Storm

by George R. Stewart

  He bundled them into the back seat of the big car. The woman in front gave them a steamer-rug. The Superintendent climbed in again behind the wheel, and started again downgrade toward where the rotary must be working. He had saved life; now he must get his road open. He spoke quickly and quietly to the man beside him.

  “Look here. Confidentially, that jam up there won’t be cleared for a little while. Why don’t you go down and wait at the bottom of the Pass? There’s a joint there where you can keep warm and get some coffee, and our friends,” he jerked his head toward the back-seat, “need some. Might save a case of pneumonia. I’ll have their car brought up to the Maintenance Station, and you can drop them there.”

  “Sure, we’ll do that,” said the woman next to the window.

  Then he saw the lights of the rotary, and stopped.

  “Thanks, folks,” he said to the people who owned the car, and jumped out without ever explaining who he was. He crawled into the cab of the rotary, and gave orders fast. “Raise the plow, boys, and take me up the road as fast as you can. We’re all needed.”

  Then he pulled the handle that elevated the aerial, and turned the current on, to warm up the tubes. The forty-five seconds they took seemed a long time tonight.

  Usually it was a little like playing house, to have a rotary fully equipped as a radio sending-station, registered and everything, with its own call-number. But tonight it was all serious. Twenty seconds. Half a minute.

  The swamper was working his levers hard, getting augers raised; the operator was backing the plow away from the snow-wall. Forty-five seconds—and there was life in the tubes.

  “KRDM-4 calling KRDO-1; KRDM-4 calling KRDO-1.”

  Already the operator was taking the plow up-grade as fast as he could push it. Then the Maintenance Station answered back through the storm. The Superintendent gave orders to the night-foreman.

  “Halt all east-bound cars at the summit—quick! Telephone to halt all west-bound cars at the gates. Contact the Highway Patrol and tell them there’s a block at Windy Point. Send two of our men down there right away to handle traffic—pull them off the day-shift if you have to. And send down a push-plow besides.”

  They were back at the parked cars. The Superintendent set another truck-driver with a flashlight to flag upcoming traffic. He put the operator of the rotary to work going along the line of cars assuring people that there was no danger and making certain nobody was killing himself with carbon-monoxide fumes. The swamper began clearing the left-hand lane below the block; that was comparatively easy, because you can usually back a car down-hill even in snow, but you may have a hard time backing it up-hill.

  At the actual block the situation was better. The left-hand lane on the upper side had been cleared. Then the truck-drivers had got together—the way they always did—to help the truck that was in trouble. They had brought forward another truck and got a chain from it to the one which was slewed across the road. There was not much room to maneuver, and the darkness and flying snow impeded the work and slowed it down. Still, they were moving the stalled truck a foot at a time, and would have it out of the jam and back on the road in a few minutes. Working with the truck-drivers and really directing the show was the man with the city overcoat who had volunteered to help; but he was so covered with snow that now you couldn’t have told what he was wearing.

  The Superintendent took charge, but there was nothing much more for him to do. Thank God for truck-drivers! It’s the professionals that keep going in time of trouble. But the man in the city overcoat and the others who had come up to help were all right too.

  As soon as the left-hand lane was cleared below the block, the truck-drivers and some others got their shoulders at one of the stalled cars and pushed it out of the snow-bank. It was without chains, of course, and its driver had lost his nerve; the man in the city overcoat backed it down-hill a few yards, out of the way.

  The other stalled car belonged to the man who had been digging in the snow with his jack-handle; he had not managed to get even one chain on. But the trouble was that he had been trying to go forward up-grade, and all the while he could have eased his car, crumpled fender and all, downgrade without much difficulty, and got it to some easy spot where he could have got started forward again without chains. With a few directions that was exactly what he did, and once he got going he went right on, without even a thank-you, up the cleared lane above the block, and around the curve out of sight, right on for wherever he was going. He even left his jack-handle lying in the snow. The truck-drivers were so mad they could have lynched him, but the Superintendent thought it was good riddance. You could hear the car-horns from above tooting in triumph because one car had gone through, and the people knew the block must be breaking.

  Next the Superintendent got rid of the east-bound cars. They were all pointed downgrade, and so had no trouble to get going. The man with the city overcoat drove away in one of them, but before he got into his car, he asked the Superintendent if there was anything more he could do.

  The west-bound cars were harder. The snow had blown in around them, and they had to get started against a heavy grade. It meant a good deal of backing and wallowing and unscrambling, and the drivers were nervous because they couldn’t see much. Those with chains had no real difficulty, but the others slipped about and spun their tires. All of these drivers were liable for tickets, because they had ignored the sign to put on their chains. The Superintendent told them so for a warning, but he was more interested in getting them off the road than in holding them until the Highway Patrol got there to give tickets. One by one the chainless cars were backed up until they got to a place where the snow was hard enough for them to get started up-grade. Once they got up a little speed they could keep moving, and the summit was only a mile farther. One of the highway gang drove the car which the woman and the old man had abandoned. Finally there were only two cars left, and the Superintendent radioed the Station to telephone Truckee for a tow-car; being towed out would cost more than a ticket, and would be an equally good warning. The people in the two cars looked cold and scared, but the Superintendent wasted no sympathy on them. People like that might make him lose the road, and besides it was just luck that nobody was killed.

  He ordered the push-plow and the rotary to get to work cleaning up the mess. From the look of things there had probably been a little snow-slide to begin with, and that might have blocked the first car and started all the trouble. The push-plow began shoving the snow to the outer side of the road, and scraping off the crust, which had built up into a low hummock. The plow had to rush, and when it hit the hummock it bucked and pitched; the driver gunned the motor, and then in spite of chains the big double-tired rear wheels spun and skidded. Then the driver had to back up and rush again. Sometimes the plow accomplished little, and other times the cutting edge bit in close to the top of the pavement and broke off great chunks of consolidated snow eight inches thick.

  In every rush the slanting stroke of the great plowshare flung the plow off to the left, and once it “did a wind-ding” by skidding all the way round in a circle. And all the while the gale whistled around Windy Point, and the air was thick with flying snow like feathers.

  In ten minutes the push-plow had got the blocked place opened up to two-lane width again; the rotary moved in and started throwing all the piled-up snow over the side.

  Let down after the emergency, the Superintendent stood by his car. He was wet and cold, heavy-legged and heavy-eyed; he thought only of tumbling onto his cot. Then he noticed that one of the men who had been sent down from the Station was standing there wanting to speak to him. The fellow’s name was Mart; he was a fair enough swamper, but maybe not too good in the head.

  “Well, what is it, Mart? Spill it!”

  “Say, Supe, I got uh idea I just been a-figurin’. It’s these here damn cars causes all the trouble. Why don’t you get ’em to keep all the cars off the road? Then we
can keep it nice and clean as anything all winter.”

  13

  The District Traffic Superintendent slept in a bed which had a telephone-set screwed into the panel at its head. That night he got under the blankets fairly early. When he was all settled and ready to go to sleep—just as a man might say his prayers—he reached for the telephone and talked with the office.

  “How are things?” he asked.

  “About the same,” said the assistant. “No trouble on the Los Angeles lines—nothing but rain down that way. A few failures on the Seattle lead, mostly around Shasta. But there’s been quite a bit of trouble on the Central—up on the Hump.”

  “What’s been the matter?”

  “Just a good big storm, I guess. There’s a lineman lost up there too—”

  “Lost?”

  “Well, hurt, I guess. But just disappeared so far. They’re out now looking for his truck.”

  “That’s too bad! Yes, that’s bad. Hard on service too. Men get jittery—don’t work well when that sort of thing’s in the air. You’ll get through tonight all right; traffic will be light.”

  “Oh, we’ll get through—barring accident.”

  “Well, call me if you need me.”

  The DTS settled himself to go to sleep. He could hear the steady spatter of rain outside; somewhere water was dropping and splashing loudly from a clogged roof-gutter. He knew that he would go to sleep immediately, and wake up at four to call the office again. His was a twenty-four-hour shift during storms. Then he was asleep.

  14

  Against all the long rampart of the Coast Range the storm was beating. Northward, and here and there upon the higher peaks, there was snow. Elsewhere was only the slanting rain, and low cloud above the ridges. Upon the Trinity Mountains (most orthodoxly christened) the storm beat; equally it beat upon those other mountains (un-Christianly named in half-altered pagan tongue) Bully Choop and Yolla Bolly.

  This is the roll-call of those chief summits rising against the first in-sweep of the storm from the ocean. Mt. Sanhedrin. Mt. Kinocti that watches above the lake. Sulphur Peak on whose slopes the geysers fume and spout. Then flat-topped St. Helena, named for a Russian princess, transmuted in romance to Spy-Glass Hill. Tamalpais of the long ridge, overlooking the Golden Gate. Grizzly Peak, high above the tall white tower, facing toward the Bay. Twin-peaked Diablo, where the beacon flashes into the night. Black Mountain over against Loma Prieta, the Dark Hill. Mt. Hamilton of the star-watchers. Fremont Peak where the moldering intrenchments sink yearly closer to the ground. Southward, stretching far off, the ridges which bound the long Valley of the Salt Pools. Out of the pounding surf the Santa Lucias, rearing up their cliffs. Blanco Peak, Mt. Mars, Saddle Mountain by the Bishop’s Town. St. Joseph and St. John. Upon them all was rain.

  At last came the turn of the coast and the long trend eastward. There the Coast Ranges lost themselves among those higher mountains which bear the name of Gabriel, the Archangel. And on those peaks which shadow the Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels—there too was rain.

  NINTH DAY

  1

  Four times in the known history of the earth have the mountains risen like a tide. Three times have the forces of air and water made head against those mountains, eating away the towering granite peaks into little rounded hills. Two hundred and fifty million years is the period of that cycle—majestic among earthly rhythms.

  When, as now, the mountains have risen and stand high, then the storms rage most often and most fiercely. When the mountains again are low and the ice-caps melted and the seas grown shallow with wastage of granite, the air grows calm, and the languorous mood of the tropics reaches far toward north and south.

  In this great struggle the chief allies of the hills are the plants. They bind the soil with their roots as with fine tough threads. With grass and fallen leaves they mat the earth against the rain-drops.

  Dubious partners in the struggle are the animals. A few, like the beavers, work to hold back the water. Some, like the flyers and light-footed climbers, scarcely enter the conflict. The burrowers—rodents, insects, and worms—ease the rush of the water and give it entrance to the earth, but their castings of loose dirt wash away quickly. Worst of all, enemies against the hills, are the grazers and browsers. Like the stag in the fable, they eat away the cover of leaves and grass; with their sharp and hard hoofs they wear trails into the raw earth, and along the trails the running water cuts gullies.

  Man, whose ancestors crawled out from the salt water, remains still a creature of the sea-margin, his habitat the low plains. A thousand feet is a small fraction of the ocean’s depth; yet, if the ocean were suddenly to rise a thousand feet, man would be largely destroyed. Of Europe would remain only some mountainous islands; the United States would fare not much better. Mexico City, cupped among its mountains, would survive as the largest center of habitation in the world.

  Living thus upon the plains, man is upon neutral ground between the mountains and the ocean. The torrents from the hills grow quiet, and let fall their silt. The great slow rivers here and there cut into the banks, and elsewhere build up the flood-plains or thrust forward the long fingers of their deltas into the sea.

  Man allies himself now with the mountains, now with air and water. Like the beaver, he builds dams and retaining walls. Like the sheep, he strips the earth and cuts trailways. He protects his habitations against the water, so that through the centuries the level of a city rises foot by foot. In the main, swayed by immediate need and convenience, he remains through the long course of time careless of the struggle, planless.

  A father was out walking with his son, and they came to a small stream.

  “Why is the water so muddy?” asked the little boy.

  “It means the soil is washing away,” said the father. “The government is sending a lot of men out to build dams and stop it.”

  But the brown stream was sign and symbol of a great conflict. Its present cycle would not be completed within a hundred million years, before which time man would very likely have run his course and vanished. By then the sky-towering crags would be reduced to gnawed stumps of granite, and a stormless climate, as in the Eocene, would cover most of the earth.

  2

  On the higher mountains snow was falling. Far beneath the surface the shrunken streams flowed in dim tunnels arched by snow; deep ground-waters fed them. The summer-darting trout were sunk in lassitude, half-hibernating. While the drifts covered the high country, it could suffer little erosion; that was for the time of thaw, when melting snow loosed the torrents.

  On the foothills rain was falling. Brown water flowed in the gullies; it ate at the cut-banks; it foamed in the narrows.

  For a certain section of canyon-rim above the South Fork of the Yuba River the hour approached. Neither accident nor the work of man was involved. The area was uninhabited. It offered foothold to few trees, and had never been lumbered. Its quartz yielded no gold. On the bare outcroppings, forest fires died for lack of fuel. But through centuries the river had worn at the base of the canyon-wall, and the side-gulches had grown deeper. At last the flowing water in one of the gulches finished washing away a little sand, and a tall rock shifted a quarter of an inch. The earth was already heavy with soaked-up rain. This small movement of the foundation unloosed the whole mass. With a long roar four million tons of the canyon-rim—rock, soil, chaparral—slid down five hundred feet before again coming to rest. Through trees and undergrowth masses of rock crashed a thousand feet farther until they reached the river-bed, and clogged the flow of the stream. Halfway down the canyon-side a tall cedar rooted in the slide stood leaning drunkenly.

  In the valleys rain was falling. As it soaked through the earth, it leached away salts; rapaciously, the gnaw of its acidity ate even at solid limestone. By its buoyancy it floated away fallen leaves and seeds, pods and bark-scalings; as the water rose, logs and up-rooted trees yielded to the
strange upward pull; they lifted from the mud where gravity had held them, and began the journey toward the sea-bottom.

  Now swiftly, now more slowly, the water flowed always onward and downward at the pull of the earth’s center. In the torrents of the stream beds, it moved boulders before it. The same force worked subtly in every turbid trickle which held some clay in suspension or rolled a little fine sand along with it.

  Whether the cut or gully was man-made or “natural” was no concern of the rain. Here and there occurred a land-slip. Of much greater importance was the continual unheeded fall of loosened gravel and small stones. Blue clay soaked up until it grew soft, and flowed by its own weight, oozing slowly forward like hot candy poured upon a platter. On hillsides the adobe soil grew heavy until great sections settled and slid, leaving behind them wide crescent-shaped scars of raw earth. And always the movement was downward, from the hill-tops toward the sea.

  3

  Along by Fox Farm was a stretch of highway that was in pretty bad shape that night. A rotary was working on it. The men in the rotary could see next to nothing; the flying snow reflected the lights right back in their faces. They were feeling their way along from snowstake to snowstake. Then came a bang, and a jolt, and the shear-bolts went.

  “That’s no pebble,” said the swamper, and they both piled out into the snow, expecting to find that a boulder or tree-trunk had fallen down on the highway.

  “God, it’s a car!” said the operator, for he could see the end of the rear bumper where the rotary’s augers had chewed into it; everything else was drifted over with snow, or plastered. The two men looked at each other, and each saw that the other was scared.

  The operator knocked the snow off the handle and opened the door. “One of those little telephone trucks,” he said.