that can keep the floors clean and fireproof by suctioning and separating hot metal slag and sawdust.
The initial transition from cozy bungalow to echoing mansion is a little jarring. This isn’t us, Kathy thinks at first. But now that they’re settling in, she and Tim are both getting used to it. From their bedroom balcony, the Milky Way lights up the nighttime sky, and the sunrise unfurls a hundred miles of plains before them. It is no exaggeration when Tim looks out and tells her, “I can see thunderstorms in Kansas.”
Yet, as many doors as the Discovery Channel has opened, there are catches to contractually obligating oneself to reality television. They reveal themselves in due course.
The most obvious and expected are the cameras. For at least two months of the year, Tim now lives under a microscope, with a
