Storm

by George R. Stewart

  •

  In the mountains the repair men were still laboring. Their foreman had a portable telephone attached to the wires, and through it he kept in touch with Sacramento. Once he came back looking not so comfortable.

  “Well, they found him,” he said.

  Everybody knew what he meant. They paused.

  “He was under the snow, but some fellows from Truckee brought in a collie dog that was trained to work in the mountains, and the dog found him.”

  Still they waited.

  “For Christ’s sake, who do you think you’re workin’ for—the Old People’s Home? Sure, he was dead. Why don’t you get on with the job?”

  They worked hard after that, and nobody talked much.

  9

  For the newspapers Max and Jen were not very useful. Their being unmarried lent a touch of piquancy, and her hair could be played up as blonde. The reporters got a photograph from Jen’s sister, and after the art department of the Register had put in some work the picture was not very valuable for identification, but it had some suggestions of the femme fatale. From the newspaperman’s point of view however, the trouble with the story was that it had no follow-up; the pair just went out of the picture as Dot saw them drive away into the rain.

  A rumor cropped up about a Nevada couple who had been married in Yuma. But when a reporter located an embarrassed young couple in a tourist-court, the girl turned out to be a Mexican-type brunette, and the story was a flop.

  The officers of the Highway Patrol kept working, especially between San Francisco and Sacramento, and from there by U.S. 40 over the pass to the state line. In the thorough and unhurrying way of good professionals they asked a lot of questions at garages and service-stations; conscientiously plying their trade, they ran down a few unlikely rumors. But they discovered absolutely nothing.

  10

  On the University campus the sea-gulls stood about by ones and twos on the green lawn—refugees from the storm. (Now, over their homes on reef and ledge the furious invading waves pounded and swept and foamed; high upon the cliffs the salt-spume filled the air.) Misplaced-looking, they stood, or flew here and there in restless, purposeless flights, or walked a few steps this way or that, raising feet awkwardly as if at the foreign feeling of grass tickling on their webs.

  A professor preparing a lecture on modern literature looked out and saw them. “Sea-gulls on the grass,” he thought. “Sea-gulls on the grass, alas! Perhaps that was what she meant. That would make sense—means a big storm at sea. They look the part too—moping! Sea-gulls on the grass, alas!”

  11

  Keeping U.S. 40 open over the Pass, thought the Superintendent, was just one crisis after another. Yesterday it had been the jam at Windy Point, and tomorrow it would be something else, but today it was wind. Not so much snow was falling; the clouds were thinner; little scraps of blue sky showed through. The Superintendent could feel some shift in the weather, although he could not figure out just what was happening. But the end of the storm would come with a sharply rising barometer and a wind-shift into the north, or northwest at least. And now his barometer stayed low, and the wind had veered only from south to west.

  This wind had been growing stronger all morning. By noon it was a gale. The rotaries had been throwing snow over the windrows since Sunday, and now the wind seemed to pick up all this snow on the windward side, and blow it back. The snow-walls on both sides of the roadway were six, or eight, or ten feet high by now. Across the top the wind swept unhindered, but within the shelter of the walls it swirled and eddied and dropped the snow which it was blowing along. From the crest of the windward side the snow blew out sometimes until it looked like a snow-banner from a mountain peak, and at the foot of this wall the drifts built out so fast that you could stand and watch them grow. A rotary would go through leaving a clean track behind it, and before the rotary was out of sight, six inches of snow might have drifted across the road.

  So far during the storm the plows had kept a two-lane highway open, but now the snow blew in faster than the rotaries could move along to throw it out, and after each push-plow the cleared passageway was narrower than it had been the time before. By eleven in the morning the Superintendent realized that he was going to have a real struggle to keep the road open at all. He mapped out his campaign.

  He gave orders. At the Lake and at Baxter his men swung the long steel gates across the highway, and neither truck nor car went through without chains on. At Baxter the drivers protested in plenty; Baxter was sheltered in a thick pine forest, and the wind did not seem strong; not much snow was falling. People never realized that conditions higher up might be different, and might have grown worse while conditions lower down were growing better. But all their protesting made no difference; they went ahead with chains, or not at all.

  Next, the Superintendent checked over mentally the location of all his plows. For the last forty-eight hours they had worked continuously; many of them had not been under shelter in that time; they took gasoline and oil from the service truck. There were six rotaries and nine push-plows for about thirty miles of highway, and from long experience the Superintendent, even without the aid of radio, knew very nearly where each one was at a given moment. The location of the push-plows was not so important, for they moved at twenty or thirty miles an hour, and could soon get anywhere they were needed. But a working rotary moved at only a half mile an hour, and to shift it to some other spot meant that it would be out of action for a while, at a time when it was most needed.

  From the wind-direction the Superintendent knew that the problem in the next few hours would be the five miles just west of the summit. One rotary was on the east face of the pass and would have to stay there; two others were similarly pinned to the lower fifteen miles of the west slope; that left him only three for the real fight and two of those were not well placed. By radio he ordered one of them to turn around and start working back on the opposite side of the road; the other one was coming the right direction already.

  Closing his eyes a moment, the Superintendent figured the future positions of all the plows—at twelve, one, and two o’clock, which stretches of road would then be freshly cleared, which ones would be drifted beyond the power of the push-plows. He knew that by one o’clock three miles of the road near Fox Farm would be next to impassable. He mentally tried various rearrangements of his plows, but there was always a bottle-neck somewhere or other. And all his figurings assumed that the wind got neither worse nor better, that his operators made no bad errors, that his machines did not break down, and that no accident blocked the road and hindered the work of the plows.

  The Superintendent sighed. To lose his road was to lose his honor. Already he realized that the road was half-lost, but by taking the cars through in convoys he might prevent its actual closing. At such a moment he felt like jumping into his car and dashing through the storm to exhort his men to greater efforts. But that course would have been foolish; the machines, not the men, were doing the work, and the rotaries had already been driven as hard as they could be forced. Instead, he went into the radio room.

  It was a quiet warm little place where a man was not even conscious of the storm outside. The lights glowed on the instrument-panel. In a calm voice he talked with the gate-keeper at Baxter—stop all trucks with trailers, tell people they’ll have to go through in convoy probably. He gave the same orders to the gate-keeper at the Lake. He organized the convoy. With the present wind the east face of the Pass was a leeward exposure and could probably be kept two lanes wide; so the one end of the convoy could be at the summit. He placed the other end a little below Fox Farm.

  He grabbed some dinner, and then it was one o’clock. Over the radio he talked to two of his rotaries. Things were pretty bad, they said. Except just behind a plow the passageway was scarcely more than one-car width, and cars meeting had a hard time to pass.

  The Superintendent went down to the garage. “G
et ready to start convoying,” he ordered. Then he jumped into his own car, and drove out down the road into the storm. He had to have a look at things for himself. He came to the first rotary. It was faced downhill, on the windward side of the road. To throw into the wind would mean that much of the snow blew back immediately and so the great parabola of snow was arched right over the highway. But the angle was too low, and some of the snow was not clearing the wall on the leeward side. The Superintendent jumped out and yelled orders; the operator raised the angle.

  Beyond the rotary the road was drifted. Even in the narrow center lane the snow was here and there eight inches deep. The Superintendent pulled aside to let an approaching car pass him. The car stalled and stopped. “He’s stuck!” thought the Superintendent, half in panic. But the car had an Idaho license, and the driver must have been experienced in the mountains. He backed out, shoved in again as far as he could, backed out again, without even stalling his engine, and then pushed through the drift and went on. The Superintendent waved enthusiastically out the window; most drivers would have stuck right there and jammed the road. But the incident settled his mind about the need of convoying.

  About one-thirty the first convoy started through. The orange-colored highway truck led it down from the summit. Following in its tire-tracks came a dozen cars, three trucks and a bus. Another highway car followed to be sure everyone got through safely. By no stretch of imagination could anyone say there was a two-lane passageway; in places the question was whether there was a passageway at all. As usual, some of the drivers were nervous and frightened; the Superintendent always wondered why such people ever tried the Pass in winter; perhaps they didn’t try it more than once. But actually everyone was safer than in fine weather, for in the convoy even the reckless drivers had to go slowly and the high snow-walls on either side made it impossible for anyone to drive off the road. All you could do was merely to follow the car ahead of you, and after a while you came through and the convoy was broken up. Beyond the ends of the convoy the road was still bad, but it was two lanes wide in most places.

  About three o’clock the situation began to improve. The wind fell off a little, and besides, by this time the wind had already blown into the road most of the loose snow which lay readily at hand to windward. Also at this time the Superintendent was able to have three rotaries converge on the worst stretch of road.

  First he ordered the convoy cut down to three miles, and then to two. Finally, at four-thirty he stopped convoying altogether, and gave orders to the gate-keepers to let the trucks with trailers start coming through. There was still a chance that one of these might jack-knife and block the road, but the Superintendent liked to feel that the road was entirely open.

  By five o’clock he was sure that things were in hand. More snow was falling again, but the wind had eased off considerably and was shifting back into the south. It had been a close call, but he hadn’t exactly lost the road, even though convoying was the next thing to it. If he had to close the gates for a while after midnight to get a chance to clean the road up, that hardly counted either, for during those hours there was scarcely any traffic. And tomorrow would be another day, most likely with an entirely different problem.

  12

  From every river and creek in the great horseshoe of mountains about the Sacramento Valley the water was pouring out. Foot by foot the level rose at the gauges.

  From the lowest parts of the by-pass lands men herded out the cattle and the sheep, and drove them to pastures a little higher, close to the levees which formed the boundaries of the by-passes. The steers sloshed through the soppy ground, bawling now and then. The ewes were draggled and heavy with rain. The lambs trotted uncertainly, stopping and starting; they bleated nervously.

  In every river town came a stirring of excitement; people went out on the bridges and stood there in the rain, watching the brown water flow and the bits of driftwood slide by. “Nineteen-point-three,” someone would read, looking at the gauge. “She’s risen more’n a foot since noon.”

  That afternoon the water at Colusa bridge rose to an even twenty on the gauge, and then quietly began to spill over the long crest of Colusa Weir into Butte Basin, and thence flow into Sutter By-Pass. The water topped Tisdale Weir next, and then Moulton. On the other side of the Valley, gauge-readings were rising rapidly on the Feather River and its tributaries, the Yuba and the Bear. At Vernon where the Feather flowed into the Sacramento, the great stretch of Fremont Weir—nearly two miles long—offered passageway for the combined rivers into Yolo By-Pass. In the early darkness the brown water rose to the concrete lip of the weir and flowed across into the wide plain between the levees.

  At Sacramento the gauge-reading was as yet just under twenty. There the American was pouring its flood into the main stream. As yet its outflow had moved down the channel of the Sacramento between the levees without preventing the waters of the upper rivers from following the same course. As a result, water had not yet begun to flow over the wicket-tops of Sacramento Weir, four miles up-stream from the city. But the level at the gauge was steadily rising.

  The General had stayed in the office later than previously. He only sighed when the phone rang again, and his secretary said, “Long-distance.” It was one of the big asparagus growers in the delta country; his thousands of rich acres lay behind low levees which he was legally restrained from raising.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said the General. “Up to this morning I would have said you were safe, but the Weather Bureau thinks we may get a lot of rain tomorrow. We have some leeway left even so, and a good deal depends on just how the rain hits.”

  “You won’t open those gates any sooner than you need to, will you?”

  The General had been a military man for many years, and he bridled at the implication of the question.

  “Look here,” he snapped. “I’ll order those wickets opened exactly when I think is the right time, and no down-stream rancher and no up-stream Chamber of Commerce will tell me when is the right time either.”

  The General accepted an apology and hung up.

  13

  “We’ve been having a pretty easy time of it,” said the L. D. to his assistant. “No break on any big line except that one up by French Bar. Of course we aren’t through with it yet. Anyway, we’re going to have something to fill the reservoirs with, next summer. The company ought to be able to pay its dividends.”

  •

  “There’s a big lot of tropical air moving in some time tomorrow,” said the Chief Service Officer of Air-Lines. “That means heavy rains, but pretty quiet conditions generally. We ought to have a fairly good day.”

  14

  Before midnight the Transcontinental Streamliner began to pull out of the station at Chicago. Its departure, like the sailing of an ocean-liner, mingled festivity and solemnity. On the platform a woman dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, and near her an after-theater party muffled in evening wraps waved gayly at a corsaged debutante who waved back through the window of her drawing-room. Even inside the shelter of the train-shed the cold was bitter.

  The streamliner clicked along over the switches of the yard at a leisurely pace. Two young men were sitting in the lounge-car. One of them was reading a pamphlet which described the train, and was commenting upon it.

  “The mildest thing the publicity-men can say about this train is ‘a miracle of modern engineering and art.’ From there they work up. ‘And truly the train may stand for a symbol of what is best in modern civilization—tough steel, aluminum alloys, resplendent chromium, satiny copper, crimson leather, shining glass—all shaped into a creation for safety and speed, power and comfort—a thing of beauty!’ Whoever wrote that passage didn’t think restraint a virtue.”

  Across half a continent the tracks stretched out ahead. Through the cold sheen of the winter moonlight the streamliner would cross the snow-covered plains of Illinois and Iowa. It would speed through the long r
eaches of Nebraska during the forenoon, and give afternoon and early evening to Wyoming. Less than twenty-four hours upon the way it would click down Echo Canyon, fifteen hundred miles from Chicago. Before the second night was ended it would cross Utah and Nevada. Daybreak would find it climbing the Sierra wall into California; at noon it was scheduled to end its run, and halt at the shore of San Francisco Bay—twenty-two hundred miles in forty hours.

  Over all those miles of track the streamliner had privilege and right of way. Freights, locals, and working-equipment took the sidings. The green lights glowed; the semaphores signaled open track. Dispatchers sent the streamliner through; trackwalkers patroled ahead of it; snow-plows cleared the way. The premier train of the run must not be halted.

  Already the city was behind. The train had gathered speed. Now it whistled for a crossing.

  The deep note sounded far through the moonlight—like the sudden mysterious bay of some great hound, unearthly and night-running. Here and there some villager lying awake in bed heard it and turned to look at his clock. “The streamliner,” he thought. “On time!” The train rushed onward through the night.

  15

  Over all the Valley rain was falling—on plowed land and stubble, on pasture and fallow and orchard. It fell on the black soil and the red soil, on the loam, the clay, the adobe, on the silt of the bottom-lands and the peat-earth of the delta.

  It poured upon the mile-wide fields of new wheat and barley. It turned the alfalfa a brighter green. It glistened upon the gray leaves of the olive-trees, and made darker the dark green of the orange-trees. It wet the up-turned, delicate branches of the leafless peaches and plums and almonds, and the stiff rods of the cherries and the pears; it wet the myriad stubby branches of the figs—rigid, like gnarled fingers. It wet alike the wide-spreading walnut trees and the close-pruned grape-vines.

  Against all the cities of the plain the storm was beating—Oroville of the olives; Marysville of the peaches; and Colusa of the rice and barley; river-girt, high-domed Sacramento; Stockton, where the ocean-steamers dock far within the wide-reaching plain; Lodi of the grapes; Corcoran of the wheat; Fresno of the figs and raisins; Porterville of the oranges; Tulare of the cotton. Over them all was rain.