Storm

by George R. Stewart

  From the broad doorway of the Maintenance Station the Superintendent looked out upon the storm. He could estimate the rate of snowfall pretty accurately from the visibility; just now he could see a certain tamarack tree which was about a hundred yards away, and so he knew the storm to be of only ordinary winter intensity. About time, he decided, to order out the push-plows. The sound of a locomotive whistle came shrilly from the mountain-side, and as if it had been a signal the beacon began flashing from the rocky crag just above the pass.

  Two men of the night shift were standing in the doorway, and the Superintendent heard them laugh shortly as the beacon came on. “A lot of good that’ll do tonight,” said one of them. “No plane’ll dare fly low enough to spot it.” Then they argued whether the transcontinental had stopped flying or whether they were merely flying so high that you didn’t hear the engines.

  For luck the Superintendent himself took out the first plow. It trundled awkwardly from the Maintenance Station, its big chains chunking on the concrete floor. He swung it to the left down the westward slope, set the level of the plow-share, and was off.

  At ten miles an hour the snow merely tumbled from the end of the mould-board. But at twenty miles an hour the snow rose in a white curve like the curve of water rising from the prow of a fast motorboat. He pushed up the speed to twenty-five. The great plow with its tons of gravel for ballast held the road firmly, and the snow flew madly. The curve of white stretched out and flattened; in an arc the snow cleared the ditch and deluged little pine trees ten feet back from the pavement. Now and then dirty streaks of yellow and dark brown flashed across the clean white as the plow scooped up gravel from the shoulder.

  There was more to running a plow than to running a truck. The share must be kept at just the right height. The speed must be fast enough to throw the snow well off the road, but not so fast as to cause vibration and leave the road-surface washboarded. And always the wheels must be held just at the edge of the road. Since the end of the mould-board extended two feet beyond the wheels, this meant that when crossing fills the outer front wheel seemed to hang clear out into space, and even the experienced Superintendent had to stifle a sudden fright that he had left the road and was about to plunge down the mountain-side.

  The powerful windshield wipers clunked rhythmically. The lights shone with a yellow glare, but in the last of the twilight he could see that the visibility was still fair. It would be a wild night, but nothing which they could not handle as routine.

  13

  The CSO went to bed at ten-thirty, the day had been hard and the next day might be harder. But the rain spattered against his window, and he kept thinking of the big transcontinental plane flying east. At eleven he got up and called the airport. Yes, she was fine; reported from over Buffalo Valley, flying at three thousand under a high ceiling, good visibility. Had some icing over the hump and bad turbulence, but kept at twelve thousand and flew right through it in a few minutes. Just as well, though, we didn’t try Reno—snow squalls there, keep blanketing everything out. Elko reports ceiling at twelve thousand. No trouble ahead. Better get some sleep.

  The CSO wanted to ask how things were shaping up for tomorrow, but at the news that the transcontinental was out of the woods he felt suddenly and beautifully relaxed. “O.K., thanks,” he said, and, tumbling back into bed, went to sleep.

  14

  The sentinels of the coast did not sleep. In the darkness through the night, the lighthouses stood, flashing out their beams against the storm. Beneath their foundations the pounding waves jarred the cliffs. Wind and rain beat upon their towers. Low-flying scud veiled them in mist. Salt spray spattered windows that were two hundred feet above high tide. But still—flash, flash, darkness, flash—they sent the message through the night, and even when mist veiled the lights, the horns blared forth, and the subtle radio-beacons reached out to sea.

  (This is the roll-call of the sentinels, whose names are partly English, and partly Spanish, as hard-pressed Viscaíno named them, sighting point beyond point through the fog and rain as he sailed north, that long-ago winter when the old queen lay dying and Hamlet was a new play at the Globe.)

  Far to the north, St. George from its wave-swept reef flashed the warning seaward. Then Crescent City, Trinidad Head, and Table Bluff. High-placed and lonely, sending its beam twenty-eight miles to sea, Cape Mendocino stabbed the darkness. Blunt-nosed Punta Gorda. Then from the pure white tower Point Arena of the Sand flashed on toward where Point Reyes of the Kings stood firm on that long seaward-reaching finger of high rock above the seal-rookeries. Far at sea on the Isle of Cliffs the Farallon beam flared out; on the bar the light-ship rolled and pitched; Mile Rocks guarded the Golden Gate. Montara, Pigeon Point, Año Nuevo of the New Year.

  Santa Cruz of the Holy Cross, Point Pinos of the Pine Trees, Point Sur of the South, Piedras Blancas of the White Rocks, its tapering white tower wreathed in rain. San Luis Obispo of the Bishop-Saint. Then from its long point, across twelve miles of foaming sea, Arguello cast its light on to Conception. And beyond Conception was only here and there a shower, with the clouds resting low on the mountains and in the long channel the waves heaving.

  SEVENTH DAY

  1

  While as yet he scarce walked upright steadily, man fashioned for himself many gods—of earth and of sea, of the nether world, but (most of all) gods of the sky. Of these, sometimes he imagined gods of the farther air, high and serene, celestial in the empyrean. Sometimes they were of the middle air, rulers of the four winds, of thunder and lightning, of rain. Still again, they were demons of the lower air, malignant, haunting headland and cliff and rim-rock, pouncing in squall or sand-storm. But most often, each god had many aspects, being now the far master of the sky, now the rain-bringer, and again the spiteful demon crushing the corn-field with hail.

  Of all lands and peoples is the roll-call of the storm-gods. Zeus the cloud-gatherer, lord of lightning. Adad-Ramman, the duplex, sender to the Babylonian plain alike of nourishing rain and devastating tempest. Jupiter of the rain; Thor, the thunderer; Indra, freer of the waters. Pulugu of the Bengal sea, before whose wrath the pigmy Andamanese cower low. Kilima, Mahu, Dzakuta. Pase-Kamui of the Ainus; Asiak who rules the air above the far-off northern ice. Tlaloc of Mexico, thundering from his mountain-top.

  Man walks the earth, but is of the air. Everywhere he pays homage, not to the air itself of which he is unconscious, but to the powers which move within the air. He bows his head before wind and rain.

  And what of Jehovah? Jehovah who poured the Deluge forty days and forty nights, and then sent the rainbow, his sign and pledge! Jehovah who came as a thick cloud upon the mountain and spoke to his servant Moses through thunders and lightnings!

  2

  In that part of the western United States which the storm now dominated, a highly civilized race of men had hung so many wires upon so many poles that hardly a landscape was devoid of them. These wires served many purposes. The larger ones supported bridges, and served for trolleys and conveyors. A very great number carried electric current for power, light, telegraph, and telephone. Others served as guys, fences, aerials, and clothes-lines.

  A common quality of almost all these wires was that they were erected in the open air, wholly exposed to the atmospheric forces. Yet such was the ingenuity of these men, and the tenacity of steel and copper that even a great Pacific storm could discommode only a few of the wires.

  In the heaviest winds the wires swayed easily back and forth. Rain served only to increase their weight a little, and then dripped off harmlessly. Snow was scarcely more effective. In the higher mountains the snow clung to the wires, and frequently built up to a diameter of several inches. The wires sagged somewhat beneath this load, but sooner or later the very weight of the snow overcame its cohesive power. At that moment a small amount of snow dropped off; this sudden change caused the wire to vibrate sharply and to dislodge most of the remaining snow. Thus relieved, th
e wire swung back and forth for a few seconds, and then settled down to receive its next load.

  In one zone, however, the attack of the storm upon the wires was more serious. Between the snow of the higher mountains and the rain of the foothills lay necessarily a region of transition in which the precipitation was neither rain nor snow but something about half way between and much more clinging and tenacious than either. This half-frozen rain and half-melted snow often built up a solid sheathing, not to be shaken off of its own weight, and steadily growing heavier as the storm lasted. A catastrophic snapping of wires was prevented only by the saving circumstance that the zone was seldom more than a few miles broad and frequently shifted location as colder or warmer air blew in from the Pacific. With each shift of position the wires of any particular region had a respite and might manage to relieve themselves of their loads.

  So, although no storm passed without damage, the actual damage could usually be attributed to some pyramiding of accidents which managed to overcome the margin of safety which man’s ingenuity had established.

  •

  During the early hours of Monday morning such a critical condition existed at a point where the transmission line from French Bar Power-House ran along the side of a foothill ridge at an elevation of about three thousand feet. The line was of a kind which may be seen almost anywhere in the United States. The sturdy spruce poles were sixty feet high; each bore two well braced cross-arms, and eight wires. The three topmost wires were the heaviest and served as the three-phase high-voltage transmission line. These wires were carried upon large insulators, one at the very top of the pole, and the others at the ends of the upper cross-arm. Upon one side of the lower cross-arm, smaller insulators supported the three service wires, operating at a lower voltage and supplying current to the near-by district; the other side of this cross-arm carried the two wires of the company’s telephone.

  The conditions of the storm were such that a strong south wind, funneling through a gap, was blowing up-hill and across the wires. Several miles farther south snow was falling from the clouds. As it fell, the snow half melted; then, as it was about to reach the ground, the strongly blowing wind swept it along and carried a large part of it actually up-hill. Since rising air grows cooler, the half-melted snow was quickly chilled below freezing, and in that condition was blown across the wires. Every particle which lodged upon them froze into solid ice at the moment of coming to rest. The lower wires were somewhat protected by the pine trees growing along the edge of the right-of-way, but the upper wires took the full attack of the storm.

  Under these conditions the sheathing of ice built up rapidly. By the time it was a half foot in diameter each span of the three upper wires was supporting a ton of ice. The wires, however, were constructed about a steel core, and each was normally capable of supporting several times the weight which had as yet accumulated.

  Some days previous, however, an owl had happened to alight on one of the cross-arms. The ensuing electrocution had caused a shower of electric sparks, and had burned and weakened one of the wires.

  3

  In the orange groves of Brownsville the norther lashed the branches, and the temperature at dawn was two degrees above freezing. Men made ready their fires for the bitter, still cold which follows the ceasing of the wind, and women prayed to God and to his Son. Across the Rio Grande in the orange groves of Montemorelos wind and temperature were the same; the brown-faced men shrugged their shoulders in resignation, and women prayed to the dark Virgin of Guadelupe.

  Across the broad reach of the Gulf the storm drove on. It tossed the ships in its path—tankers of the oil ports, cotton- and banana- and coffee-boats. Over the warm waters the air grew less chill; and its lower levels, sucking up the spray from every white-cap, grew thick with moisture.

  Beyond the Gulf, in the wind’s path, lay the long crescent of the Mexican coast. “El Norte!” said the brown-faced people, and drew their serapes closer. In early morning the storm struck Vera Cruz; waves lashed the quays; spray wreathed the ancient castle of San Juan. Upon the mountain slopes by Jalapa the storm broke in torrents of rain; it tore the great leaves of the banana trees; it whipped the coffee-bushes and the gardenias. In their wattled tropical huts the people huddled shivering. Higher up, there was snow on the peaks—Orizaba, and Peiote, and Malinche.

  Through the passes—fiercer than Aztec or Spaniard—the storm poured down upon the Valley of Mexico. The wind stirred the lakes to foam; the cypresses of Chapultepec tossed wet branches; the flowers of Xochimilco were wet and sodden. Clouds covered Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl; snow was white upon Ajusco.

  But farther that way the storm could not go, for the great mountains blocked its passage. And by the swimming-pools of Cuernavaca the fair-skinned tourists lay in the hot sun, and wondered why that morning the little cloud-banners streamed off from the peaks to the north.

  Blocking the norther’s path, to the southwest lay the wall of the Mexican Cordillera; to the southeast, the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala. But between were only the low hills of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and into that gap the wind poured as into a funnel. It spent the last of its rain upon the northern slope; dry and cool it started down toward the Pacific. Descending, it warmed; it ceased to be a chilling blast from the Arctic and became almost mild. But because of the funnel, the wind was stronger. On the Pacific it met the steamers from Panama, and buried them bows-under. “Tehuantepecker!” explained the stewards. “Have to expect them this time of year.” The captains logged a ten-point gale.

  Grown moist again from the tropical ocean, the wind skirted the coast of bananas and coffee. Striking the mountains the air exploded in thunderstorms. “Chubasco!” said the Salvadoreans. Like the men farther north, the soft Nicaraguans shivered in a cold wave, although the temperature did not fall below fifty-six. “Papagayo!” said the Costa Ricans.

  At last, having penetrated to within ten degrees of the Equator, grown warm in the tropical sun, the far-sent invasion from the north felt the drag of that great current of air which belts the earth’s central zone, and turning westward mingled with the steadily blowing trade wind.

  4

  Theoretically, the J. M. knew that such things could happen. At the Institute he had even heard a visiting specialist in dynamic meteorology read a paper on the synoptic preliminaries of a polar outbreak and demonstrate mathematically the sources of energy involved. Nevertheless, when he saw the map that morning, the J. M. almost gasped. To know that all this was in the actual process of happening was very different from thinking of it as equations—and at the same time to realize that as part of the Weather Bureau he carried his share of responsibility for charting it and forecasting its progress. He felt as if the government of the air had suddenly been overwhelmed by revolution.

  In the orderly hemisphere of the text-books there was a high-pressure area over the Pole and another near the Tropic of Cancer in what were known as the “horse latitudes.” Between the two, in the temperate zone, a succession of storms moved steadily from west to east. South of the sub-tropical high pressure was low pressure again, and the trade winds blowing from northeast to southwest.

  But now, in two great tongues of cold air, the polar high pressure had broken clear through the chain of storms. It had joined with the high pressure of the horse latitudes, and even broken into the region of the trade winds.

  He kept telling himself that such an outbreak was fully in accord with meteorological theory. The regular circulation of air was (like most things on the earth) imperfect; it resulted in too much air being carried northward, so that cataclysmic polar outbreaks such as this were necessary to restore the balance. But still, to be actually in its presence was fearful.

  With pressure risen to 1050 the polar air mass centered over Fort Yukon. From it one tongue of cold air reached far south across the Pacific, and then in a long curve to the eastward joined the remnants of the old Pacific High off the Lowe
r California coast. But the greater discharge of cold air poured southward across the plains of North America and even over the Gulf of Mexico. There also it had joined the remnants of the sub-tropical high, and that air (set in motion by the northern incursion) was now blowing a gale along the Pacific coast of Central America.

  Surrounded almost entirely within the two arms of this polar outbreak, Maria was brought to a standstill off the coast. The J. M. looked at her with a fatherly feeling. First she had been an active little storm running her thousand miles a day, slipping through the air as a wave. She had matured, and with heightened winds had bodily carried the air along with her; she had broken a ship, and swept a man overboard. Then she had shrunk, and seemed to be declining. Now, caught between the two polar arms, she had become stationary, and again vast and vigorous, and in her nature more complicated than ever before.

  In fact, she was so complicated that the J. M. had to admit he did not wholly understand her. She was no longer a baby; a baby ate and slept, and was a fairly simple affair. By now Maria was more like a middle-aged person who has grown too individualized, not to say crotchety, to fit any rules. At first, she had been a storm right out of a text-book. She had had two fronts, and then only one front—just as you expected. But now, because of the complex mixing of her air and because of the mountains along the coast, she might have a dozen fronts and be developing new ones all the time. That would be the reason why the rain sometimes fell in torrents, and sometimes quit altogether for a half hour or so.

  Yes, he had a fatherly feeling, but he was no longer in a position to say “Father knows best.” The very fact that she had traveled across the Pacific and arrived off the coast in such vigorous state showed that she was not following the rules. Usually the storms which reached California were secondary developments from the storms which had formed off Asia.