Storm

by George R. Stewart

  “Right here in the hall. Won’t you come in for a while?”

  “Oh, no, thanks. It’s after midnight. I’ve got to get to my friend’s.”

  When he had gone, Jen had to tell her married sister everything about him; only, as she said, there wasn’t anything to tell—that is, anything. Dot watched her; the little sister, she decided, was mostly chubby and wholesome-looking, but rather pretty too, especially with the copper glint in her light brown hair.

  3

  Standing on some miraculous point of lookout, possessing more than human vision, the Chief saw clearly the far reach of the Bay. Blue and quiet it lay in the sunshine. On its surface, with breeze just enough to fill their sails, moved hundreds of pleasure craft—yawls and ketches, star-boats, and snipe-boats, little home-made pumpkin-seeds. Then suddenly a great black cloud arose, covering all the southeastern sky, and the little boats turned for shore. But the storm struck, and they were overwhelmed. The bodies washed ashore where women stood screaming. Then upon the Chief fell a sense of unutterable shame and guilt, for he remembered that he had seen that great storm dominating all the map, and yet in some moment of incredible blindness he had forecast fair weather and on his word all those pretty craft had sailed out upon the Bay. And always, he knew—as he felt himself sinking into the pit of madness—that he would carry with him the horror of that sight and of the screaming.

  He awoke writhing, the pulse drumming in his ears. “Same old nightmare,” he thought, and wondered whether other forecasters had the same dream. He lay tense and shaken; his heart still raced. At such moments he always decided that he must resign, that he could no longer carry such responsibility of life and death. He felt bitter—at ships which failed to report, at ships with faulty barometers, at the vast spaces of ocean with no ships at all, at scanty appropriations, at the public which failed to realize the difficulties under which the Weather Bureau worked.

  To calm himself, he got up and turned on the light. His alarm clock pointed to three-ten, and ticked stolidly on. But the worry about the forecast which had formed his dream did not leave him. Like any rustic, he leaned from the window and looked at the sky. There was not a star in sight. “She’s coming all right,” he said to himself, for he felt the southerly wind, and knew that during the night the far-flung cloud-deck of the storm must have moved in. First of all would have come the little banners of cirrus, scattered wisps of ice-crystals, miles high; after them the high, wide-spreading cirrus haze; and then the thicker and lower clouds of the middle air, water-droplets held suspended as in fog, dense enough to obscure the moon and let even the dullest person know that the storm was nearing. From the intensity of the night he judged that this dark layer of altostratus now covered the sky.

  He began dressing. Too late to go back to bed, he said to himself; but he knew that really he wanted to get to the office and see what was happening.

  •

  The barometer had started to fall, and most of northern California reported cloud. But there was as yet no rain at any of the land stations. By the time the Chief had got the map drawn, he was back to normal.

  Yesterday he had felt himself at the central calm of four great atmospheric forces. Today there were only three. The Pacific High, dominant for so many weeks, had taken a knock-out blow from the in-driving storm. The other great storm which had moved down from Alberta centered now over Indiana, and held in the swirl of its winds all the United States east of the Rockies. Behind its cold front the blizzard was engulfing Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. But this cold wave covering all the interior of the Continent was only one discharge from the vast high-pressure area which dominated the Canadian Northwest and the interior of Alaska. For so immense was the accumulation of cold air that it was forcing a way across and around the high mountains of Alaska and reaching southward in a long tongue across the Pacific behind the storm which was just approaching California. As for that storm, the Chief decided, it was growing old, but still had plenty of fight left in it, and was in a situation where it might well be rejuvenated.

  Today’s decision was easy; it really did nothing but confirm yesterday’s; and that forecast had already been confirmed once in the afternoon bulletin issued by the Associate Forecaster. Rain, the Chief decided, would begin during the afternoon and continue throughout the next day; snow in the mountains, unsettled in southern California. Fly storm warnings, Cape Flattery to Point Conception; small-craft warnings south of Conception. He checked off the rest of his district—snow flurries in Nevada, rain in southern Oregon, clear and cold over the northern plateau and in western Washington. This was going to be one of those rare times when California had rain and Seattle had sun.

  “Well, Whitey,” he said to his chart-man, “There’ll be plenty happening in California today and tomorrow.”

  4

  The two-by-four which had fallen from the truck still lay at the edge of the pavement. No highway patrolman passed that way, and no driver thought the piece of wood worth stopping to remove. Catching sight of it as their cars came over the hump of the culvert, some quickly reacting drivers swerved to the left. Others, slower witted or more careless, drove right across it. One of these was a truck-driver with a load of cow-manure, and as he bumped over it, a few pounds of manure sloughed off, and spilled beside the two-by-four.

  5

  Far at sea the rain-belt moved steadily shoreward, but already the forerunning wave of pain had reached the land. Old lumberjack joints grown stiff in the dripping of the redwood forests twinged and throbbed. From Cape Disappointment to Point Arguello overworked mothers winced with headaches. Nerve-ends of leg-stumps tingled. Old wounds of the Argonne ached again. In a moving belt a hundred and fifty miles before the rain, renewed tortures prevailed in the hurt and maimed limbs of men.

  6

  The congregation was poor and the church was bare; but the warm imagery of the preacher’s words illumined it. Yet he prayed simply, only using for his prayer the words rich in ancient memories. For he too was of the land; he knew that the grass was withering, and that his people suffered and were afraid.

  “And if it be Thy will, O Lord, on this Thy day, send us the rain. Even now Thy clouds pass over us, speak the word and let fall the water that is above the earth. Let Thy clouds also drop water as when Thou wentest out of Seir. Send rain for the wheat and for the barley, that the tender ears may form. Send rain for the beasts of the field. As of old when Thy people thirsted in the desert Thou didst command Thy servant Moses to smite the rock in Horeb and the waters did flow forth, so raise Thy hand, O Lord, we beseech Thee.”

  7

  Over Alberta and Saskatchewan and Montana now rested a vast calm. In a steel-blue sky the low sun of the short winter day shone without seeming warmth, not compensating for the heat lost during the long clear night. Havre reported forty-nine below zero. The northern plain was temporarily a cold pole from which new outbursts of frigid air might be relayed on.

  Southeastward the cold front speeded along. It burst upon Cincinnati and Louisville, plastering hard-driven snow against poles and buildings; it swept on toward Huntington and Nashville. But in this country of woodland and tangled hills the front lost its knife-like edge; the flying snow no longer cut with blizzard-force. Even west of the Mississippi the Ozarks broke the sweep of the wind, before it reached Little Rock and Shreveport. Only as the front bore southward across the vast plains of Texas could the storm maintain something of its full fury.

  That morning in Abilene and Fort Worth and Dallas men looked up and saw the high blue wall of cloud sweeping down upon them. In its long journey the polar air had grown warmer, so that the Texans called the storm a norther more often than a blizzard. Even so, the temperatures dropped from well above freezing to close to zero, and with the whistling wind and the driving snow mid-Texas became suddenly a province of the Arctic. People battling their way along gale-swept streets quoted the grim proverb: Between Texas and the North Pole the
re’s only a barbed-wire fence for a windbreak. In San Antonio and Houston men made ready; at the wharves of Galveston and Corpus Christi seamen looked to their mooring-ropes; in the orange-groves of Brownsville there was setting-out of smudge-pots and laying of fires. And radio cast the warning on to shipmasters far out upon the Gulf.

  8

  All day, from Cape Mendocino to Point Conception, the south wind blew steadily and grew stronger. The slow Pacific groundswell rolled in heavily, wave by wave, breaking white over ledge and reef, tossing spray high on the rocky points, crashing solidly on the long beaches. Hour by hour the cloud-deck grew lower and thicker and darker; swift-blown scud sped beneath the low stratus, seeming to skim the wave-crests. In the early afternoon the wind grew stronger. The mild air was dank with moisture.

  There was neither thunder nor lightning, nor any gale. Such petulant displays might be left to smaller storms, just as a small man wins attention by showing off, but a great man keeps his dignity. This, indeed, was no local thunderstorm, no tornado spitefully leveling a town here and yet so petty and evanescent that it dissipates before reaching the next county.

  Far around the great circle, a third of the world away, this storm had taken shape. It was a part—and not a small part—of a vast and complex system of atmospheric forces covering the hemisphere. No longer was it a young storm racing its thousand miles a day. Now, powerful and sedate in maturity, it moved with the steady, sure pace of majesty. Along a line of hundreds of miles, its rain belt pressed upon the coast. What need to announce such a coming by showy fireworks? Only, along the beaches, the vast unhurried pounding of the groundswell made known that far off some great force moved upon the waters.

  •

  The clouds were lower still; mist veiled the tips of the headlands; and there was rain. No tropical downpour, no sudden burst of heavy drops. First, so fine was the rain, it was as if the low-lying mist had merely swooped a little lower. Then for a moment it was gone. But it came again. A wind gust took the falling drops and swirled them out like a wisp of fog. Minute by minute, unhurrying, the rain grew thicker and more steady.

  Along all that straight mountainous coast, five hundred miles from Mendocino to Conception, there was rain. Rain on the rocks and the headlands, rain on the beaches and lagoons, rain on the high grass-slopes. Rain sweeping inland, stippling the surface of the shrunken rivers, swirling mistily up the canyons among the redwood trees, cresting the ridges.

  Broken into mile-deep turbulent eddies, impeded a little, nevertheless across the mountains as across the ocean the rain-bearing air moved irresistibly ahead, controlled by cosmic forces far too powerful to be blocked even by the high ridges of the western shore.

  Driving in parallel with the coast, the rain had struck along five hundred miles almost at the same moment. But now the rain-belt lost all its simplicity. The ridges and canyons here of themselves impeded and there aided, and still elsewhere caused great waves within the air. Here, around some rocky shoulder the wind howled at gale-force; a mile away in a sheltered corner the leaves hung limp on the bay-trees. On the windward slopes of steep ridges the rain was a thick torrent, but in long leeward valleys where the air-currents swooped downward, it slacked off to a drizzle. Following open valleys, long arms of rain ran miles ahead, and once two of these curved together and, meeting, momentarily surrounded by rain a narrow island of dryness.

  So, on a scale small enough for men to see, a wave rushes into a rocky cove. Here it pours through the gaps, there it beats against a larger stone, elsewhere it rushes ahead and then turns for a moment back upon itself. Yet always the wave rises and pushes on, until suddenly the whole cove lies beneath the weltering surface of the water, and the rocks are covered and impotent. Thus too the rain-belt drove onward, overwhelming the hills.

  Mile by mile the rain moved swiftly inland, toward the broad valleys where the clods were dry and the earth lay cracked and men waited for the freeing of the waters.

  9

  All day the Chief Service Officer at Bay Airport had bent over the weather charts and asked advice of the meteorologist, waited for the latest reports and talked with every pilot who landed. What about cloud conditions over the coastal stations? What about velocities and windshifts at ten thousand feet? Any icing yet?

  The 12:45 from Seattle came in ten minutes late. The pilot had fought headwinds all the way, and reported rough air and bad conditions generally over the Siskiyous.

  The CSO cancelled the seven o’clock and one A.M. flights for Seattle, and felt easier. It was going to be no night to have planes out feeling their way around Mt. Shasta and fighting turbulence over the Siskiyous with probably every airport south of Seattle reporting low ceiling.

  The rain commenced at the airport about two o’clock, but there was a high enough ceiling, and the two-thirty plane from Los Angeles landed a few minutes early. The pilot had had tail-winds, good visibility even over the Tehachapis, and nothing to worry about. Fresno and Bakersfield reported good enough ceilings and only moderate winds. Without qualms, the CSO sent the three-o’clock off to Los Angeles.

  But conditions were going to get worse, not better. Minute by minute as he looked from his windows he seemed to see the clouds settling lower and the veil of rain growing thicker. Already under the thick overcast the winter daylight was dim; the night would make no difference to the storm in the upper air, but it would mean lower ceilings over the airports. Word came that the seven-forty-five from Seattle was ordered grounded at Medford. The pilot of the four-fifteen transcontinental reported by radio that he was flying by instrument, over the Sierras at twelve-thousand feet through clear air with cloud strata above and below him.

  The CSO called the Ticket Office. “Tell them we expect the five-o’clock for Los Angeles to be O.K. I’m going to let the five-thirty transcontinental start, if nothing happens between now and then, and I don’t think it will. Don’t promise anything on six-thirty and eight for Los Angeles. I still expect to get the nine o’clock transcontinental off all right, but we may have to skip Reno and make it non-stop to Salt Lake. And that finishes off tonight.” The CSO looked over the field. The lights had come on already. The great transcontinental plane from Salt Lake City was coming in for a landing.

  “She’s here all right anyway,” he thought. “I’ll have to talk to the pilot.” The drifting rain seemed thicker and harder blown in the gathering darkness. He wished suddenly that all his planes were safely tucked in for the night. “Act of God!” he thought ironically. “‘Fire, and hail; snow and vapors, stormy wind fulfilling his word!’” Over thousands of square miles the rain was falling, and wind was swirling, and clouds were creeping closer and closer to earth. Over the hump at Donner Pass snow was falling thickly, and perhaps in the air over the treacherous Tehachapis there were icing conditions. He checked off his four enemies—turbulence, icing, radio disturbance, low ceilings. Also he had his allies—cunningly built planes, powerful engines, de-icing devices, radio-beams, trained pilots. But most of all he counted upon telephone which let him know the weather any minute at any of his stations, and radio which let him order his pilots to land at some mid-way point, or even to turn back and seek safety at the airport from which they had started.

  10

  “Well, good-bye, Jen; good-bye, Mr. Arnim. Drive carefully. How you youngsters tear around—get in after midnight and start back that evening. It’s a shame this rain had to come up and spoil your trip. It’ll make you pretty late getting home. Remember me to my friends in Reno. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, Dot!”

  “Good-bye.”

  The car moved off down the street, and Dot waved from the doorway. That Max Arnim’s a nice boy, she thought; Jen could do a lot worse. Maybe they really were interested. Through the drifting rain she saw the moving car and the momentary dull marks it left on the shining wet asphalt. It turned the corner and was gone.

  11

  If he was too late in ge
tting to Colusa, he would not be able to see his man, and might miss the sale of flour he was expecting. He had been delayed in leaving San Francisco, and also the rain had slowed him down. Now it was growing dark; he pushed on as fast as he could, driving the limit on the wet road. But he had confidence in his own skill, and he knew that his car was in perfect condition.

  He was on the look-out for Tom and George’s Service Station where he was to leave the main highway and take the cutoff. He did not want to miss it, for he could save five minutes at least. Nevertheless, he was right there before he noticed, and not daring to throw on his brakes too hard because of the wet road, he ran by. For a moment he thought that he might as well go through on the main road; then, being a man of set purpose, he backed up to the service station and turned north into the secondary highway.

  Keeping at fifty an hour he drove a mile northward. Then, just as he passed over a rather high culvert, he saw sharply in the glare of his headlights some little obstruction at the edge of the pavement—a stick of wood with some dirt beside it. By quick automatic reaction he swerved to the left, felt his wheels skid, and straightened out.

  But the film of sodden manure which had spread across the wet pavement was so slippery that the tires could get no grip. The car skidded off the road, rolled over twice, and landed on its top with a terrific crash. With a shudder as of a dying animal, the car—its four wheels in the air—vibrated for a moment, and then was still.

  12

  Snow had been falling for an hour or so, and two or three inches lay upon the upper reaches of Highway 40. Already the yellow tow-car from Truckee had had to pull out a coupé, stuck in the ditch at Windy Point. Right now, in front of the Maintenance Station, a car had stopped, and its driver was fumbling with jack and chains; he looked very uncomfortable, half-blinded by the swirling snow, with the white powder sifting in around the collar of his overcoat.