Chasing his passion

Texas teen Scott Peake spends considerable time and money chasing storms.
By ROY APPLETON
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
The red Chevy pickup sails into Fort Worth, Texas, cruising for a storm.
Sporting a metal rack of antennas and weather instruments, the truck is ready for a chase. So is the captain, Scott Peake, warming up at the wheel with talk of "cumulus fields," "capping inversions" and "rear flank downdrafts."
Isolated showers are expected to develop across western sections of North Texas ... some could become severe with large hail and damaging winds possible.
The radio delivers lofty expectations. The afternoon is thick and hazy. The Allen (Texas) High School student is on the loose -- to find and, if lucky, track a heavenly show of force.
"I think we're going to arrive right when the action starts," he says. "The low-level jet stream is punching through." And once the atmospheric lid is pierced, warm, unstable air can bubble up in explosive proportions.
A boy and his truck. Passion at play -- at least until 9 p.m. While Mother Nature may roam at will, Scott's mother has rules.
& quot;She told me to have fun and be careful," he says of Marjorie Peake, who bought his truck, pays for his gas and supports a hobby that helps her son get high the old-fashioned way.
At 17, Scott is among the youngest of the nation's storm chasers, some of whom will travel thousands of miles a year to behold and perhaps report on the sky's wonder and violence.
"It's the mystery of storms," says Scott, who, as a part-timer, has ventured as far as Oklahoma and West Texas in four years on the trail. "You get that adrenaline rush, and you know something might happen."
At age 4, he didn't know what was happening when lightning struck one day near his Dallas home. In time, his fear turned to curiosity, and the search was on.
"I couldn't understand it and how it worked and what triggered it," he says.
Besides school, sleep and the Park Cities Baptist choir, most of Scott's hours are spent watching the weather, messing with plants and bugs around his Lucas, Texas, home, and sharing time with family and friends. He plants milkweed to attract monarch butterflies; he raised 28 this spring in his bathroom and kitchen.
Cable TV report
In the fall, he again will coordinate Allen High School's cable television weather report.
"He definitely brought our weather up a notch," says Shawn Risener, the district's communication department coordinator.
When storms are brewing, Scott keeps a weather radio handy at school to update forecasts, principals and coaches. From April to early June, the height of the Texas-Oklahoma severe storm season, he tracks weather patterns on his computer deep into the night. And after school when conditions are right, he "starts bugging me immediately to go out," says Marjorie Peake.
This love of nature is a matter of nurture -- not Peake family genes. Scott is one of eight children adopted by Marjorie and Reginald Peake, a radiologist.
His parents have encouraged him to address problems.
"When he is interested in something, he goes out and seeks the answers," his mother says.
His dream is to study meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and to land a job at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., which he occasionally visits and calls with questions.
"Scott is very aggressive in learning and trying to stay in touch. That's the kind of guy you want in this business," says Jack Hale, the center's lead severe storm forecaster.
Marjorie Peake wonders whether her son's passion can take him beyond the clouds.
"I've had some talks with him that storm chasing is an avocation, not a vocation," she said.
For now it's an active pursuit, all about watching storms build and flow, learning from observations and enjoying the ride.
Tornado sightings
Scott claims sightings of three tornadoes this spring near Bray, Okla., and Throckmorton, Texas, during about 30 outings.
He built his truck's aluminum rack in shop class and has worked to buy some of his $5,000 worth of chase gear. But most has come from his parents, including a laptop computer for global positioning, a humidity/dew point sensor and a wind-measuring anemometer that "can stand up to 260 miles per hour. It's a very, very sturdy animal."
Scott and the truck were out recently as storms blew across Collin County, Texas.
"It had a nice hail core in it," he says of the system that left his 9-year-old ride with fresh battle scars.
"They're trademarks," he says, proudly pointing out some recent hits. "That one had spikes sticking out of it, and it was the size of a baseball."