Storm

by George R. Stewart

  By mid-week, people had only one thought and one salutation: “Will the chinook never come!”

  Then, late Thursday afternoon, there was a change. The temperature rose somewhat, and the Weather Bureau at Edmonton reported only seventeen below zero. At sunset, men looking southwest saw a long, unbroken bank of cloud, low-hanging over the mountains. Its lower edge resting on the ridges was dark and heavy, and straight as a line drawn with a ruler; the upper edge was broken and wind-whipped, and cast up the sunset in red-gold. “She’s coming!” men said, and were loosed from fear.

  Just after midnight the mild, dry southwester—the chinook wind—swept across the plains. At the Weather Bureau the thermograph showed a rise of thirty-three degrees—from thirteen below zero to twenty above—in ten minutes. To people waking in the night the air was soft and warm like a breeze of springtime. “The chinook!” they said. “Thank God!”

  •

  Pious people were well within their rights to thank God for the chinook, although (to be consistent) they should also have rendered thanks every morning for the rising of the sun. For, equally, the chinook and the sunrise were the result of natural processes. A week earlier the cold wave in Alberta had been associated with an approaching storm in California, not as cause and effect, but merely as the two parts of a broken cup fit perfectly, being really one. Now, in the same way, the long continuance of the storm matched the coming of the chinook.

  Nevertheless, the mild and dry air now melting the snow upon the plains had a history during the past week which even by atmospheric standards was an Odyssey. On the preceding Friday, as frigid and dry polar air, it had moved from the frozen Arctic Ocean over the region of tundra west of Coppermine. On Saturday, grown even colder, it was moving west along the Yukon Valley. On Sunday, maintaining its speed of nearly eight hundred miles in twenty-four hours, it crossed the mountains of southern Alaska, became warmer and drier because of its descent, and moved southward in the region of Kodiak Island. On Monday it thrust south far into the Pacific as part of the western discharge of the polar air; over the ocean it was growing rapidly warmer and more moist. On Tuesday it felt the pull of the storm-center off the California coast and swung toward the southwest. On Wednesday the same storm brought it northeast at about the latitude of San Francisco; flung upward by the mountains, it discharged its newly gained moisture as rain and snow. On Thursday, it was again dry and moderately cold; still within the orbit of the storm, it was being driven rapidly northward as a severe wind, dry and below freezing, across the high plateau of eastern Washington; by the late afternoon it was reaching through and over the mountains of British Columbia. At this point, because of the pressure systems which were being built up, the old storm center was no longer able to hold it, and the air moved northeastward in the control of another storm just developing farther north.

  Even on the mountain tops the air had been dry and only moderately cold. Descending, it had grown much warmer and drier. By daybreak temperatures from Edmonton to Regina were well above freezing. The snow had almost vanished; wide pools of water stood in the fields. Yet the streams did not rise greatly; the warm dry air sucked up the water almost as rapidly as the snow melted, and in many places evaporated the snow even before it could change to liquid. Over all the wide prairie, the saving chinook had broken the deadly grip of the north.

  3

  As a minor detail of the vast complex of storm, the pocket of old polar air which had intruded itself into the tropical air had continued to move toward the California coast. It was only a few hundred miles in diameter; nevertheless, it possessed almost explosive potentialities. It was warm and moist below and extremely cold and dry above. If anything contrived to force the lower layer upward, this air would cool as it rose, but still would remain warmer than the air of any particular level at which it arrived. It would therefore continue to rise more and more rapidly.

  The first of the old polar air to reach the coast was a narrow wedge which lay beneath the last of the warm tropical air and so was prevented from rising. About three hours before daybreak, however, the full depth of old polar air arrived, and mountains of the Coast Range cast the lower level upward; immediately, as if a match had been touched to shavings soaked in gasoline, the reaction within the air itself became spontaneous. Great towers of cumulus cloud, miles in circumference, ascended higher and higher, billowing outward. From this rising air the rain, hard-drumming in great drops, poured in cloudburst torrents. But here and there the upper current was so strong that it carried the falling rain aloft and swirled it about until the drops froze and at last fell as hail. Close to the ground the air was sucked in violently, as toward a vacuum, to fill in behind the rising air; the sudden wind-flaws drove the rain before them, and snapped branches from trees. The disturbed electrical balance readjusted itself in stabs of lightning; thunder boomed above the roar of wind and rain.

  •

  With the staccato rattle of drums sounding an alarm, the heavy drops beat upon thousands of windows. Shades flapped, curtains bellied out, water spattered upon floors. Thousands of people woke from the death-like sleep which comes before the dawn. Still drugged with oblivion, men staggered to close half-opened windows. Mothers hurried to look at their babies. Children screamed in fright at the sudden uproar. (As thousands of lights were snapped on, the operator at French Bar Power-House, two hundred miles away, spun his handle and let more water pass through the turbines to meet the sudden demand for current.)

  The General Manager awoke. He thought of his thousands of miles of rails gleaming wet in the night, of the waters running in the ditches beside the tracks, of the culverts and the bridges. He remembered the streamliner, somewhere out in Nevada, coming fast. He thought also of the men and the safety devices, of the snow-plows at work, of the red and green lights shining through falling rain and snow. He had confidence, and went back to sleep.

  Jen’s sister awoke, and went to look at her babies. As she heard the beating rain, she shivered and caught her breath in a sob. She felt her little sister out there somewhere lying in the rain, or wandering lost, calling to her. For the hundredth hopeless time she called the office of the Highway Patrol. No news. Shivering, she went to bed, and did not sleep again.

  The Chief Service Officer did not quite awake. (He was worn out with a hard week, and all the responsibility of when to let his planes go, when to keep them grounded.) He tossed about as the drumming of the rain beat its warning in through layer after layer of sleep. But his subconscious mind rejected the call of duty which, waking, he would have assumed. It tricked him, and in dream he seemed only to be watching a parade. The rattle of the hail became the ta-ratta-ta-tat of snare drums, and the distant thunder was only the sounding of the great horns. He did not leap to the telephone with a word of warning and advice to his less experienced assistant at the airport. Instead, half-awaking, he imagined comfortably that it was merely a dream, and fell into another sound sleep.

  The L. D. awoke. “Sounds like trouble,” he thought. He remembered his wires and his poles, his dams and his ditches. But he had confidence in his men, and went back to sleep.

  The District Traffic Superintendent awoke. He took down the telephone from the head of his bed, and talked with the office. “Just a local cloudburst,” said his assistant. “No trouble yet on the long lines.” The DTS went back to sleep.

  The Chief awoke. He looked at the clock “Hn-n?” he thought. “That was it!” Then, since there would be no use in getting to the Bureau before the reports came in, he rolled over for another cat-nap before getting up.

  •

  As it approached land, the old polar air had had a breadth of several hundred miles, bulging forward near the center. This center touched the coast first near San Francisco, and the violence of the action at that point was such that it pulled the air in from the north and south. The moving front of heavy rain and piled-up clouds thus shrank in breadth and became correspondingly more intens
e. It swept across San Francisco Bay, deluged the hill country and sluiced down its rain upon the delta.

  Rushing northeast across the Great Valley it struck Sacramento.

  The General awoke to full consciousness all at once. The rain crashed against the closed window like something solid. He called his office, where one assistant worked through the night.

  “When did this get here?” he demanded.

  “Just now, sir. But I knew it was coming. It hit the delta half an hour ago, and I’ve had a dozen long-distance calls already.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “Nothing—yet.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  Dressing, he looked at his watch; the hands pointed at four-twenty-six.

  •

  “Big Al” Bruntton, the pilot, was checking over the trip forecast with the dispatcher at the Salt Lake City airport. It was five-twenty-nine (Mountain Time), and he was taking out the big sleeper-plane, non-stop, to San Francisco, a four-hour flight, better than six hundred miles. Either Al or the dispatcher, not liking the weather conditions, could cancel the trip. But it was hard even to think of canceling when conditions at Salt Lake City were perfect for flying. The forecast indicated that the same conditions would hold almost to Reno. Farther on, the storm was continuing.

  “The five A.M. reports,” said the dispatcher, “don’t show anything very bad over the Hump. It’s tropical air—stable. Trip six-eight flew it, and just went through between cloud levels. The Bay has been having violent showers, but that’s very local—as yet anyway.”

  “Let’s get started,” said Big Al.

  “If we have to ground you at Reno, all right. But I think the chances are pretty good you can go all the way through.”

  Big Al walked out to the plane. The night was snappy cold, not much above zero. Only a slight drift of air was moving up from the south. The sky was a wide arch of stars, glittering bright through the desert air. Far to the west, ahead, a full moon was low in the sky. Back eastward, over the mountains, was just a hint of the coming dawn. On a night like this the idea of storm was unreal. Big Al could hardly bring himself to believe that within five hundred miles he might be ordered down.

  He settled himself at the controls; trying not to bump his sleeping passengers more than was necessary, he took off. Gaining altitude he swung around and headed west; the beam was a dull steady buzz in his ears. He leveled off as soon as he had reached safe flying height, for if he went higher he would meet heavier headwinds. He settled to cruising speed. Ahead he saw the moon. As always he felt that he was racing the moon, even overtaking it. Actually, he knew, the plane was making about one-hundred-eighty miles an hour, the moon at this latitude roughly seven hundred. He could not even keep the moon in sight. And even faster, the sun was racing up behind him. Tonight the moon would not set, but would be caught in the open; and somewhere over Nevada he would watch it grow dim ingloriously before the rays of the sun.

  •

  As the plane rose higher and the never-freezing waters of Great Salt Lake lay beneath, the streamliner pulled out of Reno. After two thousand miles it was still on time to the second. In the sleeping-cars the corridors were dim. Most of the passengers were asleep; those who had awakened because of the stop at Reno were settling down again. The bar was closed; shining chromium and crimson leather, the lounge-car was empty except for a dozing trainman.

  The wheel-clicks came faster as the train picked up speed. Like the bay of some huge unearthly hound, the horn sounded through the night. A swaying and creaking of the cars let even a man lying in his berth know that the train was pulling up-grade.

  On the crests ahead, thick clouds hung low, but overhead broken clouds slid across the sky. The moon shone between, gleaming upon scanty desert snow. The clumps of sage-brush were snow-encrusted; in the moonlight they glittered like wedding-cake ornaments.

  Ahead of the streamliner, red lights winked into the green. Fifty miles farther on, a rotary snow-plow pulled out of Norden yards to get the track clear; a flanger crew was making ready to follow. Track-walkers dragged themselves out of sleep, and set out to patrol their sections. The crack train of the run must go through on time.

  •

  The wheels ground on a curve; the streamliner, a few miles out of Reno, was entering Truckee Canyon. In San Francisco the Chief was drawing the last of his isobars.

  Against the blank darkness of the windows the rain was a continuous crash, varying only as some gust raised it to a crescendo and then let it fall off a little. The Chief was working with a half-smile on his lips. With that beat of rain against the windows it seemed silly to think that the storm was over. Yet he had already in his mind worded his forecast: “Heavy showers, then clearing.” By the time the average citizen sat down to breakfast and, picking up his paper, looked for the weather-report, the rain would already have ceased; very likely the sun would be shining.

  Yet the Chief was not dabbling in astrology or staring at a crystal; the forecast lay all upon the map, clear for anyone to read. Off-shore about a hundred miles, sharply defined by ship-reports, he had drawn a blue line marking a cold front. Eastward of that boundary line as it advanced toward the coast was falling pressure, warm moist air, and a southwest gale; behind it was rising pressure and cooler air borne in on the northwest wind. That front with a sharp wind-shift line of more than ninety degrees, would cause plenty of disturbance as it passed over California, but it would be the storm’s last kick.

  He called the J. M. over for a look. “Well,” said the Chief, “your friend Maria is about done for.” East and west, like hostile forces, areas of high pressure had developed and were pressing in. To the south, the Pacific High showed again. Northward, Victoria had drawn close, taking to herself the northern air which had been feeding Maria. At the center, the pressure was rising rapidly.

  “What about this?” asked the J. M., motioning with his head toward the windows where the storm still beat.

  “Pretty local. Fresno, you see, reports only a drizzle.”

  “Well, Maria was a good one, while she lasted.”

  “Don’t speak of her in the past, quite yet. Wait till that front goes by. Say, have you called the hospital?”

  Racing on from Sacramento, northeastward, at forty five miles an hour, the front of the advancing old polar air met the line of the foothills shortly before six o’clock. The steady rise of the slope forced the air still upward, and threw it into even wilder confusion.

  Blue Boy, the boar, awoke and grunted in displeasure. His thick covert of oak was good against most rains, but not against this one. He stirred resentfully, bringing to life some vague boar-memories of a warm dry shed. Then he settled down, trying to make himself more comfortable.

  Johnny Martley awoke. His house was near one end of French Bar dam, and close to the lip of the canyon. The house was of wood, solidly constructed, company-built. He could feel the tough timbers give before the wind-pressure; he heard the crash of the rain. “Cloudburst,” he said to his wife. “Rain (hear it?)—not snow. There’ll be a lot of water down the North Fork.”

  (Rick, the lineman, did not awake. In the little mountain town where he had been born, he lay quietly in his coffin.)

  •

  It was just after six when the J. M. talked to the nurse on the ward. He reported to the Chief.

  “She says the Old Master is pretty bad—that chill, or something, got his heart.”

  “Hn-n?” said the Chief. “He’s ninety if he’s a day.”

  •

  Just after six also the radio operator at Bay Airport talked with the plane over Elko. There was some crackling of static, but the words came through clearly. Big Al Bruntton was flying smoothly through the calm high-pressure area which stretched across most of Nevada. The radio-operator gave the information which the Night Service Officer had ordered. “Conditions over the summit, still flyable, but be
ready for orders to land at Reno. Worse on this side of the summit—considerable turbulence. Cumulus cloud masses rising to an undetermined height, probably some icing conditions at certain levels as previously reported. Airports available: Reno open; Sacramento doubtful; Bay open, and conditions expected to improve after passage of a cold front about seven A.M.; Red Bluff doubtful; Fresno open and expected to remain so, available for emergency landing.”

  In the gray of the morning Al picked up the Reno beam, and turned the plane to its new course.

  •

  In the first dim light of dawn the cloudburst was unloosed over all the tangled foothill country of gully and ravine and deep-cut canyon where rise the feeders of the American. Under the covert of pine and live-oak and manzanita millions of oozing trickles converged and grew larger. Muddy streams ran brawling; over rock ledges they poured in waterfalls. The steep slope of each canyon-side shed water like a roof. Gulches and gullies converged into ravines; the water foamed downward in torrents. Creeks flowed like forks, and forks like rivers.

  At Yankee Jim’s two inches of rain fell in ten minutes. Brushy Creek was rolling boulders. From Shirttail Canyon the waters gushed out in a wave three feet high. The rise of the North Fork was so sudden that for a moment it backed up into the Middle Fork. Weber Creek took out two bridges. The South Fork went over the flats at Coloma. And on Folsom gauge where the united river swept out into the plain the red-brown water already swirled close to flood-level.