by Al Roker
In the upper story of Daisy Thorne’s apartment in Lucas Terrace, the crowd of neighbors was now packed into the parlor. Evening was falling, and something was bumping the floorboards from underneath. Daisy realized with horror that it was the first-floor furniture, bobbing in the water down there.
Then came the shocking arrival of still more neighbors. Not from below, this time, and not from down the street—that could never happen now—but from upstairs, on the third floor of a nearby section of the same apartment house.
The most surprising fact about this arrival was that these neighbors got into the Thorne apartment at all. They’d been in the adjacent section of the building. It was an elegant feature of the Lucas Terrace Apartments that each section had its own entrance, with no doors offering communication among them. With the buildings’ sections cut off from one another, how had these escapees possibly managed to arrive at the Thornes’ door?
Necessity, luck, and brains. This group too had been seeking refuge on the second floor of a two-story apartment in that adjacent section; above them was a third-floor apartment. Mrs. McCauley, the woman who had been painting the romantic, russet-haired nymph with Daisy Thorne as her model, was there with a number of other women; the painter’s husband, J. P. McCauley, was there too. And he was paraplegic.
They’d huddled there as a group, hearing a rumble, then a crashing splash. Part of the building’s lower wall had failed. The sea had taken it down.
That meant the whole facade and wall on that side of the apartment building would soon go. They would be swept out with it into the surf. They had to leave.
At first, they ascended. They found their way up the public stairs. They checked the door of the third-story apartment above. It had been vacated and left unlocked. They went in.
Still, they remained on the side of the building that was collapsing. Being up here wouldn’t save them. Somehow they had to get to the other section of the building.
In the apartment, they found an ironing board. They pushed open the door to the third-floor porch. Ducking the sheets of rain that swept across the sea below—that sea, which now hid their building’s first floor—they used the ironing board as a plank. It spanned the wet, open air between this upper porch and the upper porch of the apartment above the Thornes’, on the other side of the building.
In raging wind and rain, the women carried the paralyzed man across the ironing board. They all gained the other porch and entered the empty apartment there. They left it and quickly went down the stairs to the second story. There they knocked on the Thornes’ second-floor door and were welcomed in.
But despite the astonishing resourcefulness of the group’s self-rescue, the news they were bringing to the crowd sheltering on the Thornes’ second floor was terrible. If one side of Lucas Terrace was collapsing into the counterpunching ebb and flow of the surf, the rest of the building must soon follow. There was nowhere left to go.
The furniture below was still banging the floor. Soon the furniture would stop banging. It would be pressed, with gigantic force, harder and harder against the second-floor joists. The floor wouldn’t stand it long.
Daisy had been planning big changes like a wedding, an end to her employment, and a move to Houston. Now, inside and out, her house was falling into a raging sea. She was sure she’d be going with it.
In the north-south hallway of the school, Ed and Annie McCullough and their families arose from the crowded floor, trying to get out of the rising waters where they’d been leaning against a wall, when lightning struck the building’s chimney. Then came a long crash.
Annie froze. She turned to look back at where she’d been sitting.
The flue had collapsed without warning and brought down the entire hallway brick wall. Fifteen people were killed instantly, buried in the blink of an eye under a mountain of debris.
Annie stared in disbelief. Seconds before, she’d been sitting there too, right beside people who were now only buried corpses.
In the Howth attic, the family crouched together. Marie’s brother knelt beside the new mother and prayed for her life. Gulf waves began smashing repeatedly against the attic window.
The old doctor was busy pushing an old cot against that window. He held it with all his strength. He was trying to support the window and keep the sea out, hoping he might just outlast the peak of the storm.
“Papa,” his daughter called from her mattress. “Are we going to die?”
He reassured her: “No, daughter. It’s almost over now.”
But Howth felt strongly that they all had but a few minutes to live. He knelt by his wife and took her in his arms.
“Good-bye, darling,” he said. “We will meet in heaven.”
The doctor meanwhile must have seen his own doom coming. He shouted a final instruction. “Stay with the house as long as there’s a piece of it!” he yelled. “If she stands this five minutes, it will all be over!”
The sea crashed through the attic window. The doctor disappeared. Howth was thrown by the blast away from his wife and baby and was underwater, plunged below the churning surface.
He knew it was over. He actively tried to make the end come quickly. Clarence Howth opened his mouth. He sucked in as much water as he could.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .”
Daisy Thorne listened to her mother read aloud from the family Bible. The huddled crowd in the apartment listened over the roar and scream of the wind, seeking solace in the ancient words of the psalm. The floating furniture from downstairs continued to bob and bang on the floorboards.
Mrs. Thorne reached the end of the psalm: “Surely I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” The people began praying silently. Outside, waves began smashing against the second-story windows. The whole building was almost underwater.
Then a crash, startling everybody. The entire adjacent section of the building had fallen into the gulf.
In Mrs. Thorne’s bedroom, Mr. McCauley, the paraplegic, was lying on the bed, his wife beside him. The crowd went into the bedroom and deliberated desperately. Daisy’s bedroom, facing away from the gulf, seemed the safest place now. The crowd pressed that way.
But Mr. McCauley didn’t want to move. His wife stayed beside him.
The crowd pushed into Daisy’s room, filling it to the walls. At that moment, an adjacent public hall collapsed, sending bricks crashing through the room’s windows, breaking the glass. Daisy ran to her mother’s room to get pillows: she hoped to use them to protect her mother and aunt from flying glass and brick. She pleaded with the McCauleys to move from that room. They would not.
As Daisy ran back to the people in her own room, the parlor wall fell. She was looking straight out at the crashing water.
There wasn’t much building left. Now big timbers crashed into the only wing that—other than the stack with Daisy’s room—remained of the sturdy Lucas Terrace building. Through the broken panes in her room, Daisy looked across to see that entire wing of the house fall. The young woman had the fleeting impression that it exactly resembled a house of cards.
Then Mrs. Thorne’s bedroom fell into the water. Both of the McCauleys were swept, together, straight into the churning waves.
Arnold Wolfram’s family had begged him not to return to work after lunch. The storm had already been raging then, the streets filling with water. But Arnold, still stubborn, had felt he was needed at the store, so he’d gone all the way back uptown, to the store at Twenty-Third Street and the Strand, twenty blocks away from home—despite the fact that streetcars had stopped running, and the only way home would surely be on foot. The former ranch hand, now such a staid salesman and bookkeeper for a grocer, was fearless.
And now he doubted he would ever see his family again.
He’d finally realized, by early afternoon, that this rain was a true deluge, that the whole city must be in serious danger. He’d raced to close up the grocery store. He’d started into the streets, where the water was already risin
g quickly. He could see it filling the gutters and rising toward the sidewalk.
Arnold was carrying a package containing a new pair of shoes, bought that day. And now, as he tried to make the twenty blocks back to his family, he grasped for the first time just how serious the situation was.
It wasn’t just rising water. As Arnold waded slowly, alone, against that rising current, he saw that he was in danger from above. Roof tiles had begun flying through the darkening air. Big pieces of glass windowpane were careening by: they turned on their jagged angles at high speed.
Arnold ducked. He was sure he’d be knocked unconscious or decapitated at any moment. He’d never seen anything like this wind-driven barrage.
He stepped up into the shelter of a doorway, and from the package he pulled his new shoes. He threw the packaging into the raging stream. Using the laces, he tied the shoes to his head.
Now at least he had a helmet. Turning into the wind again, he resumed his tortuous wading.
That’s when he saw the child. Down in the rushing water a boy, unable to stand, had been swept along the streets from somewhere and was now, Arnold saw, spiraling strangely in place, around and around in the water. Unable to get up or swim away, the boy seemed stuck in a rapid circular motion.
Arnold realized what was going on. The kid was circling a deep storm drain. He was being sucked into the drain’s vortex. Soon the kid would be pulled, helpless, all the way underwater.
As fast as he could, Arnold splashed awkwardly over to the boy. Just as he arrived, the boy seemed about to go under for good, but Arnold grabbed for his body. He got a grip. He yanked, breaking the vortex.
Arnold pulled the boy out of the drain and into the deep stream. There at least the boy could stand up.
And now Arnold recognized this kid: a Western Union messenger, about ten years old, who lived near the Wolframs. Then and there, Arnold resolved not only to get home himself but to get this boy safely into the Wolfram house as well. Over the howl of the wind, he shouted reassurance.
And he told the kid to take off his shoes. There in the deep, flowing streets, sheltering as well as possible against the rain and wind, the messenger boy did as instructed, and Arnold tied the shoes to the kid’s head, just as he’d done with his own. Now they both had some protection from flying objects.
Together, they turned into the drenching wind. Arnold and the boy began their fight to get to the Wolfram home.
Sister Elizabeth Ryan finally made it back to St. Mary’s Orphanage on the beach past the west end of town. The maintenance men that Mother Superior Camillus Tracy had sent to find the missing nun made it back too. Sister Elizabeth had been at St. Mary’s Infirmary in town, collecting supplies for the orphanage. Having gathered groceries and other supplies in her wagon, she’d been ready to return, but Mother Gabriel, head of the infirmary, had been watching the weather and was concerned.
That was late in the morning, when some people were still treating the storm as a lark. Yet Mother Gabriel suspected it might be unsafe for Sister Elizabeth to travel alone by wagon all the way out to the westward beach. She suggested that Sister Elizabeth wait out the storm at the infirmary here in town.
If she did that, Sister Elizabeth objected, the children would get no dinner. She was needed at the orphanage.
She declined Mother Gabriel’s offer. When the wind started shaking down bathhouses and telegraph poles, and the tide was starting to flood the streets, Sister Elizabeth was driving her wagon westward out of town.
And she did make it. While the orphanage was right on the beach, just past the high-tide line, and directly facing the gulf, its two buildings were brick and stone. It was a tall, imposing, two-part edifice that suggested nothing if not stability. A high wall of sand dunes seemed to protect the two-story structures from the gulf. Salt cedar trees grew in the dunes, screening the orphanage. The ten sisters had long been making those building at once a refuge and a home for the ninety-three children who lived there.
But by the time Sister Elizabeth returned, the orphanage was anything but a refuge.
The dunes had quickly been eroded by that tide rising higher, against the north wind, than anyone had believed possible. The salt cedar trees, shallowly rooted in the dunes, collapsed within minutes. Like every other building on or near the beach—just like Daisy Thorne’s building, Lucas Terrace, on the opposite end of town—St. Mary’s Orphanage was very quickly surrounded by crashing surf. By nightfall, the surf was crashing against the second-story windows.
Using lamps and candles, Mother Camillus, Sister Elizabeth, and the others had gathered all of the children on the second floor of the newer building, the girls’ dormitory, farther from what had once been beach and was now raging gulf. Mother Camillus feared the worst. The older building would collapse first; then would come the building they were all in. Her only thought was to keep the children as calm and unafraid as long as possible, and keep trying to save them.
She led the children and the other sisters in song. They sang “Queen of the Waves.” It’s a folk hymn, originally sung by French sailors. The hymn asks the Virgin Mary for protection from storms at sea, and its lyrics—which the orphans and nuns of Galveston sang in English translation—described their position exactly:
See how the waters with tumultuous motion
Rise up and foam without a pause or rest. . . .
Help, then sweet Queen, in our exceeding danger,
By thy seven griefs, in pity Lady save;
Think of the Babe that slept within the manger
And help us now, dear Lady of the Wave.
As the children’s voices rose against the booming surf and screaming wind, Mother Camillus’s fears for the front building came to pass. They all heard the crash. The boys’ dormitory had fallen.
Quickly she had the other sisters and the maintenance men tie the smaller children together with clothesline in groups of six or eight. Each group was tethered to one of the adults. The Mother Superior’s hope was that in a deluge, the adults would be able to swim, and the children would not be lost.
And now, as the children kept singing, it happened. The water and wind attacked the second building. It broke glass windows and undermined the floors. Then the roof fell.
The entire building toppled into the wild waters, just as the first building had. Mother Camillus, Sister Elizabeth, the maintenance men, and all of the orphans and other nuns, tied and untied, were washed into the sea.
Arnold Wolfram and his ten-year-old companion, the Western Union boy, were still fighting their way through waters rising so high as to become nearly impassable. Arnold was holding the kid’s hand tightly.
And yet, shouting over the gale, he’d also made the youth understand that if one of them fell, they must let go, not bring one another down. The boy understood.
They had reached Broadway. That street, hours earlier a lovely esplanade on high ground, was invisible now, a raging sea.
They let go of each other. They swam down the street. Wires and poles were snapping, collapsing, flying. Yet somehow they made it across and grabbed the cast-iron fence of what had been a garden, outside the Galveston Artillery Club.
Standing on sidewalk again, with water now up to the boy’s armpits, they worked their way slowly along the fence, holding fast to each rail.
At the corner, they came upon a man clinging to the fence. He was fading fast, exhausted; his grip on the fence was weakening.
Arnold and the boy moved as quickly as they could along the fence toward the man, thinking they could help. But before they got near enough, his grip failed. While they held to the fence and watched helplessly, the water swept him out of sight.
Arnold Wolfram was sure he and the boy were doomed too. But there was nothing to do but keep going.
Upstairs at Cassie Bristol’s boardinghouse it was dark now. As little Louise and her family waited there, they felt the whole house shaking terribly, despite the holes Cassie had chopped in the ground floor.
Th
e family wanted light. Through the rain-beaten windows, they could see dim lights in other upper rooms. People were using kerosene lanterns to bring some comfort to their places of terrified retreat.
But Cassie would not use a kerosene lamp. The awful shaking of the house might knock it over and set the place on fire.
Ever resourceful, instead she put a drum of lard, rescued from the kitchen, in the center of the room. She turned it into a lamp by plunging a stick into the lard, draping a piece of lard-soaked cloth over the stick, and lighting it.
The cloth burned slowly, consuming fat. Louise and her family, waiting in terror as their house swayed and water rose to the windows, at least had a mellow, stable light.
Then Louise’s older sister Lois let out a scream.
What Lois was pointing out, to Louise and the rest of the family, was truly terrifying: the entire wall of their room was moving in and out with each blast of wind. The wall separated from the ceiling; it drifted outward far enough to give a full view of the rainy night sky. Thick clouds fled across the face of the moon.
Then the wall swung slowly back to join the ceiling and close off the view.
The room was falling apart. This called for evacuation, Cassie decided. The plan, as she delivered it quickly to her children, was this: she couldn’t swim, but her sons were good swimmers. They could swim across while pulling a mattress; Louise, Lois, and Cassie would hold onto the mattress and use it as a float.
It was a desperate plan. Their destination would be a neighbor’s house, still standing across the street—now ocean—with light showing on the second floor.
They got the mattress and readied themselves. When the wall left the ceiling again, offering them a way out, Cassie shouted, “Let’s go now!”
But they all flinched when faced with the reality of leaving the house and embarking on the raging dark water. The sea was wild, and heavy objects shot randomly out of it. Overhead the sky was full of flying debris.
The wall closed again. They’d missed their chance. The house boomed and shook.
Then the wall opened, and Cassie shouted the same instruction. But Lois said “Wait!” Failing again to make their move, Louise and her family crouched, poised to flee but fearing to flee, in the room with a wall that seemed about to float away into the sea.
