Would anyone, the world round, have been able to make Tim stop chasing?
Even the man, himself?
Kathy and I go inside. We walk upstairs and out through the master bedroom’s French doors, onto the balcony where Tim once said he could see storms clear to Kansas. A PhOCAL sprite camera is angled off to the east. We can see the snowcapped Front Range. A mourning dove pipes dolefully. Kathy looks out over the rearing foothills. “This, I’m going to miss. On nice days you can see the wind turbines,” she says. “This was his dream. It’s where he wanted to retire. But every time I get out here, I get sad. He’s not here. Paul’s gone.”
Kathy thinks about whether she will see her son and husband again. She believes in a hereafter, where they’ll be reunited someday. Tim had been doubtful about the prospect. “He thought, ‘If you’re dead, you’re dead, and if you live, you live,’ ” Kathy says. Whether or not there is an afterlife, he did have a very specific, very Tim request for the handling of his remains.
“The one thing he used to say is, ‘If I die before you do, take my ashes and have somebody put them up in a tornado.’ That’s what he used to tell me.” She pauses for a moment, as if she’s imagining what he might say now, after all they’ve been through.
“Well, he’s already been in the tornado, so I get to do whatever I want with his ashes.”
Twice now, Kathy has felt his presence, some signal that he’s been watching over her. The first was when Ben McMillan, Ed Grubb, and Tony Laubach sent her roses. Due to some delivery snafu, they arrived on their wedding anniversary. Tim had always brought her red roses on their anniversary.
The second time was last night. She was dreaming. Kathy opened the front door and Tim was standing there, looking as though he’d just returned from a chase, waiting to be let in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
TIM’S LEGACY
THE CORE OF a violent tornado was once a mystery to us, as unreachable as the surface of the sun. For decades, some of the scientific world’s brightest minds struck out for the plains like hunters. Their weapons of choice were Rube Goldberg contraptions in all shapes, materials, and sizes, designed for a single purpose: to extract knowledge from one of the harshest environments on the planet. But the tornado’s mysteries proved stubbornly elusive. Back in the early eighties, the barrel-shaped TOTO toppled in a weakly tornadic wind. “There are easier ways to do this,” Howie Bluestein had lamented. A second effort in the nineties, part of a multimillion-dollar, federally funded research expedition, used an aluminum-alloy tube mounted to a steel plate and caught a glancing sample at the edge of an F4. Others tried, each with their own particular gizmo, and each failed. The hunters moved on. Their quarry was too unpredictable, too dangerous. They sought other tools, even though they knew all too well there could be no substitute for probing the core directly. The only way to understand what happens in that place where houses fall and people die was to get inside it—then to emerge again, all the wiser. But maybe such a thing couldn’t be done.
No one—aside from his fellow chasers—had ever heard of Tim Samaras when he appeared on the scene with his “turtle.” Yet this nobody—a man whose academic pedigree began and ended with a diploma from Alameda High School—pulled off one of the most dramatic coups atmospheric science had ever seen. The core was not, as he proved, untouchable.
He spent the remainder of his life building on his breakthrough at Manchester, and pushing the in situ probe field forward. He succeeded with a frequency that no one has matched since. “What Tim was able to do,” says Tim’s TWISTEX partner Bruce Lee, “blows everybody else away.”
Lee once said that knowledge isn’t advanced by one spectacular measurement, or even two or three. Solving the mysteries of tornado formation, intensification, and decay is incremental work. It takes dogged persistence to track down and sample a menagerie of vortices, from the single-cell, to the two-cell, to the multiple-vortex, and every subspecies in between. One of the many tragedies of Tim’s loss is that he died before he could finish this work, to the extent that the labor of science is ever complete. Near the end of his life, he was developing a new anemometer design, one without moving parts, built to withstand high-end tornadic winds. But the design, in his exacting eyes, still required a few tweaks. He never got the chance to test it in a twister. In the late spring of 2013, before the anemometer was ready, the storms called him away.
One couldn’t be faulted for asking whether Tim failed, or whether his death stands as final proof that probe work is too dangerous, too impossible, to undertake.
The scientific community, however, has already answered these questions since his death. If anything, Tim Samaras reignited a whole new mode of study. Gabe Garfield puts it this way: “We weren’t seeing what was going on inside of the tornado where it matters most. Tim showed that it could be done. He laid an important cornerstone at the foundation, and others will build on that.” His work redefined what was possible for tornado researchers.
If there’s any one person who’s been the most diligent in building on Tim’s work, it’s none other than Josh Wurman. As often as he and Tim failed to see eye to eye, Wurman has continued down a path Tim blazed. The founder of the Center for Severe Weather Research has kept expanding his own fleet of pods, deploying them into the paths of tornadoes while simultaneously scanning with
