Storm

by George R. Stewart

  10

  Red and green, half obscured by flying snow, the block-lights gleamed above the railroad tracks. A rotary was just starting out of the Norden sheds. When it had gained a sufficient head-start, a faster-moving flanger would follow it. The rotary would pull into a siding at Emigrant Gap, and a few minutes later the flanger would pull in behind it. This would leave the track clear of equipment and freshly plowed so that the Limited from Chicago would go through without a stop. Everything was closely timed. The Limited would have passed Norden and be halfway to the Gap before the flanger was switched off the main track.

  Compared with the compact little rotaries which cleared the highway, the steam rotary was ponderous. Instead of merely an operator and a swamper, it carried a crew of nine. In the compartment just behind the rotating blades were the conductor, the operator, a brakeman, and an oiler. In the boiler-room were an engineer and a fireman. Behind the plow to push it forward was a locomotive, and in it an engineer, a fireman, and a brakeman. The four men in the front compartment really operated the plow, and no one envied them their jobs. The conductor spent most of his time leaning out the side-door into the storm, trying to see what was happening. The operator and the brakeman crouched uncomfortably upon a raised seat trying to see through little windows usually obscured by the snow which the plow itself cast into the air; they strained to see even whether the lights were green or red. The oiler moved about with his rags and cans, inspecting the bearings.

  From the heat of the boiler just behind, the compartment was steamy and hot; oil fumes made the air heavy and sickening. But occasionally an icy jet of outside air swept through the compartment, and fine powdered snow covered the beads of sweat which stood on the men’s faces. As it cut into the drifts the plow bucked and vibrated. The great wheel bearing the cutting-blades revolved at high speed; it roared and pounded. Every man in the compartment knew that he was engaged in about as dangerous work as railroading affords. With so much ice and snow on the tracks derailment was always likely. And in the event of any collision, they would be caught behind the fan and rammed back into the steam of the boiler just behind them. All in all, the compartment was about as uncomfortable a place as could be found—heat and cold, bad air, racking vibration, dinning noise, and the threat of sudden death.

  Clumsy as it was, the rotary made a good job of throwing snow. On one side a vane scooped in the wall of snow which the flangers had left standing between the two tracks. On the other side a vane bit deeply into the high ridge which the flangers had built up. After the rotary had passed, there was four feet clear along the outside of the track. But the rotary did not clean the snow from between the rails, and so a flanger had to follow before the Limited could speed through safely.

  In a great parabola the spout of snow rose from the rotary, cleared the ridge of snow, and fell far across the mountain-side. Striking the telegraph wires it knocked the snow from them, and set them wildly vibrating. Striking the small pine trees it threw them into a sudden agonized tossing of branches. It tore off dead limbs and sent them flying through the air.

  In the compartment the operator and the brakeman leaned forward, looking for the light which they knew must be close at hand.

  “Green,” said the operator.

  “Green,” said the brakeman, confirming.

  The plow moved on.

  11

  The long process of soaking up was completed; the earth was satisfied. Streams ran in the gullies; the rivers were rising.

  Before leaving his office at six o’clock the General checked over the situation. Snow was falling at the twenty-five-hundred-foot level and above; accordingly there would be a negligible run-off from the higher mountains. On his desk, neatly codified, were hourly reports of river depths at the gauging stations on the Sacramento and its tributaries. All of them recorded the rivers rising, but slowly. The prospect, as reported by the Weather Bureau, was for more rain.

  The General walked the length of his office twice, and then dictated a brief forecast:

  A general rise is developing in all streams, and with continued rain higher stages will result in the Sacramento River and its tributaries. Within the next twelve to twenty-four hours water will begin to flow over Moulton, Colusa, Tisdale, and Fremont Weirs and to pass through the lower parts of Sutter and Yolo By-passes.

  12

  On the east slope by the gates at Donner Lake, on the west slope just below Emigrant Gap, the chain warnings were posted. In front of them were burning the flares, smoky oil-flames, hard-whipped by the wind, flickering from the top of squat iron balls, like witches’ fires. The wording of the sign was educational rather than mandatory:

  STOP

  MOTORISTS PUT ON YOUR CHAINS.

  WITHOUT CHAINS YOU ENDANGER

  YOUR OWN LIFE AS WELL AS OTHERS.

  In spite of the signs numerous motorists drove on without heeding. “Ah, y’don’t need chains,” some argued. “The Highway Commission is in cahoots with the garages; they want you to stop and pay four bits to get your chains put on, and maybe have to buy the chains too.” Egotists went ahead, trusting to their own presumed skill as drivers. Optimists assumed that the other fellow would get into trouble. Gamblers enjoyed taking a chance. Plain fools considered that man and his works were superior to the storm. About one car in five on this particular evening went ahead without chains.

  •

  At the Maintenance Station the day-shift was finishing dinner. Food came to the table on heaped platters—steaks, boiled potatoes, canned corn, tomatoes, and spinach, hot biscuits, coffee in gallon pots, stewed apricots and cake. After a hard day the men were tired. Their arms and body muscles were dull from long wrestling with the steering-wheels; their eyes were blood-shot and their eyelids snappy from the long effort to see through the snow-storm.

  The Superintendent ate with them. He was tired too, and ready to drop into bed at the first chance. He had driven back and forth along the road that day more times than he could remember; he had jumped from the car, waded through snow, shouted orders. But most of all what wore him was the sense of a pressing-down responsibility; even as he ate, he could feel the traffic going through his own mind. Cars, trucks, and buses—hundreds of them—converged from dozens of valley roads toward the snow-clogged bottleneck which was the Pass. Just as the roads converged so did the responsibility; first upon his plows and his men, then upon the foremen, then upon the Superintendent himself. As long as he could hold the road, throwing the snow off as fast as it fell, then he was master of the situation. But if ever the road was blocked and the traffic snarled up and the work of the plows impeded, then the drifts would build up, he might lose the road, and the process of getting it opened again might take hours or even days.

  A mark of the difference between the Superintendent and his men was that the men had thrown off their heavy working-outfits and had settled in for the night; their wet clothes already steamed in the drying-room. But the Superintendent still wore his boots; while the storm lasted, he was never really off-shift.

  When he finished eating, he went wearily down through the covered passageway into the garage, wondering what would happen next. The garage was warm, and water was dripping from a snow-covered rotary which had pulled in for minor adjustments. But at the wide doorway, the wind whistled, and the Superintendent buttoned up his short coat as he stood looking out.

  Darkness had fallen and the storm was thick. It looked like a bad night. A heavily pounding truck came up-grade from the west; a car with yellow lights followed it at an interval—then another car, and after some minutes another. Smoking his cigarette, the Superintendent was vaguely conscious of something not just right, but he could not yet analyze his feeling. Another car came up the grade from the west, then another—and the Superintendent’s vague feeling crystallized in thought. No cars had come from the east!

  He looked at his cigarette. It was down to the butt, and he threw it fro
m him into the storm. Moreover, he had been standing there a little while before lighting the cigarette. In that time no car had passed from the east. But in the same time a half dozen had passed from the west and here came two more. It might be a coincidence, and also it might be a traffic-block on the eastern slope of the Pass. He called to the garage-foreman where he was going, jumped into his car, and drove out from the calm of the garage into the blinding confusion of the storm.

  In spite of the constant work of the plows, little drifts of snow lay across the road; the tire-tracks of the cars which had just passed were half obliterated. Even an expert like the Superintendent could not make speed on a night like this, no matter how great the emergency. He swung around the curve of the bridge, still meeting no car from the east. Then just as he was nearing Windy Point, he came to the first of the parked cars.

  They were all on the right-hand side of the road, but farther ahead there must be a block. The Superintendent pulled up behind the last car, and jumped out. If anyone, he thought, ever needed to be three or four people at once, he at that moment was it. He ran down beside the line of cars, clicking off in his mind the things to be done and the order of their doing. Save life; see what’s the matter; keep it from getting worse; straighten it out; get the road open.

  As he ran, he mapped out the situation. Windy Point—the road swung around a steep out-jutting of granite. On the outside of the curve a cliff fell away. And the Point was named because from some trick of topography a redoubled wind swirled about it. Elsewhere the storm might ease off, but at Windy Point there was always a blizzard; if no snow was falling, the wind picked it off the ground and blew it through the air.

  Ahead on the curve the Superintendent saw the moving beam of a flashlight. “There’s where the block is!” he thought. Then, just as he most wanted to rush forward, he dug his hob-nails into the snow, and turned to a car he was just passing. He pounded vigorously on the closed window-glass; he could feel the throb of the engine.

  The window-glass lowered two inches and a blankly wondering pair of eyes stared out.

  “Open your windows or shut off your engine,” shouted the Superintendent without ceremony. “Want to suffocate to death with gas-fumes?”

  He saw the look of sudden consternation come into the eyes, and then he ran on. “Idiots!” he thought, “Closing all the windows and then running the engine to keep warm!”

  Now both lanes were full of halted cars pointed downhill. The reckless and over-confident drivers had tried to pass the cars ahead, and now the road was blocked solidly. The Superintendent raged within himself at the stupidity of man.

  The flashlight was in the hands of a truck-driver whose big truck had slewed around, blocking both lanes. The Superintendent knew that no professional truck-driver would have got into such a jam by himself; so without pausing he climbed around the truck’s bumper, and saw two cars stalled just beyond it. They were at crazy angles to the road, and one of them had a half-crushed fender. A man in a long city overcoat and a soft felt hat covered with snow was scraping away ineffectively with a jack-handle behind one of the cars, trying to put on chains.

  The Superintendent grabbed him by the shoulder. “Anybody hurt here?”

  The man, frightened and shaken, yielded to the voice of authority without questioning.

  “Nobody hurt. That truck—”

  “Never mind the truck. You ran past tire-chain warnings yourself.”

  But it was no time to argue. Knowing now that nobody needed first-aid, the Superintendent scrambled back across the truck, and grabbed the truck-driver.

  “Hey, Jack,” he said, “I’m road-superintendent here. Take that flashlight and go back and flag all the cars coming down grade. Don’t let ’em block the left-hand lane any more than it is already.”

  “O.K., boss.”

  The Superintendent was thankful again for truck-drivers; they knew there was more to driving a car than just sitting behind the wheel. Just then a big deep voice spoke out at the Superintendent’s ear.

  “Anything I can do, officer?”

  The Superintendent overlooked being mistaken for a snow-covered highway patrolman. The man who spoke was in a city overcoat and a felt hat, much like the man who was trying to dig his car out with the jack-handle. But he was different. The Superintendent recognized his type at once. Most drivers of private cars were idiots in an emergency, but now and then one kept his head. Sometimes a man like that, wearing good clothes, would straighten out a jam on his own initiative; people would take advice from him when they wouldn’t from a truck-driver.

  “Sure you can help,” said the Superintendent. “See if those cars in the left-hand lane can back up. If they can, help ’em do it, and we’ll get one lane clear above the block.”

  The Superintendent climbed back across the truck again, and went past the man who was still digging in the snow with the jack-handle. Below the block, things looked the same as on the upper side—cars jammed thick into both lanes—big cars and little, old and new, a jalopy with a broken window plugged with a quilt. Already windshields were plastered over, and snow was drifting between the cars. Enough headlights were still burning to throw a yellow glare over everything.

  On a half-run, as fast as he could go, the Superintendent hurried along between the two files of cars. He glanced right and left as he ran. From windows lowered just a few inches he saw one pair of eyes after another staring out stupidly, looking a little perturbed but just waiting for somebody else to straighten things out. Yet as he hurried on, he met two men bending forward into the gale, plugging through the storm, ahead. The Superintendent felt a quick warmth within him; those snow-covered figures let him know that Americans weren’t all soft with civilization; some of them still piled out into the gale and the snow, and marched to the front, to see if anything could be done—and do it. The blood of the frontiersmen hadn’t yet gone altogether thin.

  Again he had to stop to warn people about closed windows. But the next time he stopped, it was because the door of a car was standing open. He looked in—nobody there. He thought of the two men he had met, but they would have shut their doors to keep the snow out. And there—of all things—were some gloves lying on the front seat, a woman’s gloves!

  He hurried to the next car, and beat on the window-glass. Another pair of stupidly wondering eyes looked out at him.

  “What happened to that woman in the car ahead?” shouted the Superintendent.

  “Her?” came the word from an invisible mouth below the level of the glass. “She and the old man was with her—they started t’walk down the road. She yelled in—said we was all goin’ t’ get buried in by the snow and froze. Just like somebody named Donner, she said. Think we’d better start walkin’ out like she said?”

  “God’s sake, no! When did they leave?”

  “Oh, maybe five minutes.”

  The Superintendent really ran now. Five minutes! But a hysterical woman and an old man could not move very fast. Crazy! There ought to be a law against books about the Donner Party; but he had known it to happen even when people had never heard of the Donners.

  At the end of the line another car was pulling in. The Superintendent yelled through at the driver: “See a man and woman down this road, walking?”

  “Yes. We wondered—”

  The Superintendent opened the door without asking leave.

  “Slide over,” he said, “and give me the wheel. You got chains on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t argue then.”

  The Superintendent flipped the wheels to the left, and drove the front bumper into the snow-wall. He reversed, spinning the steering-wheel. He felt the back tires slip, but the chains bit and held her. He flung her into low again, steered left, just grazed the snow-wall with the bumper and was off—downgrade.

  “How far away did you pass those people?”

  “Gee, I don�
��t know,” said the man. “Quite a way.”

  “Just the other side of the big bend,” said the woman who was sitting crowded against the other door.

  “Thanks.” It was funny; sometimes a woman had better sense about such things than a man did.

  It was a fine big car; he put it into second and went down around the Horseshoe as fast as he dared; and that was about twice as fast as any ordinary driver would dare. Out of his eye-corner he saw that the man beside him was scared, pea-green.

  He met a car going up; it was a knife in his ribs to think that another car was going up there to add to the clutter, but he had to see to this other matter first, even if it lost him the road. In theory the Highway Patrol handled traffic and people, while he took care of the snow. But there might not be an officer within ten miles, and so he had to look after everything, all at once.

  He slowed down. “Keep a look-out on the other side for those two people, will you, please?” he said to the woman. She lowered the window a little. The snow came with a blast in her face, but she kept looking. She was a good one.

  The Superintendent was thinking fast. There must be a rotary working close to here. He would stop and see if the operator had seen these people walking, and they could set their radio working to bring up help. Perhaps, he kept hoping, one of the men who had enough courage to get out into the storm would also have the sense to start flagging cars and keep them from piling into the jam on the lower side.

  Then he saw them—two figures scurrying awkwardly to the side of the road as the car-lights hit them. He threw on the brakes.

  “I’ll have to bring them into your car.”

  He was afraid that the woman might be hysterical, but ten minutes in the storm had taken the fight out of her. She was middle-aged, and the man must be close to sixty. They were a miserable-looking pair, plastered with snow, not too warmly dressed. The woman’s gloveless hands were blue with cold already. And it was five miles down the Pass before the first house.