Today is not the day to test this belief. The storm is too dangerous, and Tim has much more still to learn. But his curiosity is boundless, and at Last Chance there is some part of him that is plotting, imagining how to part the rain, to pierce the core, to touch the tornado’s flux and fury.
CHAPTER TWO
A BOY WITH AN ENGINEER’S MIND
AS A KID, it wasn’t enough for Tim Samaras to see that the gadgets around him worked. He had an irrepressible need to know how and why. The bane of his mother’s household appliances, he dismantled her blender to see why the blades spun so fast. At ten years old, he autopsied the television set in an attempt to determine how colors and shapes flashed across the screen. That these things worked perfectly fine before he took them apart was not something he seemed capable of taking for granted.
Rather than reprimand the boy, his parents gave in to his tinkering. His father, Paul—to save himself repeated trips to Sears—kept Tim supplied with cast-off junk to deconstruct. He went so far as to take out an ad in the Rocky Mountain News, seeking used electronics. So long as the gadget was free, Paul Samaras would show up at your doorstep, a salvager combing the Denver suburbs for the benefit of a little boy with an engineer’s mind. Mostly he returned to Tim with antique radios—the kind with the big dials—clutched under one arm.
Tim’s bedroom was his laboratory, and a hazard to bare feet, strewn as it was with transistors and diodes and capacitors. Here, he brought the silent radios back to crackling life. Though Paul was a stern and authoritarian presence in the house, he actively abetted Tim’s hobbies. The father had always wanted to become a ham radio operator. The trouble was, he never got around to passing the code tests required by the FCC. Tim found his father’s manuals, studied them, and became a licensed amateur at twelve years old, call sign WN0JTV. He built his first transmitter using the horizontal output tube from an old television set. The accomplishment filled Paul with pride, and he soon erected a used two-and-a-half-story Hy-Gain antenna tower next to the house in Lakewood, to amplify the signal his son could receive and broadcast. Since the yard was small, with little room to bury radial wires to ground his antenna, Tim would occasionally sneak out of his bedroom window at night and excavate small trenches in the neighbors’ yards for burying his lines. The two-thousand-volt transmitter emitted such a powerful signal that it often infiltrated the electronic organ next door. The little neighbor girl would be in the middle of practice when an awful shrieking and hissing would pour through the organ’s speakers, provoking her mother to fits of obscenity.
On special nights, though, Tim’s radio fell silent, and the family gathered for one of its favorite films. Paul would drag the dinner table into the living room, and Tim’s mother, Margaret, would serve supper in front of the TV. On one such Sunday at six o’clock, six-year-old Tim took his seat next to his brothers, Jim and Jack. The house echoed with the roar of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, then the first strident chords of The Wizard of Oz.
Tim was entranced by the film—but not by Day-Glo Technicolor, or the timeless parable. Sepia-toned Kansas was what rooted him in his chair that evening. He couldn’t take his eyes off the tornado as it roped over the fields toward Dorothy and Toto. A skirt of sod swirled around the twister. The wind howled, the windows shattered, and Dorothy’s little farmhouse took flight. Tim could scarcely believe such things existed on the plains east of his home. He would watch the opening moments again and again throughout his childhood. The rest of the film made him sleepy—even the Munchkins and those terrifying flying monkeys. The fantasy didn’t hold the same magic he beheld in that vision of raw power and menace.
Three years later, Tim caught his first real glimpse of Dorothy’s tempest, from his own backyard. It wasn’t the awe-inspiring image he had hoped for, just a small funnel cloud, never in contact with the ground. Still, he sprinted into his neighbor’s yard and mounted the swing set, angling for a better view. The thin, introverted boy clutched the metal bars and craned his neck as this snake in the sky undulated languorously over the city in the storm’s half-light. It was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen.
As he grew, whenever his dual interests in technology and severe weather could align, Tim’s eyes would alight. When storms blew over the Rockies, he’d run wire from his window to a power pole outside, attempting to conduct the ambient electrical charge to a lightbulb. When the storm was far off, he’d tune his radio to the dead space between stations and press his ear against the speaker. If he was quiet, he could hear static crashes, the whispers of distant lightning in pulsed white noise.
By the time he was old enough to drive, he’d take his 1967 Ford Galaxie 500, “a huge frickin’ boat,” his brother Jim says, and park it at the make-out spot on an outcropping near Red Rocks. Tim wasn’t a bad-looking young man: slight of build, with a thick head of dark, nearly black hair, and a fine olive complexion. But he didn’t come here for the girls. He had simply outgrown watching storms in his backyard. From his perch at Red Rocks, the clouds were practically right on top of him, racing close above the giant amphitheater of pink sandstone.
For spending cash, he clocked after-school
