Storm

by George R. Stewart

  The man’s overemphasis made the General think of a dog’s barking; he disliked it intensely. Also, as a former officer he disliked being shouted at by a civilian. But he kept his temper.

  “Look here,” the man barked on, “if you open those gates at the twenty-five-foot gauge reading, that road won’t flood. We represent the State Businessmen’s Association, and we pay a lot of taxes. We’re about ready to turn on the heat!”

  In the long years since he had ceased being a junior officer the General had got out of the habit of keeping himself tightly reined in, but he still held on.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “what happens to the delta farmers when those gates are opened?”

  “They get flooded of course, but they take that chance. And there’s not half—not a quarter—the loss of crops that there is loss of business here.”

  The General reflected a moment, wanting to argue. Damage to land and crops was real to him, but as a military man he could never quite figure out the meaning of loss of business. Someone didn’t spend money today because he didn’t like to go out in the wet, but he must do something with the money some time. But that was not the point.

  He put his last thought into words. “Gentlemen, that’s not the point. There is the matter of an agreement. Possibly conditions have changed, and flooding the highway is more costly than flooding the farmers. That’s still not the point—I hold the gates until I consider that the safety of the city is endangered.”

  The three men of the Committee looked at one another, and then got up. Last to go was the fat chairman. He turned around in the doorway.

  “All right, General—” he barked. “And say, you don’t by any chance own stock in the Delta Asparagus Company?”

  The General was on his feet. He did not bark, but he roared: “Get out of my office!”

  The General strode back and forth the length of the room. By God, by God, but civilians were a poor lot of mammals, by God! Didn’t they ever learn that you had to work together, even sacrifice yourself, for the whole? That very moment the General limped as he walked, and he had that limp from the day he took his regiment against a too strong German position. Everybody knew it was a hopeless attack. But it pegged some German reserves, and kept them off the neck of another American outfit somewhere. The men who died—and there were a lot of them—at least knew that they helped the whole army. In war you fought a common enemy. But these buyers and sellers—faugh!—they strangled each other. They squabbled even when the storm allied itself with the river, when hour by hour the readings of the gauges were higher and the rising water lapped searchingly along the levees. Suddenly the General felt a great disgust with man as a species. It might be a good thing if the situation pictured in his favorite passage should happen again and on a larger scale—if the whole valley (or the whole world perhaps) should become only a far-stretching welter of brown waters with a few heads bobbing about here and there for a little while.

  Still, he would like to have an ark to save some of the better ones—a few good soldiers, and some of the men who were out there patrolling the levees right now in the rain, fighting the river and the storm, not figuring how to get a dollar and thirty-six cents out of some other fellow.

  8

  At the airport it was an easy day. In spite of the intense downpour, the planes came and went nearly on schedule. The tropical air was stable, and almost as trustworthy as high-pressure. The ceilings were ample; the wind was steady and moderate; there were no electrical disturbances. Even over the mountains there was no icing. The clouds lay in great, long strata, and between cloud-levels the pilots found good enough visibility. As for the heavy rain, that in itself was no hazard; it flew from the propeller-blades and from the fuselage and wings—and no harm done.

  It was the best day that the Chief Service Officer had experienced since the beginning of the storm. But toward evening he grew a little nervous. It was like a dead calm; sooner or later it must break, and you began to wonder how it would break. He looked at the afternoon weather maps, and talked with the meteorologist.

  “What’s that isolated line of cloud doing out there off shore?” he asked.

  “Can’t make out exactly,” said the meteorologist. “Some kind of upper-air front. It’s been moving in closer for the last couple of days. We’re watching it.”

  “You’d better!” said the CSO shortly. He checked the latest weather reports from the air-lanes. There was no important change.

  He passed into the dispatching-room, and checked the reports of progress which had been radioed in from the various planes. There was nothing of note.

  He went back to his office. There he snarled malignantly at a stenographer who came in with letters. He knew that he was merely relieving his own nerves, but he did not apologize. Being rude to the stenographer was only a way of keeping himself from settling down into complacency.

  “Act of God!” he thought cynically to himself, returning to that early religious training, now long perverted. “Fire and hail, snow and vapors, stormy wind fulfilling his word!” He checked over his old enemies wondering which was getting ready to strike next. “The Prince of the power of the air!” Yes, he too was working somewhere at his subtle sabotage—making pilots overconfident and careless, crossing the wrong wires in men’s minds, causing meteorologists to be unobservant, lulling dispatchers into negligence.

  In a few minutes now his assistant would be coming on and taking charge for the night. He felt that he should pass on some warning, but there was really nothing which he could transmit except perhaps his own nervousness, and that in itself would be misleading.

  9

  The first outfit that got to the snow-slide was the V-plow with eight men of the night shift hanging on to it. First of all they took in a chain, and hooked it around the front axle of the Superintendent’s car. With the other end attached to the plow they yanked the car out of three feet of snow by main force. Then the V-plow drove right on into the slide. It went ahead easily as far as the snow had just run up the road, but when it hit the main part of the slide, where the snow was many feet deep, the plow shoved ahead and made a hole in the snow, and the V-plow could do nothing more.

  Next a push-plow came up. It widened the narrow track of the V-plow, and then barged around, pushing the shallower snow back in various places. While it was working, some of the men got their webs on, and climbed up on the slide; they had to move gingerly for fear their weight might start the whole slide again and take them down into the canyon. When the lights of a rotary showed up around the turn, the push-plow went off to work on the road somewhere else; it would be no more use for a while at the slide.

  The rotary headed in as far as the push-plow had opened up the way, and then started work. The men gave a little cheer as it began flinging snow; for now they were really getting somewhere. The operator had set the augers so that the rotary climbed up on the snow a little as it advanced. But even so, as soon as the rotary got to the main part of the slide, the snow was high over the tops of the cutter-bars. The rotary ate its way ahead until soon it had dug out a cave for itself and the blower had no place to throw the snow. Then the operator backed it out, and began shaving up the edges, and the men with shovels on top of the slide tumbled down great masses of snow, especially from the mouth of the snow cave. As soon as there was enough to work on, the rotary waded in again and threw it all over the side. But the advance was slow.

  The Superintendent’s job was to direct the fight, and mostly he was busy, plunging around through the snow telling the operator where to head the rotary in, directing the men on top of the slide and warning them to be careful. Once he went back a little way to get a look at the whole set-up, and it was something of a sight to see. Darkness had come on, and the snow was falling as fast as ever. The lights from all the plows and cars that were there were playing on the slide. The men on top looked small and black as ants by contrast with the great white
heap. The rotary was throwing its great arc. And all around, the flying snow reflected back the lights, and shut off the little scene of activity from all the world outside.

  He had time then to figure out just what had happened. High on the cliffs a big overhanging snow-nose had got too heavy and dropped off. It lit on the loose snow which had just fallen, and below that snow would be the surface of the old snow which had fallen in November and grown slick and hard and icy by melting a little in the sun each day and freezing up at night. The new snow had started moving, not rolling like a snow-ball, but sliding along the slick surface below. It picked up speed and grew as it went. Now it would override the snow ahead, and now it would shove beneath and carry it along. There was nothing to stop it, for this was an old track where the snow had been sliding for centuries. No trees could grow there long enough to get big, and all opposing rocks had long since been carried away. So the slide was probably nothing but snow—and that would be lucky for the two men inside the buried rotary.

  •

  Up at Windy Point the mechanics were working on the broken axle. It was a tough job. As darkness came on, they had to rig up extension lights from the battery. They staked down canvas all around the rotary. But twice the canvas blew loose, and all the time the wind whistled under and over it and through all the chinks until a man could hardly see or hear, and had to work mostly by feel. But in the end they pulled the pieces of the old axle, and fitted the new one into place.

  •

  The men on the slide gave the rotary with the new axle a cheer when it came down the road. The Superintendent lined it up behind and to the left of the other rotary. With two arcs of snow flying the rate of progress picked up, and the scene was wilder-looking than ever.

  Then suddenly there was a lot of yelling, and some of the men from the top slid down. Peters was just heaving himself out of the snow. They beat him on the back in triumph, and then dug in and pulled out. Swenson who was just behind. The two of them had got the shovels out of the back of the rotary, dug their way in to the rock wall along the inner edge of the highway, and then followed it, tunneling foot by foot, and using the rock wall as one side of their tunnel.

  “I’ll send you right up to the Station, and you can get something to eat and turn in,” said the Superintendent.

  “Ah, I’m all right,” said Peters. “Give me some webs and a shovel, and I’ll get up there with the boys on the slide.”

  Swenson said nothing, but went along with Peters.

  By this time it was eight o’clock, and the rotaries had not eaten ahead more than fifty feet into the two hundred feet of slide which lay upon the road.

  At nine the cooks came down with coffee and sandwiches. Everybody felt a little better.

  The men gave all they had, but there was something grim about it. You wouldn’t have called it a joyous fight. The men did a lot of swearing—at the job, and at each other. Superintendent and all, they knew they had lost the road. It would be in the papers: Donner Pass Closed. Just as if it might have been U.S. 50 over Echo Summit or the Sonora Pass road which nobody even tried to keep open.

  •

  It’s a fine thing to go below (as the mountain people say) in the spring, and meet up with a fellow you know, in Sacramento maybe, or Marysville. And you go in for beers and he says, “Where you been all winter?”

  “Oh,” you say, “I was up on the Hump with the snow-plows.”

  “That so?” he says, and he’s kind of impressed.

  “Yessir,” you say, “we kept ol’ Donner Pass open all through the winter, even that bad storm in January.”

  But now you couldn’t say that. You’d lost the road. “Crise-tamitey, quit jabbin’ me with that shovel-handle.”

  10

  That night no car went east or west. From Shasta on the north to the Tehachapis on the south, every pass was blocked with snow. Unbroken, the long Sierra thrust its peaks into the air; where the mountains rose highest and boldest against the sky-line, there the age-old battle of air and rock raged most fiercely. The snow swirled around the pinnacles; it settled deep in draw and chimney; it drifted across the ledges. From the peaks trailed off through the air the mile-long snow-banners.

  Far to the north on Lassen the snow lay thick, white-blanketing the deep volcanic fires. Like black flames, the Sierra Buttes thrust skyward, too steep for snow to find lodgment. Castle Peak and Donner Peak guarded the Pass; Mt. Tallac looked down upon the tossing waters of the wide blue lake, too deep for freezing.

  Southward, far southward, peak over against peak (named and nameless), ran that line of mountains. Higher and higher they rose to the south until Mt. Whitney topped them all. Peak, butte, and pinnacle; dome, ridge, and crest—over them all was snow. Snow upon the glaciers, upon the thick frozen tarns, snow over all the stunted junipers and lodge-poles that lay close along the granite at timber-line.

  No longer was the air mild and gentle as when it had lain over the tropical water. Cast upward miles high, it seemed now more like some frigid influx from the Pole. Its tepid moisture had now become hard-frozen snowflakes. No longer did it move languorously; but, sucked in toward the maelstrom of the center, it swept the ledges with hurricane fury. From Lassen to Olancha, five hundred miles, against every peak and crag whirled the storm-driven snow.

  ELEVENTH DAY

  1

  Once upon a time (to tell a fable) a primitive tribe lived beside a broad, brackish river near the ocean. This river had a disconcerting and inexplicable habit. Sometimes when the people wanted to dig clams, they found the water lapping high against the banks, and the clam-beds flooded. Sometimes when the people went to fish, they found wide mud-flats where they had expected to spear salmon.

  At first the people attempted no explanation. After many generations they came to realize that a river-god, capricious and sometimes malignant, was responsible for this rise and fall. They placated the god by throwing flowers and food into the water, and now and then (when famine came) a baby.

  After further generations a wise man arose among the people. He showed them how to outwit the river-god, who was really stupid, or else subordinate to the sun-god. For, observing the time of high water by the position of the sun, you could return next day when the sun was in the same position, and find the water high again. The priests were horrified, and had the man stoned to death for impiety, but the people found his ideas useful.

  Throughout further centuries the knowledge of the tides increased. It was learned that they followed the moon more than the sun, that they were greater toward the north, that even the vagaries of spring- and neap-tides accorded to rule. Finally the people, having developed mathematics and printing, published tables showing for a year in advance the height and time of every tide. Local influences such as wind and rain still produced a little variation, but the tide was no longer mysterious, and fearful; it was wholly understood.

  •

  As is the tide, so is the weather; the atmosphere, like the ocean, moves under physical laws. But the atmosphere is more mobile, so that the forces seriously affecting it are more numerous. All its motions arise from the heat of the sun, but this simplicity lies obscured beneath complications. Gravity, inertia, electricity, the spherical shape of the earth, its rotation, the ocean-currents, the contrasts between water and land and between desert and forest, the height of mountains, the compressibility of air, the almost explosive qualities of water-vapor—these and other forces combine to produce the weather.

  Man is now able to make approximate short-range forecasts. He has reached about as far as the people who estimated tides by the sun. But many of the forces of weather-control have already been stated with mathematical exactitude. The way of progress lies ahead, wide and open. A century hence, Siberia and Patagonia alike, Arctic and Antarctic, the islands of the sea and the ships that cross the sea, may all report to one great bureau. Then the published tables of next year’s weather may be as ac
curate as the published tables of next year’s tides.

  Only man’s quarrelsomeness seems likely to prevent this consummation. To master and apply the laws of the air without a world-wide co-operation is like trying to predict tides with an imperfect knowledge of the motions of sun and moon.

  If the final success is attained, what will be the effect upon man? Will he at last have to stop talking and speculating about the weather? Will the foreknowledge that he must prepare against a tornado upon a given day be more strain than grasshopper-like ignorance and sudden disaster? Will the removal of the daily mystery only serve perhaps to make life at once safer and more boring?

  2

  “The brave west winds” again were blowing. Across the continent from the Gulf of Alaska to the Atlantic, the linked storms closed their front against the north. As yet the eastward-moving current was weak, and its course was sinuous. Here it ran far to the north; here swinging to the south, it even eddied back westward. But still the final movement was from west to east. No longer did the polar air reach out deep toward the tropic. The forces of the south had restored their line of battle.

  •

  During six days and nights the Canadian plains had been an extension of the Arctic—ever since the morning when the blizzard had swept down from the north.

  The blizzard had ceased after a few hours; then the clouds vanished, and the air grew still. But that stillness lay like death upon the land. Day by day, a brassy sun swung in a long arc through the southern sky, but it gave little warmth; at noon the stretched-out shadows lay blue across the snow. Night by night, a waxing moon rode bright in the sky; not even a wisp of high cirrus blanketed the earth; the heat radiated off far toward the cold stars.

  In the dawn, steam rose visibly from the stables where the blanketed horses huddled. From the chimneys of lonely ranch-houses smoke rose straight and high until at last it bulged out like some great unnatural mushroom. On the range, cattle pawed and nuzzled through the crusty snow to reach the dried grass; their legs were scraped and bleeding; bloody icicles hung at their nostrils. They must keep to their feet; for, if they lay down, they froze to the ground. As, moaning, they huddled together for warmth, mist from the moisture and warmth of their breathing hung over them in the still air as mist hangs over a pool. (But far over the Pacific the air was moving.)