At 6:00 p.m., still traveling east, Carl begins to film again at the intersection of Smith and Heaston Road. He holds a camera in one hand and the wheel in the other. Tim’s face appears in profile, with that unmistakably hawkish nose and thick-framed glasses. He is staring toward the south, down Heaston, the storm no more than a mile and a half distant.
Ashen braids of cloud race over the prairie from north to south, looking low enough to touch in places. If this entire circulation pool comes down—if its size is any indication of what’s to come—this is going to be quite a chase. Tim knows the chrysalis of a legendary monster when he sees one. “Oh, my God,” he says. “This is going to be a huge wedge.”
Events will soon move quickly, and they won’t slow until the end. The last few moments before a killer tornado touches down are like the breath drawn before the plunge. The beginnings of the funnel are often beautiful and evocative—a flaring and bunching of cloud material, like the dance of a murmuration of starlings across the sky. But all is moving at a faster speed this afternoon.
Within seconds of the first wisps, there is a tornado on the ground, a broad cone out of which thin vortices lash and spear the prairie. A few rapid strokes of the Cobalt’s windshield wipers pass, and a series of oscillations are transmitted along the length of the funnel. It quadruples in width. The growth is so sudden it can seem as though a distortion is at work, a visual artifact produced by a lens. But it should serve as a reminder that what they chase isn’t bound to some visible spectra. It’s the closest thing to a ghost in the physical world. “Wow,” Carl exclaims. “My God . . . Look at the tornado! Just to our south.”
They continue east, driving forty and fifty miles per hour as the sedan shudders over the washboard dirt road. Tim and Carl would expect the tornado to close in on them gradually, taking a diagonal northeast track that would place it on a collision course with El Reno. Instead, it seems to be receding, falling away ever farther to their southwest. Smith Road is no longer a viable intercept route. It is time to readjust and close the distance. At about 6:06 p.m., the Cobalt slows and turns south down Brandley Road.
The shape on the southwestern horizon is alien, otherworldly, a plume of smoke that lives and breathes, swirling of its own accord.
“It’s heading straight for Oklahoma City,” Tim says.
They continue south for a mile, but Tim prefers to operate with a buffer, and if his choice to turn at the next intersection is any indication, he’s sensing that theirs grows threadbare. Turning east on Jensen Road means caution, safety.
Yet with each moment they drive eastward, the tornado veers farther out of range, a behavior they must find bafflingly aberrant. Most mature twisters follow the parent storm and the prevailing winds from the southwest to the northeast. This one is clearly tracking to the southeast. The ideal intercept strategy would be to stay north, get ahead, drop down a little south if need be, and deploy. They’re in perfect position for a conventional, northeastbound tornado. But this is clearly not a conventional tornado. Today, they’re barely keeping up.
Regaining their edge will require some white-knuckle maneuvering. They’ll have to take the next south road and push close enough to keep the tornado in range, but not too close. There’s another east road about a mile down, which should keep them clear of the outer circulation.
Just before 6:09, Tim, Carl, and Paul make their move. Carl steers the Cobalt south down Chiles Road in an attempt to close the increasing distance. But the nearer they get to their east route, the clearer their mistake becomes.
For roughly forty seconds, the car remains unusually quiet. Carl is the first to break the silence. “Is the airport down another mile?” he asks, though he already knows the answer.
Reuter Road, the planned east turn, is a dead end. For the most part, the road network is laid out in a reliable square-mile grid. Not so with Reuter, which terminates at the El Reno Regional Airport. This means Tim, Carl, and Paul are now committed to driving an additional mile to the south—much closer to the tornado than they would prefer.
By 6:10, as they pass Reuter, they are no more than a mile and a half from the outer edge of the condensation funnel. Carl stammers about spotting Reed Timmer, their former Storm Chasers costar, perhaps in an attempt to make himself and the others feel as though their position isn’t quite so precarious. There are only two options available to them at the moment, and neither is appealing. They can turn around and backtrack to Jensen Road, then continue east; this will almost certainly knock them off course and preclude an intercept. Or, they can grit their teeth and continue south, courting the storm’s northern flank as they make for the next east road, called Reno.
Tim and Carl choose to press on. At about the same time, the tornado’s south-southeast track shifts. It is now moving almost due east. From their perspective, they would notice that the tornado is no longer off to their two o’clock—instead, it is directly
