She leads me into the four-car garage where Tim spent most of his time listening to Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin on satellite radio. “He’d get up and he could spend all day here,” she says. Nearly every square inch is devoted to his tools: band saw, drill press, lathe, Miller welder. The tubes inducting sawdust and metal shavings into his custom vacuum system crawl along the walls. Sunlight pours in through the garage-door windows. His workstation looks untouched, its Panasonic Toughbook still plugged in.
Tim’s shop was only supposed to fill one side of the garage—there’s a wall dividing it down the middle—but it had spilled liberally over to the other half. A mesonet rack is propped against a wall. A white Chevy Cobalt—Kathy thinks it’s M3—occupies one of the spaces.
We exit the garage through a back door into the house. At the threshold are Tim’s work boots and Carl’s Vans. The place looks as if they might return from a chase at any moment, and their things are both a comfort and a torment. Kathy has long since moved back to the bungalow in Lakewood. This place is too quiet now; it feels like the relic of a part of her life that is gone. Yet, giving anything away is as hard as the keeping. “It seems silly,” she says, “but it’s like giving part of Tim away. He used it and I can envision him working on it.” Somehow, she will have to clear everything out and ready the house for sale. Tim was a pack rat, so this is no mean task. It sometimes seems so enormous a job that it’s paralyzing.
The office is the way he had left it: orange HITPR on the floor, a panel of computer screens, and a massive hard drive whirring softly. A calendar on the wall is filled with appointments: a National Geographic talk in Maryland, the week after El Reno, and another in Chicago, October 7–8; a ham radio convention in Estes Park, June 29. The months during tornado season are devoid of appointments. His goals are listed on a dry-erase board:
Build camera platform.
Order five ball mounts.
We wander outside, where the probe truck is parked in the driveway. It is an impressive machine: powerful diesel engine, LEDs lining the windshield, spotlights mounted to the grill guard, and Tim’s good-luck charm, a McDonald’s cheeseburger, sitting on the dash, as stiff as a hockey puck.
The sight of the truck gets Kathy thinking. “I knew they were taking the car. I didn’t see what was in the car,” she says. “I didn’t think to ask why because they’d taken the cars before. That was my question to Gabe: ‘What if they’d been in the truck?’ ”
The answer didn’t prove as simple as the question, though. The diesel engine might well have allowed them to fight their way to daylight; or the GMC’s high profile might have presented the wind with an even bigger target to batter around.
There are a lot of what-ifs: about the car, the roads, the storm, the decision making; about the day of and the years prior. What if any one piece hadn’t been arranged just so?
Then there are the hints only obvious in hindsight. Over the years, Kathy saw more than one video clip that concerned her: “He’d come home and he’d have video and he’d be showing it,” she says. “There were times it seemed he was too close.” She would tell him as much, “and he’d go, ‘Oh, no, we were so many feet away.’ ” He’d tell her all the reasons it had been safe. She wasn’t sure she agreed with him—and it looks so clear now, staring back at it.
But why not trust him in those moments? He was an expert, so were his companions. And in all those years before 2013, no chaser had been lost in a tornado. Even in all the conversations they had about safety when Paul joined the crew, “We never ever discussed this ever happening,” Kathy says.
They’d had plans to travel, Kathy and Tim, to see the country together, to spoil their grandchildren—maybe even to see Paul settle down with the right woman. Tim had been talking about spending less time on the road in the coming years. He was getting older, and the field work was getting harder and harder on his body. What if he’d chosen to dial it back a few years earlier? Would they be on some beach together right now, far from the landlocked plains and its howling winds?
There’s a temptation to pick through each what-if. There’s a temptation for the mind to travel down the counterfactual path—be it out of longing or doubt or anger—to find a route that leads away from that fateful stretch of road, toward a world with Tim, Paul, and Carl still in it.
But Kathy recognizes the futility of these alternate realities.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, “if anything could have or would have been changed.” The outcome is the outcome. Wherever Tim and Paul are now, Kathy knows, that’s where they’ll be. No matter how you turn over the past.
It holds true even for the mother of all what-ifs—that tortuous question that everyone in Tim’s circle brushes up against at some point: What if I could have done something to stop him? It’s this hypothetical, in a sense, that underscores the wisdom of Kathy’s approach and the trouble of searching for the pivotal what-if.
Tim says on video that he would have moved back to Lakewood for Kathy. If she had asked, he would have agreed in a second. But what if she had gone beyond, and asked the harder question of him?
Imagine that she had known everything in advance: the risks he was taking; the dangers that even he could not
