Denver's Own Royal Tenenbaums

Nevertheless, in the heart of this tornado, Timber managed to delve deeper into his fascination with automobiles than ever before. In his garage workshop, with the help of his son Corban, he homed in on the fatal flaw he saw at the core of all vehicles: the internal combustion engine.

"We liked to talk about designs that bothered us," says Corban, "the things we wanted to fix. One of the ones that came up regularly was the internal combustion engine. It's incredibly inefficient and incredibly polluting, and it's a problem."

The heart of that problem, the two realized, lay in the engine's chambers, where continual combustions move pistons up and down in their cylinders, movement that in turn powers the engine. But the vast majority of the energy dissipates uselessly into the cylinder walls as heat, wasting massive amounts of fuel.

Timber wouldn't stand for this grievous inefficiency, so using toothpick models and CAD drawings, he and Corban came up with a better solution: They got rid of the pistons and cylinders and designed chambers that expanded in diameter with each combustion, like shutter lenses. Now the energy that had formerly been lost as heat could move the chamber walls, more effectively powering the engine.

They called it the Internally Radiating Impulse Structure, or the IRIS, since the concept was as practical and beautifully elegant as the dilation of a human eye.

The family coalesced around the idea, quickly realizing its promise. The IRIS engine would be lighter and more easily implemented than other alternative transportation systems such as hybrids, electrics and fuel cells, and could be adapted to run on any sort of fuel, from gasoline to biodiesel to hydrogen.

Here was Timber's blockbuster invention, the final evolution of his childhood rocket-engine schemes, the idea he would be remembered for. Timber and the children began presenting the concept to scientists and automobile manufacturers, and they always received the same response: "Why didn't we think of that?"

"Almost everyone who sees it can also see the potential," says Brent Johnson, who was hired in January as the chief executive officer of Tendix Development, Timber's company that's developing the IRIS. "The potential of the technology, although it has challenges, is enormous. The struggle is, how much will it actually deliver. That can only be guessed at this point."

That's because they didn't yet have the funding to build an IRIS — but the way things were progressing, it was only a matter of time. The big news arrived at the end of January: NASA had named the IRIS the best new transportation idea of the year in its annual "Create the Future" design contest, beating out almost 1,000 other submissions. In April, Timber was scheduled to fly to New York to accept the reward.

It was a battle for the ages, the clash between chaos and Timber Dick.

Timber was more than a worthy adversary, seeking out balance, logic and stability wherever he roamed. He'd been immediately taken with the big white house's classical symmetry, its two perfectly proportioned wings. And he took unending comfort from the inherent equilibrium of his progeny, how almost every succeeding child alternated gender, hair color, even academic fascinations as if by some strict genetic plan. Chaos might have won a skirmish or two, but he wasn't even close to conceding victory.

This is why he would have found the circumstances of his March 29 car accident on I-70 frustratingly random. It just didn't make sense that the right front wheel of his Dodge Caravan would seize up on Floyd Hill near Idaho Springs, sending his minivan off the road and down into a ravine. This wasn't a burst tire or a stretch of slick road, but a catastrophic failure of the entire wheel, a sudden and total breakdown of the most basic operation of his vehicle — something that just shouldn't happen. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, of the 38,588 fatal crashes in 2006, the last year for which there is data, only seven were related to wheel failure, and none involved a minivan like his.

To make matters worse, his accident involved a malfunction of one of the things he knew and loved best. He'd always been passionate about cars, making their safety and efficiency the focus of many of his inventions. In that way he was just like his father — the race-car aficionado who was killed in an auto accident.

To Timber, this predicament just wouldn't have cut it; he would have immediately wanted to start doodling solutions with one of his trusty purple pens or locked himself in his workshop until he fashioned one from Plexiglas and PVC pipe.

The doctors at the University of Colorado Hospital burn ward, where Timber had been taken after the accident, thought he might get that chance.

While he'd suffered broken bones and severe enough burns over his legs and chest that he was placed in a medically induced coma to relieve the pain, signs suggested he could be out of the hospital in a few months. So the family immediately set to work revamping life in the house to make their father's recovery as smooth as possible, the sort of thing he would have done for them.