But by the time he arrived home, the sign had faded, and no explanation seemed enough to encompass what had happened. When he sat down with his children, they just couldn’t understand. They asked the questions he didn’t know how to answer:
“How could that happen to him?”
“Wasn’t he the best?”
“He was with Carl. Isn’t he good, too?”
“Yes” was all Winter could say. In his heart, he would always feel the same way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE SIGNS
ED GRUBB KNEELS on the front lawn of Kathy Samaras’s Lakewood bungalow and dismantles a mesonet station in the light of a late-winter afternoon. The grass is thatched with shade from the tall maples, and Kathy sits nearby in a wooden rocker with the sun on her face. On this day in February 2015, she wears short sleeves, though snow still clings to the shadowed eaves of a house across the street. The neighborhood is settled deeply into the weekday quiet, the neighbors at work, their kids at school.
Kathy, Ben McMillan, and I watch Grubb break the mesonet down into its constituent parts: anemometer, barometer, and the PVC pipe that inducts air through the temperature and relative-humidity gauges. Bruce Lee and Cathy Finley will receive the parts in Minnesota. It is unclear when or if TWISTEX will ever embark on another mission. Tim was the research entity’s sole fund-raiser, and no one so far has stepped into his role. Even if Lee and Finley secure a grant, the mission’s shape may be fundamentally different. Kathy retains possession of Tim’s probes, and she is deeply conflicted about having anyone else attempt the very thing that took the lives of her husband and son.
When Grubb’s task is finished and the parts are placed into the back of a friend’s SUV, Kathy goes inside and sits at her kitchen table in front of Paul’s Mac computer and a glass of iced tea. Her face is reflected in the darkened screen for a moment until she boots up the computer and begins to sift through its contents. The last person to have done so would have been Paul.
One of the first photographs she finds was taken on May 9, 2013, a few weeks before Tim and Paul were killed. In the frame, a single oil-well pumpjack attends a shaft of lightning stitching through the underside of a supercell down into some unheralded corner of the plains. There is a white Chevy Cobalt, one of the mesonets, parked in the foreground. Paul was shooting a long exposure, and Tim must have gotten out of the vehicle halfway through. He stands next to the Cobalt, looking up into the hardening clouds, his body translucent, spectral.
There’s a self-portrait of Paul, too. His black beard is thick and lustrous. Kathy wishes she had more pictures of him. The problem is, he was always the one behind the camera.
She opens the next file and finds clips from an unfinished documentary Paul was filming about his father. In one segment, Tim is in his shop, working on the clear dome turret for the Lightning Intercept Vehicle. He’s wearing faded jeans with gaping rips in both knees, and a denim shirt with National Technical Systems’ logo embroidered on the chest. His glasses tend to slip down his nose, and he pushes them back into place. He’s fifty-five years old here and still trim, but his cholesterol is a little too high. The hair at his temples has gone white. He wears it shaved close at the sides and a little longer on top, which gives him a distinguished, even professorial, bearing.
Behind the lens, Paul’s camerawork is graceful and effortless. The frame glides over the workbench and dives in for close shots of Tim’s hands. His fingers are thick, his nails dirty, like a mechanic’s. Big veins shunt across his thickly muscled forearms.
In another clip, Tim is holding his grandson Jayden, at his first birthday party, and smiles contentedly. Jayden reaches for Paul and the camera lens. “You’re putting fingerprints on the camera,” Tim lovingly scolds, then brings Jayden in closer, and the child laughs, his tiny hands outstretched.
One of the last videos Kathy plays is of Tim and Carl as they prepare for their final season. On May 17, Ed Grubb is squatting atop the probe truck, working on a mesonet station in the driveway of their house in Bennett. Tim is showing Carl around his shop and the recent improvements he has made to the vacuum system. He leads Carl to the truck and bemoans a side panel’s leaking compartment. In 2012, Tim had been forced to put their suitcases in garbage bags to keep them dry. But he is evidently excited about the high-speed camera he plans to mount to the dash for the PhOCAL project. “I want to put my Phantom camera in here—when we’re not chasing a tornado—if a late-season MCS [mesoscale convective system] drifts over central Kansas,” he says. “We’ll get a lightning hit on a wind turbine. That’s what they really want.”
At one point during the tour, Carl asks Tim whether he and his family will remain in this sprawling estate in the foothills. So far from town, the house can feel empty, especially with the girls moved out, and Tim and Paul so often on the road. Kathy has made clear that she doesn’t have an attachment to the land the way he does. “Uncertain,” Tim replies in the video. “The boss doesn’t like it out here. I love my wife more than I love this house, and if my wife doesn’t want to live here, that’s all there is to it.”
At this, Kathy brings her hands to her mouth and gasps. Grubb reaches out and takes her in his arms.
In the heat of midsummer, I find Kathy leaning on a shovel in the front yard in Bennett. She has just buried a field mouse whose body
