Storm

by George R. Stewart

  If the discharge rose above this maximum of 600,000 cubic feet per second, theoretically the condition of ’61 would be repeated and an area the size of Massachusetts would be under water. In actuality a flooding of one part of the valley would probably save the rest, unless the conditions should be too long continued. Time, as the General knew well, was often a deciding factor. It might even be possible, in a sense, for the maximum to be exceeded without any general break, because the crest from each branch of the river might pass at different times. Thus high water from the American usually went by before the crest arrived from the Feather and its tributaries, and that in turn was out of the way before the flood from the upper Sacramento rose to full height. But if time under some conditions was a help it could also cause disaster. A sudden cloudburst in one drainage basin might bring down a crest which would top the levees locally while elsewhere in the system the channels were far below capacity.

  Sometimes the newspapers referred to the General as “The Czar of the River.” As a military man, the General loved command well enough not to resent the title, but he knew that his authority was not very effective. The planning and construction of the vast levee-system had to be done months and years in advance, and once the rain started falling, even a Czar was little more than a spectator.

  In his office during each storm he collected data upon actual rainfall; he co-ordinated this with the Weather Bureau forecasts; he estimated the advance of the crests of various streams by reports of the readings of numerous river-gauges. From all these data he predicted the hour at which water would begin to spill over the various weirs, and the area which this water would cover. Then he sent out warnings. The broad lands of the by-passes pastured thousands of sheep and cattle; in some places certain crops could even be grown. At the General’s word the sheep and cattle were hurriedly collected and driven to safe places; the roads across the by-pass lands were closed; men began to patrol the levees to guard against breaks and seepage; and all the river towns passed into what was almost a state of siege.

  There was, moreover, one prerogative which the General jealously guarded. The city of Sacramento, state capital, population a hundred thousand, was—as the General often said—by far the most valuable piece of property in the whole Valley. It stood in the narrow angle between the American and Sacramento rivers, a ticklish place. And of all the tributaries, the American was quickest to rise, and most treacherous. Besides its levees, the chief protection to the city was Sacramento Weir, four miles up-stream. It was more than a third of a mile long, and of all the weirs it alone had gates. Only at the General’s order could those gates be opened.

  15

  In the City, as if symbolic of a new regime, the great banners no longer flew from the high towers. Here and there some smaller flag rode out the storm—tossed and whipped in the south wind, its colors dulled and sodden.

  Wisps of fast-driven scud swirled around the bare flag-poles, and lower—until the tops of the towers were dim in the cloud. By the clocks it was day, but lights shone from the windows. Stone-work was dark with wetness. Under the high archways of the portals people huddled, peering out for street-cars, signaling cabs.

  Water spattered upon the sidewalks in rain-drops. Water ran in the gutters; it gurgled through the gratings of the storm drains; it dropped from awnings and cornices; it cascaded from broken drain-pipes.

  Sleek wet asphalt reflected the glow of neon lights in long unreal lines of pink and blue. Drivers of cars leaned forward nervously, peering through the windshield-wipers. The professionals—truck- and taximen—sped along as nonchalantly as ever; their impudent wheels threw water from the puddles; pedestrians drew back, fearful or angry. Street-cars came along stolidly; from beneath their wheels little sprays of water flew sideways.

  The flower-stands no longer glowed with sun-bright colors; the vendors did little business; they covered the blooms with water-proofs, and hoped for a better day. Newsboys no longer pre-empted the best corners; now they withdrew toward sheltered spots and guarded their papers against the wet; when they made a sale, they quickly drew the folded paper out and handed it to the customer.

  On the sidewalks fewer people moved along. They no longer strode boldly, heads up and confident faces, as they had a few days before, when the Pacific High ruled the air and the northwest wind swirled through the sunlit city. Now in an environment suddenly grown half-aquatic, they scurried along, uncomfortable, in costumes only partly adapted to the rain. Men’s hats, dripping water, lost symmetry and spruceness; below overcoats, trouser legs collapsed damply; shoes lost all trace of shine, or disappeared beneath clumsy rubbers. Pink, green, and blue, women’s raincoats put up a brave front, but the color was infirm and chalky with no touch of gayety. And below the raincoats, shoes and clammy silk stockings were spattered and muddy. The very faces of men and women were hidden beneath umbrellas; as people passed at the corners, the umbrellas clicked and tangled.

  And all the while, sprung of the forces of sun and earth, part of a vast system which covered the hemisphere, the south wind blew steadily. High above the wet sidewalks and the streaming gutters and the scurrying people, the hard-blown scud swirled about the towers and bare flag-poles; still higher was only the thick cloud-deck, and clean rain falling.

  EIGHTH DAY

  1

  The place of man’s birth is unknown; but in poetic dreams (as if dimly remembering) man yearns back toward some land benign and equable, far from the path of storms. Such was the Earthly Paradise. Such was Lotus-Land, and that far country of Those-beyond-the-North-Wind. Such was the Isle of Apples, Avalon:

  Where falls not hail or rain or any snow,

  Nor ever wind blows loudly.

  Still, near the Tropics, such regions may be found; in milder epochs they spread far toward the Poles.

  Even yet, man seems to carry with him mementoes of some idyllic past. In his mind a grasshopper, each summer he assumes that the ever-blooming tropics still surround him. Only by hard-won wisdom, not by racial aptitude, does he lay up for the future. The birds fly south without waiting for frost; the bear stores up fat to hibernate; the bee and the beaver hoard food. If such creatures had grave and reverend philosophers, they might teach more concern with the present, and less with the future. But the average man always has difficulty in getting round to mend the roof in dry weather.

  From the tropics also may stem man’s dislike of the violent changes of the temperate zones. For (as the saying goes) the tropics have climate but no weather; they display a set diurnal or seasonal rhythm. In his deepest instincts man seems to expect such sameness, to resent sudden shifts. He has never learned that in mid-latitudes unusual weather is all he can expect. He always grumbles.

  One belief of man’s growth is that when as a proto-human he faced a more severe climate, he was forced to work harder and so survived and started on the road to civilization. But this negative theory fails to explain why man did not retreat to the tropics or else like other species merely die off after a few uncomfortable lingering generations.

  Another theory of survival stresses weather instead of climate. When the gentle epoch ended and storms became many and violent, then those very storms—the shock of constant adjustment—stimulated man out of his tropical languor, and gave him power and will to outface a harsher world. With each storm and passing front, blood pressure rises and falls, nerves react, secretions alter. So physicians have learned, and they quote from Hippocrates, father of medicine: “Air is lord.”

  Some theorists say even that civilization can flourish only in the lands along the storm-track, where man most often feels the bracing shift from warm and moist to cold and dry, back and forth. For evidence, they point to Ptolemy’s records, which seem to show that in their times of greatness the Mediterranean lands knew more turns of weather than now in these decadent days.

  This marriage of civilization and storms has not been proved, or yet refuted. If it is true
, then those atmospheric powers which seem to overwhelm men in the temperate zone, also stimulate the energy to live and conquer. Civilized men are like Napoleon’s grenadiers—they always grumble, but they always march.

  2

  At Brownsville men weary from tending fires fell into bed, and slept the peaceful sleep of those released from fear; at Montemorelos the brown-skinned people no longer shivered upon their straw-mats. The still cold of the night was broken. The oranges were safe, and the fires might burn low. On this side the Rio Grande and on the other, a softer air was moving from the Gulf. Whether women had prayed to the Son or called upon the dark Virgin, whether men had cursed or been silent, upon all the orange groves the gentler wind was blowing. On the coast of Texas and the coast of Tamaulipas, no matter the flags, it blew.

  No longer did the stars glitter coldly in the cloudless sky and the heat drain off to outer space. Now, in the darkness before dawn, from Galveston Bay to Río Pánuco the overcast hung low; as the moist air blew across the cold land, long arms of fog moved up every valley.

  Mile by mile the southern breeze pushed inland. Monterrey felt it, and Saltillo; it moved in the streets of Laredo. It came to San Antonio and Houston, to Austin and Waco. Reaching far to the north along Trinity River a finger of mist touched Dallas. And even farther, along the Red River and the Cimarron, men waking in the night knew that the power of the cold was breaking.

  The teletype machines were clicking in wild confusion; Whitey was entering data. The Chief, sitting in his chair, was looking at the map upside down. Reading a notation here and there he already sensed the continued power of the storm.

  As usual, it gave him a feeling of his own futility and insignificance. Even his forecast made little difference today; anybody could see the rain was going to keep up for a while. Usually he had a keen sense of interest in the men with whom he worked; he felt the importance of whether the J. M. was just a whippersnapper with a lot of crazy ideas out of books, or whether he had the makings of a good weather-man. But today the Chief did not even inquire about Whitey’s sick wife. Personalities were important in fair weather; when a storm stretched from Sitka to San Diego, what happened to individuals seemed of little moment. The storm was so great that it monopolized his mind.

  After he had drawn the map, he saw that the situation had changed remarkably little as far as the Pacific Coast was involved. The storm still centered off Cape Blanco. There was room for argument, the Chief knew, about how a storm could stay in one place, and even about whether it actually did. Some maintained that what looked like the same storm was in some way really a succession of storms, continually dying and being born. Others talked of waves along a stationary front. But as the Chief liked to say, if you’re crossing a tropical river and something grabs your leg, you’re not much concerned whether it’s an alligator or a crocodile. From the practical point of view the storm was all one, although quite possibly it had as many parts as a centipede.

  But what really interested the Chief that morning was a bulge eastward of the 1011 isobar, looping around Salt Lake City. It was not a prominent feature of the map, but to the Chief it was the indication that things were getting back to normal, that the ordinary movement of air from west to east was being re-established. It meant that some of the air from the Pacific storm had got across the mountains, and was about to form a secondary storm-center over Nevada or Utah. From there it would go east. Already air was moving up from the Gulf and warming Texas and Oklahoma.

  In this plains region and farther east had come the greatest weather-shift of the last twenty-four hours. Over most of the Mississippi Valley the north wind had ceased blowing, and had left the weather cold, clear, and still. The center of the High forming the calm area had drifted slowly eastward from Kansas City to Terre Haute. Peoria reported eleven below zero. Farther east the temperatures were not so low, but the air was still pouring down from the Arctic. Crossing the Lakes this air picked up some moisture, enough to let loose snow flurries upon Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit, and even as far south as Pittsburgh.

  As the Chief decided finally, the restoration of more normal conditions would not proceed very rapidly. The storm off the coast still looked good for forty-eight hours of rain in California. But the bulging out eastward had already caused a breaking of the cold wave on the plains.

  Then he checked himself, and shrugged his shoulders. “Hn-n?” He had merely yielded to that incurable human tendency to see things from your own point of view. Weather-men in the plains states would be saying that the flow of air from the south across the plains had caused the storm to bulge out eastward. Did one side of the scale go down because it was heavier, or did the other side go up because it was lighter? It all depended upon how you looked at the matter. The whole atmosphere was in exact balance; this particular problem had no solution. The more you thought about which caused what, the more you felt cause and effect to be nothing except words—convenient to use at times, but not really meaning much. The Chief wondered whether he would know more about it if he had taken courses in philosophy.

  •

  The same problem was involved in what was happening concurrently in South America, where an intensely heated tropical air-mass had moved down from the Amazon Valley. Superficially, one might have said that the great incursion of polar air, reaching clear to Panama, had disturbed the equilibrium and pushed the equatorial air southward. Equally well, one could say that the movement of the equatorial air had permitted the unusual southern push of the polar air. Both statements would have ignored the existence of an intensified circumpolar whirl over Antarctica, a willy-willy in Western Australia, and the weather elsewhere in the world.

  But even a perfect solution of the problem would unfortunately have brought no comfort to the sweltering people of Uruguay and Argentina. While Chicago newsboys were crying, “Six die of cold!” twenty-two persons were treated for heat-prostration in Buenos Aires, and a man dropped dead in the Plaza Belgrano.

  3

  Upon the Sierra each tree after its kind withstood the storm. The aspens that bordered the high meadows, the alders and the willows along the streams—these had flared with autumnal yellow, and now raised against the winter storm only bare branches, skeletons upon which the snow found small lodgment.

  The fir trees rose in tapering pointed cones. Their broad thick-set needles held the flakes, until the trees grew solid white. So perfect was their cover that around each trunk, beneath the shelter of down-sloping branches, was a cup in the snow, a refuge for the hard-pressed grouse and rabbits where sometimes even bare ground was showing. Beneath their loads the fir trees stood stiffly—like Puritans, prim and uncompromising—saying between tight-drawn lips, “We shall not bend, though we break.” And often they broke; the over-strained trunk, brittle in the cold, snapped like a match, and the tree lay in ruin.

  Not so were the cedars. They bent easily and pliantly beneath the weight, until at last they sloughed off the snow and again stood upright.

  Still different were the yellow pines. Their slender, thinly set needles let the snow slip through. On the windward side a sheathing built up on the scaly-barked trunks; white ridges lay upon the big horizontal branches of the crown. Otherwise, the trees looked almost as dark and green as in summer.

  More like the cedars were the lodge-pole pines, which the people of the Sierra call tamaracks. These flourished only at the highest levels and must survive the full force of every storm. Each smaller tree caught the snow as thickly as a fir; then just as the weight was about to become crushing, the whole tree seemed to shake itself violently, and after a moment it emerged from the cloud of falling snow, again upright with only a powdering of crystals upon its needles. The mature lodge-poles cleared themselves branch by branch, loosing a few bushels of snow to drop upon the drifts beneath; in heavy stands one heard constantly the long shu-u-sh of falling snow.

  Most curious of all were the lodge-poles which stood twenty
or thirty feet in height. As the snow-load built up, these formed the curious shapes like the sheeted dead and known as snow-ghosts. Inch by inch the white columns bent over until they leaned one against another in weird confusion. And those growing alone arched farther and farther. They did not break, but to some of them the weight clung too tightly, and they never straightened. Spring and the melting snow found these stretched along the ground in wild contortions, still growing strongly. But most of the snow-ghosts, though they arched clear over and touched the ground, in the end shook off the snow and stood again upright. For upon the Sierra the lodge-pole grows highest of trees; to live at all it must live vigorously; timber-line is only the frontier which the lodge-pole, ever yielding and ever up-springing, holds against the power of the storms sweeping in from the far Pacific.

  4

  Neither Max nor Jen had turned up for work at nine o’clock. Through the hours of that morning an undercurrent of speculation eddied back and forth. In the office where Max worked, two typists exchanged ideas hurriedly.

  “I tell you, they got married.”

  “Yeh, don’t you know they got a three-day law in California?”

  “But maybe they got married in Carson or Verdi—’fore they ever left Nevada.”

  “I’ll bet they picked up a couple of swell jobs somewhere, and are just givin’ us the ha-ha.”

  In the restaurant where Jen worked, the proprietress was in the cashier’s booth.

  “Where’s Jen?” said a regular customer.

  “Oh, she’s off for a few days,” bluffed the proprietress.

  Jen’s roommate who worked at the candy counter was worried, and sniveled secretly into her handkerchief. She was glad she remembered the name of Jen’s sister in San Francisco. At nine o’clock not twenty-five people had known anything. By noon the knowledge had spread to a hundred. Through the lunch hour, as people mingled and relaxed and fell into talk, the story radiated out until possibly a thousand people knew some vague version, and the diverging chains of gossip began to meet.