Storm

by George R. Stewart

  A truck was coming up from the west. It was laboring heavily, and he heard the engine pounding long before he made out the headlights, dim and yellow. The truck was plastered with snow, and even as it passed along the road thirty feet away, its outlines were indistinct and obscure. He could see, however, that it was a big van; the snow was piled high on its flat roof. No wonder she’s laboring, thought the Superintendent; she’s got maybe a ton of snow there on top.

  The day-foreman was just behind the truck, and drove into the Station. His car looked like a moving snow-bank. The wipers were barely keeping two little sectors clear on the windshield; the chains were so clogged with snow that they hardly clicked on the concrete floor. One of the garage-men pulled up a hot-water hose, and began to wash the snow off in preparation for the next trip out.

  The foreman walked across toward the Superintendent, his hob-nails scratching on the concrete. He had been out in the drifts wading around at the dozens of little matters which a foreman had to look to, and he was almost as snowy as his car. He took off his fur cap, and knocked the snow from it.

  “Heavy today,” he said. “Soda Springs says we’ve had over five feet of snow during the storm up to this morning, and there must have been a good foot since then anyway.”

  “Yes, it’s a pretty bad storm,” said the Superintendent.

  The foreman grinned. “About the first time I ever heard you admit that much!”

  “I’ve seen a lot of storms,” said the Superintendent shortly. “Much traffic?”

  “Just the ones that have to go through, and a few fools who don’t know what they’re gettin’ into. Tomorrow afternoon the skiers will start comin’, and then we’ll have traffic troubles again.”

  From overhead came the sound of a plane.

  “You wouldn’t think those things would be running today,” said the foreman. “But they’ve been going over regular as clockwork.”

  “Maybe they’re above it all. It may be calmer up there than it is here.”

  “I hope it is—for those planes!”

  The foreman stood a moment, scratching on the concrete with the hob-nails of his left boot.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got to see about takin’ out some extra snow-stakes. There’s gettin’ to be a lot of places where the old ones are hardly showin’ above the snow any more, and we’ll have to splice new ones on their tops.”

  The foreman went off for the snow-stakes. The Superintendent got into his car, and drove down the east slope of the Pass to see how things looked.

  The east face was to leeward, but around Windy Point was the usual swirling blizzard. Just below the Point he met a rotary. It was working up-grade on the inside of the road against the rock-wall, and was throwing its arc of snow across the highway and down the steep slope beyond. As he drew near, the rotary stopped throwing to let him drive by; he tooted lightly in salutation. He noted that the rotary was working heavily in very deep snow, over the top of the cutter-bar. A snow-nose must have just fallen off.

  Around the Horse-shoe it was like a quiet nook, and the snow fell almost perpendicularly. At Rocky Point there was more wind again. Peering out through the windshield, the Superintendent could scarcely see anything, but by signs more than actual sight he knew that the snow-noses were many and were building far out. He could never exactly figure any logic to the ways of drifting snow. Against a telephone pole the snow always built out on the windward side. But at the crest of a cliff and along a cut in the road, it built out on the lee side. Farther and farther it would reach into space until the big blunt nose hung six or eight feet in the clear over the highway. Then eventually it grew too heavy and dropped, not doing any harm except to make a lot of mess for the plows to clean up. Some time, he supposed, a snow-nose would light on top of a car. Even so, it would probably not hurt anything, but it would certainly surprise the people in the car, and half scare them to death.

  Below Rocky Point he met another rotary, also working up-grade on the inside. It seemed too close to the first one, but probably the operator was following orders from the foreman. Passing, the Superintendent leaned out, and caught a glimpse of big Peters in the rotary’s cab.

  He drove to the gates at the lake. Even at this slight distance to the east of the Sierra the snowfall was noticeably lighter. Beyond this point the rotaries were only needed occasionally, and a few miles farther was the open sage-brush country of Nevada which got hardly any snow at all.

  As usual some drivers had come to this point without chains. A tow-car from a Truckee garage was standing by, like a vulture, waiting for people to get into trouble. The garage-man was putting chains on one car, but around another car two men were working unskillfully in the snow while a woman now and then lowered the window-glass far enough to yell advice at them.

  The Superintendent drove up the highway again. A big snow-nose had fallen, but it had left one lane still open. He passed the rotary, and tooted to Peters and Swenson. Just then he saw a tire-chain lying in the road; he stopped the car, and got out to pick up the chain so that it wouldn’t get tangled up with the rotary.

  Then—as he was walking back to his car—he heard it! It was unmistakable. He started to run for his car. The strange low hissing noise rose with a crescendo in pitch and intensity. Through the falling snow he could see nothing. Then as he ran, the whole roadway shook with some sudden impact; the hissing changed to a thudding. Like an advancing wave of water, a wave of snow came running along the highway. It pinned him against the side of his car, half-knocking his breath out.

  In the next instant he found himself standing in three feet of snow. There was sudden quiet.

  Pinned against the car, the Superintendent looked quickly to his right up the road; some twenty feet farther on, the wave of snow had come to a halt; for a moment with all the pressure of the mass behind, it had flowed madly, like a torrent of water; now it was only inert snow. He glanced hurriedly to his left, down the road. Where Peters and Swenson had been working with the rotary was now only a long unbroken slope of snow. The Superintendent wormed himself about, and got free. He saw that the snow behind his car was piled up too high for him to wallow through.

  “Hey!” he shouted, cupping his hands in front of his mouth. “Peters! Swenson!”

  He waited but there was no answer. Well, there was probably no need to worry. Things were bad, but they were most likely not nearly as bad as they looked. The road was not carried away. The slide had merely filled the roadway with snow, and swept on. On the outside edge of the road, the snow would be only a few feet deep; on the inside the depth might reach forty feet. Somewhere within that mass of snow was the rotary.

  But the tough steel would withstand much more pressure than forty feet of snow could exert. Peters and Swenson were this moment undoubtedly still sitting inside the cab—white-faced probably, considerably surprised at their sudden entombment, perhaps still a little scared, but safe. Peters would already have had presence of mind enough to turn off the engine and prevent them from being asphyxiated. In a moment they would collect themselves enough to begin discussing whether they would try to dig themselves out, or merely sit tight until they were rescued.

  Thinking of how flabbergasted Peters and Swenson would be made the Superintendent realize that he himself was almost as much appalled. And yet these great slides from the heights could be expected a few times during every hard winter; he had just never happened previously to be present during the few seconds when one occurred; he had been within earshot often enough.

  Collecting himself, he saw that his car was hopelessly buried in three feet of snow. He floundered ahead out of the deep snow, and then set out, half-running, up the load toward the next rotary. As he went, he already was planning. Lucky, he thought, this other rotary was so close; it could be working on that slide in ten minutes after he got to it. In three hours the road might be open again. He had other luck too. He met a car coming do
wn, flagged it, told the driver of the snow-slide, turned him around, and saved ten minutes walking.

  Right at Windy Point was the rotary. With a curt thank-you to the driver, the Superintendent jumped out, and then he realized that the rotary was not working. The operator and the swamper were peering beneath it from behind.

  “Anything wrong?” shouted the Superintendent, with a sudden feeling of depression.

  “We were gunning her hard into that big drift,” said the operator in half-apology. “An axle went.”

  The Superintendent stopped in his tracks, figuring hard. One rotary buried, and another temporarily out. Three hours, six hours, eight hours. He would order out the whole night shift, and bring up another rotary. Eight hours. But if he threw all his remaining power against the snow-slide, the rest of the road would become impassable. Ten hours, then. Ten, or twelve.

  His depression deepened to blackness. For three or four hours he could simply hold traffic at the gates; it would be merely a block, not a closed road. But twelve hours—that would even be in the papers. This rotary had been running for four days steadily; that was the chief difficulty. In the end, machines were like men; you could drive them just so hard and so long before they went to pieces.

  But in this fight there was no surrender. He got the day-foreman on the radio and gave his orders. Rout out the night shift. Send down every man you can spare from the garage, even the mechanics. Order up another rotary. Stop traffic. Get into touch with the Highway Patrol. Call headquarters in Sacramento.

  The operator and the swamper were already at work under the rotary. But they would not get far until the mechanics came down from the garage, and even then the process would be slow. At Windy Point the snow blew into your eyes faster than you could blink it out.

  The Superintendent hurried down the road again toward the slide. He told himself that he ought to be on the spot, mapping the attack; really it was just that he wanted to be doing something.

  He could hardly see his own car. The snow had almost drifted into a mound over it. The track he had made in floundering out was obscured. He waded in, and with some difficulty got the shovel which he always carried in the back of his car.

  In his excitement and his desire to be doing something, he even threw a few shovelfuls. Then he stopped, feeling foolish and almost embarrassed. He got back into the car, and sat there.

  The Superintendent was thinking back some years to the time when he had been in high school. One teacher had made him read a lot of poetry, and he had always had a sneaking liking for the stuff, although he would never have confessed to it to the other boys. The trouble was that things people did in poems were so often silly, even though the words were fine.

  There was one poem he remembered now, while he sat in his car waiting for a rotary to come up. It was about a man who went through a lot of terrifying experiences and finally came to some place where he saw a tower, and just then he was going to be overwhelmed by some great mysterious power, far too big to fight against. Then the man got out a little horn, and blew defiance against the great mysterious power. The teacher had called it a magnificent gesture, and said something about the dignity of man, but the Superintendent remembered that he had always thought it pretty undignified to go blasting into a horn in a situation like that.

  Take the way it was now. If this was a poem, he probably should get out and start shoveling snow. Would that be a magnificent gesture, or just ridiculous—in the face of a storm that covered all California? Only machines could clear that road, and he might as well settle himself and keep calm and wait for them.

  He leaned back comfortably. Stolidly he lighted a cigarette. He had a fleeting suspicion that perhaps the cigarette itself was a gesture. “Well, anyway,” he said to himself, “it’s time I was having a smoke.”

  But as he pulled in on the cigarette that feeling of deep depression came over him again. He had lost the road! The storm had been too much. It had worn down the men, and beaten even the machines.

  7

  Once the water had begun to spill over the weirs, the gauge-readings rose more slowly; but still they rose. People going out after breakfast to stand on Colusa Bridge saw the brown swirling water just a hair above twenty-one. At noon they looked, and said, “Twenty-one-point-six.” By three o’clock the water was just below twenty-two. But the levees stood up high and firm on either side; the river would have to rise seven feet more, and touch twenty-nine to reach the danger-point, and even beyond that the levees, with luck, might stand a foot or two.

  For every inch that the water rose at the gauge, another inch spilled over the weir. By mid-afternoon a depth of two feet was pouring over the quarter-mile length of Colusa Weir; that flow itself already equaled a large river. But from the other weirs also great streams poured out. Over Fremont the flow was twenty inches deep and nearly two miles wide. Peering out through rain-sluiced windows, the people in cars crossing the long viaduct on U.S. 40 looked out to see Yolo By-Pass, a mighty river three miles wide of swiftly flowing flood water.

  Sacramento gauge, close to the point where the American flowed into the main stream, stood in early afternoon at twenty-one-point-five. It was rising slowly, but as at Colusa the city would not be endangered until the water rose seven and a half feet more, and touched twenty-nine. Before that happened, the weir-gates could be opened.

  In the General’s outer office three assistants had been kept busy all day. Each had a telephone, and all three lines were busy most of the time.

  One of the assistants flipped the switch for the General’s private telephone.

  “Yes?” said the General from the inner office.

  “Folsom reports seven-point-eight, up nine-tenths in an hour. I thought you’d like to know it right away.”

  “Yes, thanks. We’re in for some trouble with the American, I think.”

  “And, General, Oroville wants you—Mr. L. D. Jackson. He wants you personally.”

  “Put him on,” said the General with resignation. He had never heard of L. D. Jackson, but felt that he had been talking to him under different names and in different towns all day.

  “Yes, General,” said the long-distance operator. “And when you’re through talking to Oroville, would you mind not hanging up? I’ve three more long-distance calls waiting for you.”

  The General talked with Mr. Jackson, giving him information and reassurance. Then he talked to Red Bluff, Redding, and some ranch-house out of Marysville. It was the same story with slight variations; each man had his worries which in his own mind loomed larger than the possible flooding of all the rest of the valley.

  Fortunately at this stage the General could usually quiet people’s fears very quickly. The water was flowing over the weirs and flooding through the by-passes on a much greater scale but with the same simplicity that water spills from one basin of a fountain into the next. Everywhere the gauges stood several feet below the critical point. With the rain still continuing, there was no telling what height the flood crest would finally reach, but as yet the tremendous capacity of the by-passes was not even severely taxed.

  So far, the damage reported had been only incidental and fortuitous. Two boys venturing out in a rowboat had lost their heads apparently, and overturned in the swirling channel; one of them had been drowned. A sudden outbreak of Stony Creek had swept away two hundred sheep! Seepage, caused probably by gophers working in the levee, was being fought near Meridian; local authorities reported the situation controlled. An incipient break in the Feather River levee had been discovered by a patrol before it had time to develop. The near-by ranchers had mobilized hastily. One of them donated some bales of hay, and these clogged the flow until a sand-bag defense could be built up.

  “Hold up any more calls for me,” said the General into his telephone. “Unless there’s an emergency; I’ve got to do some figuring and get out a forecast.”

  The American was t
he immediate problem. Reports from the mountains indicated very heavy rain was falling everywhere in that basin. Even worse, it was a warm rain and was washing off the snow-cover up to the five-thousand-foot level. Every creek and gully flowing into each of the three forks must be a-boiling. And of all the rivers the American was the most flashy; because of its steeper gradient and shorter length, its waters crested quickly, and came out with a rush. With Folsom gauge rising so rapidly, the lower country would soon feel the effects; by latest report Sacramento gauge had risen to twenty-one-point-eight.

  The General dictated: “The Feather, Yuba, and upper Sacramento Rivers are rising slowly, but gauge-readings are not excessive; flood levels are not to be expected within the next twenty-four hours. The amount of water flowing through the by-passes will increase moderately. The American River is rising rapidly, and will reach twenty-five feet at Sacramento about midnight. This will necessitate closing the main highway between Sacramento and North Sacramento, and re-routing the traffic via Jib-boom Street.”

  The General settled back in his chair and looked at his desk-clock. That statement would go out immediately, and in about twenty minutes he could expect the Committee.

  The Committee consisted of three business-men, a type of humanity for which the General as a military man had no liking. Two of them were tall and thin, but the chairman and the most aggressive was short and fat.

  “General,” he stated emphatically, “this has got to stop. When that road is closed, business in North Sacramento falls off fifty to a hundred thousand dollars each day. Sacramento clearing-house receipts fall off five hundred thousand dollars—each day!”