Storm

by George R. Stewart

  (That the shoots of wheat and barley might stand upright, and the rice and cotton sprout in their season. That in long rows the asparagus might thrust its stalks though the peat of the delta. That the almond-blossoms might soon be like a shining white cloud on the slopes, and in the summer sun the trays of drying prunes and apricots be bright rectangles of purple and orange.)

  Five hundred miles from Red Bluff to the Grapevine, all the rich, flat land—over it all was rain.

  TENTH DAY

  1

  While men built Westminster Abbey and King Louis the Saint rode to his crusades, the cliff-cities of Mesa Verde—first civilization within the area of the United States—knew their last prosperity. For seven centuries they have lain empty, shunned by Ute and Navajo as spirit-haunted ruins of the Old People. But those centuries have meant little to earth and sun; as today, the winter storms swept down when Balcony House was new and fat babies rolled on its terrace.

  Most likely a storm made little difference in the life of those diminutive, nimble-footed people whose ancient toe-holds still pit the face of the cliffs. In the winter their corn-fields on the mesa-top needed no care; the season held off the nomad raiders who came harrying in summer. While the storm raged and ice-glaze made the cliff-paths impassable, the dwellers in Balcony House may have settled down to their quietest and happiest days. The granaries were deep with corn and beans; the spring at the back of the rock-shelter flowed (as it still flows) with pure, cool water. Their dogs lived with them, and their turkeys were penned at the back of the houses. A fire of a few sticks sufficed in the thick-walled houses and the underground club-rooms of the men. For clothing there were deer-skins and blankets of turkey feathers. The great over-hang of arched rock was a shelter from snow and wind.

  An interval for talk and laughter, for weaving, for fashioning of arrow-heads, for discussion about next year’s corn-planting, for long rituals of religion—when the storm had passed by and the ice-glaze was shattered beneath the unveiled sun, then was time enough to climb the cliffs, and go visiting to the other villages.

  But modern man cannot withdraw. He expects much more of his civilization; he has spread it far and wide until it sprawls; he has given hostages. Therefore, he must sally forth about his flocks and herds; he must look to his roads and ditches, his levees and culverts, his wires and rails. To protect his machines he must invent other machines and with them labor against the storm. The honor of the battle is now not so much to skill and courage as to flawless steel and cool bearings.

  At the end, our cities will stand like those others. In the year when Edward of England made war on Llewellyn the Welshman and Ser Marco Polo was new in the court of Kublai Khan, the rains failed; year after year, drought lay upon the mesa-land. As some think, the people began to raise a great temple to placate the gods of storm; that temple still stands unfinished. Before the twenty-four years of drought had passed, the people were gone; dry winds swirled ashes in empty courtyards.

  Whether the civilization of a land withdraws before the storm or fights against it, the end will be the same. Man is of the air, and the air must rule him. Drought or flood, cold winds and ice, heat, blown dust, shift of the storm track—in the end they overcome even the imperturbable machines.

  2

  During a lull in the storm the old coyote went hunting again. He saw the airplane-beacon flashing into the darkness; he crossed the railroad; he leaped into the highway just after a push-plow had gone by.

  He came to the remembered place where he had scented something strange beneath the snow. High above him at the top of the cliffs a rotary was working; some of the thrown snow, falling a hundred feet, settled as fine powder upon his fur. He nuzzled about. The depth of snow was greater than it had been before, and so the scent was fainter. As yet that night he had not killed, and now the saliva began to drool at the corners of his mouth. But mingled with the pleasant smell were others which made him suspicious and wary. He went prudently on his way, remembering the spot for future nights.

  3

  In San Francisco the rain was a steady downpour, heavier than ever. In Los Angeles the rain had stopped; there was a bright blue sky between broken clouds, and a brilliant sunrise. Portland had rain and Spokane snow, but in Seattle men pulled their overcoats closer to shut out a chilling dry easterly.

  El Paso was having a sudden cold snap with snow-squalls. Abilene reported trees blown down in a fifty-mile gale. Galveston and Corpus Christi were being deluged with warm rain drifting in upon a steady southerly wind.

  Tampa, half way between Miami and Pensacola, was ten degrees colder than either, but had a clear sky. Jacksonville and Savannah were dank and chilly beneath thick low-lying fog.

  Washington had calm air and a brilliant sun which seemed to shed no warmth; the temperature was eight above zero. New York lacked two degrees of being as cold as Washington, and Philadelphia was a little warmer than either of them. In Boston the temperature was even higher, but a steady north wind made people feel chillier.

  Buffalo was the cold pole of the country. As at Washington the air was still and the sun brilliant. But the temperature was sixteen below zero, and the newspapers reported four deaths from cold.

  Detroit and Cleveland were below zero, but were warmer than they had been on the preceding day. Chicago was growing much warmer. Memphis had fog; Kansas City reported a thaw. Havre and Bismarck were almost as cold as Buffalo.

  All these reports suddenly presented to the average common-sense citizen would certainly have led him to conclude that the weather in the United States upon this particular day was a mere crazy-quilt, wholly lacking in scheme.

  •

  To the J. M., looking at the ordered isobars of the finished map, the weather displayed a pattern which was precise, comparatively simple, and in a sense even purposive. The weather of any place in the eastern United States, for instance, could be readily explained by reference to its location within the high-pressure area which centered over Lake Ontario. In addition, the usual circulation of air from west to east was re-establishing itself.

  The most obvious sign was Little Maria. She centered over Abilene, and was giving Texas almost every variety of weather. But there were other signs. The high-pressure area was slowly drifting eastward. He checked back upon the maps of the last three days and traced its movement—Kansas City, Terre Haute, Cleveland; and this morning its center was east of Buffalo. Maria still stood firm, and the Triplets were dead; but Victoria, growing in power, had already reached the western Aleutians. Over the Pacific the long arm of the northern invasion was shrinking back, and over the Yukon valley the pressure was falling. Again he looked at the preceding maps. On Tuesday that pressure had stood at 1050; on Wednesday it had dropped to 1042; today it was 1035. Once this pressure should have fallen a little farther, the outflow of northern air would cease, and Maria either would pass into some new phase, or else—cut off from fresh supplies of air—must die.

  The Chief came in, and the J. M. felt himself suddenly grow warm with the new sense of comradeship.

  “How’s Maria?” said the Chief, quietly, so that no one else could overhear him.

  “She’s fine,” said the J. M.

  “I want to check again on that line of cloud.”

  It was still there—no doubt of that. One of the ships reporting cloud today had reported cloud yesterday. She was a fast liner from Honolulu heading for San Francisco, and the cloud bank was moving at just about the same rate.

  “Hn-n?” said the Chief. “You know, those passengers on that liner will think there’s been cloud all over the ocean all this time. Not so bad though, as when a ship gets in slow-moving storm-center, and keeps in it maybe half way across the ocean. Well, have you figured out anything more?”

  The J. M. felt a new uplift at being asked a question as though he were an equal.

  “No,” he said, regretfully but honestly. “We’ve got a
whole line of ships reporting between here and Honolulu, but they don’t show enough wind- or temperature-shift anywhere to indicate a front. Whatever it is, it’s only in the upper air.”

  “When would you say it’ll get here, whatever it is?”

  “Two or three tomorrow morning,” said the J.M, but he did not say that he had used his slide-rule.

  “Hn-n? worst time possible. In the afternoon it’ll still be too far away for any good forecast, and it’ll be on top of us before the morning forecast goes out. Maybe it’s nothing, of course; and then again it may be a matter of a million dollars’ damage and twenty lives. A plane with a good observer could fly out there in a few hours and find out what it’s all about. Yet—” His voice was suddenly bitter. “If I asked the Navy for a plane, all the gold-braiders would laugh their heads off. But we have to take the responsibility of a forecast.”

  He bent over the map again, and studied it for any clue which might have so far escaped discovery.

  •

  The J. M. heard the door open and glanced around. He started with surprise. The Old Master was standing there, dripping wet. He looked pitifully small, draggled, and cold. His white hair straggled damply from beneath the sodden black felt hat. The light overcoat with the velvet collar clung to him, soaked. He was shivering.

  The Chief looked up. “Lord!” he said sharply. And then both of them sprang to their feet. But the Old Master carefully shut the door behind him, and spoke in his outdated, formal way.

  “Good morning, gentlemen. I thought that I should like to look at the map. My barometer has risen this morning, and I judged that the storm is over. I did not think it worthwhile to carry an umbrella when I started out, and I am afraid I have been somewhat dampened by an unexpected shower.”

  The other two glanced at each other, and the Chief shook his head quickly.

  “Here,” he said. “Let me take your wet coat off. Sit by the radiator awhile, and dry your feet.”

  “Oh, no. I thank you, no. I shall just take a look at the map, and be on my way.” He took his hat off out of politeness, but he only pulled his coat tighter about him as they started to take it. He walked toward the map, but a shiver took him, and he tottered.

  “I’m afraid, sir,” said the Chief, “you shouldn’t trust a barometer too far. It’s a wonderful instrument. But still—”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Sometimes you get heavy rain with a rising barometer. I remember two such cases in eighty—eighty—eighty-seven. Yes. I know, I know. But still, other signs confirming, you can go with the barometer.”

  The Chief steadied him by the right arm; the J. M. held him by the left; he leaned over and peered hard at the map. A drop of water fell from him right upon a 1008 isobar. The J. M. mopped it up with his handkerchief; the Old Master did not even notice. Probably he was seeing next to nothing. The Chief was trying to explain the map.

  “You see,” he said, “there’s a lot more rain to come in.” The Old Master shivered violently; he did not seem to notice what was being said. Then he pulled himself together and seemed to come out of the fog; he spoke clearly and stiffly.

  “I thought that I should like to see the map again. I shall be going along now. I know—I know.”

  The Chief spoke hurriedly to the J. M. in a tense low voice: “Call the Navy Recruiting Office downstairs. Somewhere—get a doctor!”

  4

  Bright yellow in the winter sunshine, agleam with resplendent metal, the streamliner was making eighty miles an hour along the Platte River. Thin snow covered the land; in the channel the swift water ran black between the ice-fringes.

  In the lounge-car two young men had joined with two older ones and were playing cards, listlessly. “One heart . . . two diamonds.” Though it meant rubber, no one cared enough to put up a fight. When the points were added up, there was no suggestion of continuing.

  “Are we on time?” asked one of the young men, just to be saying something.

  “Were the last time I checked,” said the second young man. “God, what a bore this trip is, even on the streamliner.”

  “Looks cold out there,” said the first, gazing idly out the window at the bleak landscape.

  “Plenty cold when we left Chicago—haven’t stuck my nose out since, to tell the truth.”

  “Well, neither have I. Be good to get to California, and have a little decent weather.”

  “I hear they’re having rain out there too.”

  “If there’s one thing that bores me more than riding on a train,” put in one of the older men, “it’s discussing the weather. Riding on a train and discussing the weather is too much.”

  •

  Between Norden and Emigrant Gap snow was falling at the rate of six inches an hour. A fast freight had to be side-tracked for twenty minutes until a rotary could punch through and clear the track, and then the freight had to follow a flanger, keeping one block behind.

  The men piled out of the rotary, and fought their way to the station-house. They were shaky in the legs from the unceasing vibration; they walked uncertainly. Their clothes were soaked with perspiration from the heat and steam, and they shivered in the cold, snow-driving wind. They grabbed themselves sandwiches and coffee; and standing with coats opened they tried to dry their clothing around the roaring, red-bellied coal stove.

  Then orders came through. They plugged back to the rotary through the snow, and started out again. In this kind of storm the snow-equipment had to be kept moving. A fast train with mail was due through in a little while, and stopping a train like that was more serious than holding up a freight.

  In the foothills rain was falling instead of snow. In ground well softened by the long downpour Blue Boy, the big boar, rooted in contentment. From his precipitous pasture above the railroad he looked down incuriously with his little eyes at a train passing below him. It had come down from the higher altitudes so fast that in spite of the heavy rain a little snow still clung to the tops of the cars. For a moment there was the roar of the locomotive and from the circular orifice of the smoke-stack thick blackness belched upward at the boar. Then came the click-click of passing mail-coaches and Pullmans. The noise faded off around a curve, and only the sound of a whistle came back faintly. The boar rooted on, undisturbed.

  5

  In the early hours of morning the tropical air had arrived at the coast; by noon it covered all central California. While passing over the surface of the ocean it had produced only moderate rains along its advancing front where it overrode the cooler air ahead of it. But at the coast line the mountains forced it upward. Rising and cooling, the air released its stores of moisture. There were no displays of violence—no thunderstorms or wind-blasts. In fine drops the rain fell almost quietly, but the downfall was unceasing, and intense.

  Mile by mile, swiftly, the tropical air moved inland. It crossed the Coast Ranges, and the air upon the long ridge-tops grew strangely mild. It moved over the Great Valley, but the air in that long trough was cool and heavy so that the tropical air moved across its top and nowhere touched the surface; but the rain which fell was not cold. Reaching the long westward slope of the Sierra the tropical air again rode upward, and the downfall was most intense of all. The snow-line lay about the three-thousand-foot level, but as the warmer air moved in, thick rain began to fall clear up to five thousand feet.

  Some few days before, the Arctic had swept down across Texas; now as if in compensating reflux California became an outpost of the tropics. That air which swept the peaks and ridges had lain for weeks over the warm ocean. It had sucked its rain from the creamy foaming of lazy blue waves, from the spouting of whales, from the splashing of porpoises, sporting in the sea-trough. Its air had smoothed the plumage of gull and gony; it had laved the sides of leaping swordfish, and the backs of sleeping turtles awash in the long swells.

  •

  Over all of central California the tropical air
was moving, but most intense was the precipitation in the foothills northeast of Sacramento, the basin of the American River. Five days of rainfall had saturated the earth, and now for every drop that fell another drop must somewhere pass into a stream and move rapidly downward toward the valley. Into the North Fork and the South Fork and the Middle Fork the water poured out from every side-canyon and gulch and gully. The North Fork of the North Fork came surging down. High up, the melting rain fell upon the snow which arched the East Fork and the Rubicon, and a thousand little streams which lay dormant in their snow-tunnels; beneath the insistent rain the snow grew soft and heavy; the arches fell and the water went foaming downward.

  The streams poured out from all those creeks and canyons named by the Forty-Niners—in hope and despair and ridicule, now in flat matter-of-factness, now in flamboyant fancy. From Deer Creek and Otter Creek, from Bear Creek and Grizzly Creek, from Jaybird Creek and Redbird Creek. From Alder Creek and Willow Creek, and Lichen Creek, and Brush Creek; from Granite Creek and Slab Creek and Slate Creek. From Indian Creek and Dutch Creek and Irish Creek. From Pilot Creek and Whaler Creek, and Soldier Creek and Sailor Creek. From Iowa Creek and Missouri Creek. From New York Creek and Manhattan Creek, and Knickerbocker Creek and Hoboken Creek. From Dry Creek, no longer dry. From Lady Creek, and Widow Creek, and Secret Creek, which mask (men say) far ruder names. From Devil’s Creek and Humbug Creek and Shirt-tail Creek; from Hangtown Creek and Robbers’ Creek and One-eye Creek. Out of them all and a hundred more the water came foaming.

  6

  In the late afternoon the Superintendent stood again at the wide entry-way of the Maintenance Station, and looked out. Even here at the crest of the Pass there was only a steady, moderate wind, but the snowfall was thicker than it had yet been. It was more than ever like feather-down spilled from a pillow, and the flakes descended in what seemed an impenetrable mass which the eye strove in vain to pierce. The Superintendent could not see the tamarack which he used as a gauge of snowfall; he could not even see the other side of the road.