Storm

by George R. Stewart

  Only by a narrow margin was the whole train not lying a crumpled tangle in the brawling torrent of the North Fork. “Tough steel, aluminum alloys, resplendent chromium, satiny copper, crimson leather, shining glass—miracle of modem engineering and art”—the streamliner stood still, balked in its course. All the cunning of wires and clockwork, of lights and semaphores, was as nothing before some trick of the storm.

  Just then a draggled little track-walker came slopping up-track through the water. He had mud and slime all over him, and his language matched the slime.

  “What you know!” he blurted. “That one pipe clogged so tight she not running water—just a little mud. I crawl up through there; think I see what’s wrong. What you think jammed in there and blocked the pipes—drowned—a great big hog!”

  •

  Minute by minute Big Al fought the storm. He could feel the drag of the ice. Lightning crackled all around; the radio roared with static. Now and then the whine of the beam came through or some blurred words—Bay trying to get them. But it was no use trying to follow a beam. He tried to keep to the west. Once an air draft dropped him so fast that he thought he was gone; he looked ahead for the mountain-side that would come crashing through the mist. But nothing came through the mist, and he fought for altitude with his logy, heavy plane. Side gusts tossed him back and forth. (He didn’t dare to think what was happening to the passengers.) He himself was tired as a dog. In the air minutes count like hours. What kept him going was the thought that it couldn’t be so bad as it was, and last very long. Then suddenly he knew that he had wished it would be over pretty soon—one way or the other. That was his first touch of panic.

  He tried to think of the plane itself. The engines were sweet as you ever heard. Everything else was fine. Just a little heavy with ice, and that didn’t seem to be getting worse very fast. But the machine’s being so fine, strangely, didn’t make him feel better. It only made him feel that the man, by contrast, was the weak part that was going to pieces. Already he knew that he didn’t trust his instruments, and when a pilot doesn’t trust his instruments, he’s going bad. But just the same, he began trying to look for the ground to know where he was. But there wasn’t any ground—naturally. He was tired; he was going bad; he knew it.

  The worst blast of all struck him. He was sure it was the end. He bit his tongue to keep himself alert, and just managed to keep her under control.

  And then—so suddenly that he blinked and looked again—there, just ahead was blue sky—blue as water. The moment he saw it he felt rested. He knew he was all right. He’d flown right through the front. That last wallop had been the final wind-shift. There might be more squalls, but he’d be all right. He saw more blue sky, and then a glimpse of ground—foothill country. Just then the Bay operator came through as clear as if he were on a direct wire.

  Five minutes later the plane was heading south over the Sacramento Valley. (The passengers were getting hold of their stomachs again.) Off to the southwest Big Al was watching two showers, but they didn’t amount to much. He’d been blown miles out of his course, northward; but he’d be landing inside of an hour.

  4

  Through eleven days the storm had flourished and been strong. Tyrannical, it had drawn power to itself from the north and the south. From the Arctic to the tropics, in great circuit, it had ruled the air, and troubled the sea, and warred against the mountains.

  It had been as a conquering king who boasts in bronze—I was great and increased more than all that were before me; I gathered silver and gold, the treasure of kings and of the provinces. It had been as a firm-founded nation—vigorous in youth, virile in prime, knowing no doubt of the future.

  The king and the nation seem unassailable, but within them breeds decay. Time is a strong warrior.

  While the king sits enthroned, the generation of worms makes ready. To everything there is a season—a time to be born and a time to die. There is a time for the breaking of nations. Of storms also it is written, “This too shall pass away.”

  Far off, the sun at a certain angle with respect to the revolving earth had for a while shone favorably for the continuance of this particular eddy of air. Now its existence was becoming no longer possible. The storm had seemed some emperor of the air; actually it was only a puppet-king.

  •

  The storm was dying, but even in death it was great. The last front, close to a thousand miles in length, revolving like the spoke of a wheel about the storm-center far at sea, hurled itself against the mountains. Great pines tossed wildly as the fierce wind-shift took them aback; thick branches snapped; whole trees went down. Then the front had passed on, and the steady cold wind from the northwest was scattering the clouds.

  Onward moved the front, still revolving about the far-distant center. It burst in snow-squalls upon the saw-toothed desert ranges; on the high plateau it powdered the sage-brush with shining crystals; the quick snap of its wind-shift whipped the desert junipers. But its stores of moisture drawn from the tropical sea were already exhausted upon the mountains. As midday neared and passed, the wall of the front ceased to advance so vigorously; the snow-flurries were fewer.

  Hour by hour over thousands of square miles, from the solid surface of the earth upward to the quiet of the stratosphere, the air acknowledged a new dominion. The great storm was dying.

  TWELFTH DAY

  1

  The storm during its life had traveled a third of the way round the world; at its height, it had encompassed an area larger than the United States of America.

  By mixing in gigantic proportions the northern and southern air the storm had helped adjust the inequalities of heat between equator and pole.

  Next notable of its actions was the transfer of water from ocean to land. One inch of rain falling upon one square mile totals a weight of seventy thousand tons. Rain and snow from this single storm had fallen over a land area of more than two hundred thousand square miles, and the average precipitation of water was several inches.

  Of all this water a little had already been reabsorbed into the dry air following after the last front. Another small amount had been impounded behind man-made dams. Somewhat more had passed through natural channels and returned to the ocean. Much remained as snow—attaining a depth of many feet—upon the higher mountains. Much was contained in the flooded streams, and was somewhat violently engaged in flowing toward tidewater. Another large part was held within the now saturated earth. Still another had gone into vegetation, for in many places the grass had grown an inch during the storm.

  The third notable work of the storm was its lowering of the land-surface. Here by landslide, there by less spectacular erosion, the water had carried millions of cubic yards of earth a greater or less distance toward the ocean.

  Beside these cosmic effects, the direct influence of the storm upon men seems small and secondary. Good and bad lose their meaning, and exist only according to point of view, within a limited range of vision.

  “Sixteen dead by storm,” declared the Register. This would doubtless be rated a bad effect, but perhaps the world was better off because of these deaths. And even the accuracy of the headline can be impugned.(Does the match or the powder cause the explosion?) The sixteen died not because of the storm but because of their own mortality. The storm was merely the occasion; after a few years they would in any case have died.

  But if the editor was to hold the storm responsible for sixteen deaths, why not for hundreds? Many invalids died during the days of the storm, their deaths precipitated by chills and heart-depressions, attributable to the weather. Some healthy persons suffered wet feet which led to colds, pneumonia, and death within a few weeks. Other colds resulted in weakened resistance which opened the way to various fatal diseases.

  Million-dollar rain, was another headline in the Register. This, doubtless, would be rated a good effect.

  But the saving of a crop in California might qui
te possibly lead to bear raids in Chicago, foreclosures in Oklahoma, suicides in Florida, strikes in Massachusetts, and executions in Turkey.

  As with the so-called bad, the so-called good was often far removed and difficult to appraise. Only a few entomologists realized that the rain, falling just when it did, destroyed billions of grasshopper eggs, and prevented a plague six months later.

  Even aside from its cosmic effects the storm had thus vitally affected, in one way or another, the life of every human being in the region. It had accomplished all this without being itself catastrophic or even unusual.

  2

  The particular storm known as Maria to the Junior Meteorologist in San Francisco had rained, snowed, and blown chiefly upon California, secondarily upon the neighboring states. But there was in the nature of this storm nothing peculiar to that region alone.

  Maria was dead. But on the eighth day of her life she had begun (after the strange manner of storms) to give birth to a new storm which the Junior Meteorologist had called Little Maria. Now four days old, no longer little, having swept the southeastern states, this storm centered over New York City.

  In the Appalachians as in the Sierra Nevada, wires were down. The Peedee and the Santee, like the Sacramento, rolled flood-waters seaward. Snow-plows fought drifts in the Catskills as in the Siskiyous. Trains and buses ran late; planes were grounded.

  In New York City the Department of Sanitation mobilized fifteen thousand men to clear snow from the streets. The Commissioner announced that mechanized equipment at work included 177 rotary brooms, 377 flushers and plows, 619 crosswalk plows, 46 sanders, and 1,246 trucks with plows attached; he added that he was ready to call out further reserves of men, and was making ready 268 additional pieces of equipment.

  The wind howled a hundred-mile gale atop the Empire State Building. Pedestrians, jack-knifed against the blast, slipped and fell on the snowy sidewalks. A woman, losing balance and blown against a stone buttress, went down with a fractured skull. Wind gusts swept a workman from a scaffolding, and he broke his neck. Falling signs injured seven. Accidents were so numerous that hospitals reserved ambulances for the more severe cases. An emergency squad of police roped several squares for safety, and the few passers-by clung to the ropes as if to life-lines.

  Station WKY reported twenty-one interruptions to service between five and ten A.M. Williamsburg Bridge was closed to traffic while the sweepers cleared it. Pulaski Skyway was blocked for two hours.

  In the harbor a freighter broke its moorings. A South American liner was held up in the lower bay, and docked four hours after announced time. A coast-guard cutter went out to rescue a fishing-boat. From fifty miles beyond Sandy Hook a tanker radioed: “Steering gear carried away; helpless in full gale; all ships close by please help.”

  In Queens the power company reported ninety poles down and two thousand families without lights. In Bronx Park a freak twisting wind snapped hundreds of branches. Four elevated lines in Brooklyn suspended all traffic for forty minutes of the morning rush-hour, marooning thousands of passengers. LaGuardia Field cancelled all flights.

  His Honor the Mayor whimsically stated to some reporters that he used to be able to enjoy snow-storms, but now he had to worry about what the cost of snow-clearance did to the budget. While His Honor happened to be looking from one of his office windows, the flag-pole in City Hall Park—fifth to stand there since the original liberty pole of the Revolution—snapped off and fell.

  In the midst of disaster there was rejoicing. The Water Department announced gleefully that the heavy snowfall up-state would do much to make up a critical deficiency in the City’s reservoirs. Five hundred public-school children received a holiday because some heating equipment was disabled. Rena Carey, a declining Hollywood star, broke into all the picture sections with a photograph which showed her on a slippery sidewalk skidding into the arms of a tall policeman.

  But at least there were no deaths from cold. The storm had moved from the southwest, bringing only gales and sticky snow. “This snow follows necessarily,” commented a learned writer of editorials, “from the fact that our ancestors chose to locate this city in a rather snowy part of the snowiest of all continents.”

  3

  And now a line of linked storms across North America blocked the outflow of polar air southward along that easy route in the lee of the Rocky Mountains. In China and across the Pacific also the storms drove hard against the North. So, along that broad ocean passageway between Norway and Iceland, the overflow of the Arctic poured out.

  Fiercer than Pict or Caledonian, more furious than the Northmen, it swept upon Britain. On Grasmere and Windermere, the ice was like steel. On moor and down and heath hard-driven crystals flecked the gorse and bracken. Cold wind upon warmer land, it swept the mist from the gray cities by the northern firths; and cleared the smoke from the great towns of the Midlands; and drove before it the yellow pall of London, covering six counties. Even in sea-girt Cornwall, men whiffed the dry air of the North, sharp upon the cheek-bones, biting the nostrils.

  Still onward drove that wind. It buffeted ships in the Channel. It swept the lands of Scheldt and Seine and Loire. Still on! For, when the sun rides deep in Capricorn, what power shall withstand the North?

  4

  The General had jumped from bed at four-thirty Friday morning when the cloudburst suddenly beat against his windows. During the night when Friday passed into Saturday, he did not consider the question of bed.

  As he looked from his office windows in the still hours of the morning, he felt a curious sense of unreality. The full moon was brilliant; street lights shone upon dry asphalt; branches of trees and shrubbery swayed in a steady breeze. It was no night to imagine floods and disaster. Apparently the inhabitants of the valley felt a similar sense of safety. Few long-distance calls came in from panicky ranchers and business-men demanding the news and asking advice.

  The storm was over. But for the General the crisis had not yet passed. Far and wide, he could feel those billions of cubic feet of water, penned in behind the levees, pouring toward the Bay. The water-level in the rivers stood far above the valley floor, high as the roof-eaves of the cottages in the river towns, high as the second-story windows in Sacramento. Along hundreds of miles of levee-top, in the bright moonlight, his patrols walked their beats, back and forth. The men needed no slickers tonight; each carried a shovel on his shoulder. On one side each man looked far down the slope of the levee, and saw the street-lights of some little town still burning or perhaps only the wide stretches of the valley where the scattered houses showed no lights. On his other side, the patrol looked out almost on his own level, and saw the brown backwater among the leafless willows of the stream-margin; beyond the willows flowed the swift water of the channel.

  At one o’clock word was telephoned from Kennett, far north under the peak of Shasta, that the upper Sacramento had crested at twenty-four-point-six, and was falling. This crest was high enough to be dangerous, but it would not arrive in the lower river for several days and could be disregarded for the moment.

  The critical stream was still the American. Although the rain in the foothills had ceased twelve hours previous, the crest had not yet had time to descend to the plain. Every fifteen minutes the General had a telephone call from his deputy at Sacramento gauge where the American poured into the main river. Hour by hour the water rose—twenty-seven-point-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-eight-point-one.

  By now so much water was flooding from the American that it almost monopolized the main channel below its mouth. The water from the upper river had topped the wickets of Sacramento Weir, and was flowing across in streams two feet deep. At either end of the long weir a man stood on guard; the moonlight glinted upon the star of a deputy sheriff and showed the bulge of the pistol at his hip. There were many people who might like to have those wickets opened, and the General was taking no chances.

  Between two and three, the gau
ge held steady. Perhaps, thought the General, the crest had arrived; perhaps he had held the American. But then the gauge crept up—twenty-eight-point-three, twenty-eight-point-five. Beyond twenty-nine it must not go. The trouble, the General suddenly realized, was with the Sacramento itself. Under present conditions the four miles between the weir and the mouth of the American should be practically still water. But now the outlet through the weir was not sufficient, and the water still pressed down against the outflow of the American and rose against the levees around the sleeping city. The telephone rang, and the deputy reported twenty-eight-point-seven. On top of that was another call—police headquarters; a patrol-car just reporting, three inches of seepage water covering a street. Again the telephone—northwest wind freshening, waves slopping at the top of the American levee, we’re holding it with a row of sand-bags; not dangerous—yet.

  The General shrugged his shoulders. Like a good soldier he had held his lines until he could retreat with honor. He gave his orders.

  Men hurried along Sacramento Weir. They knocked out the pins holding the wickets in place. An eight-foot wall of water swept through.

  Then occurred what might seem a miracle. Along four miles of its course the great swirling river grew still, and then reversed its flow. Water which had passed the weir on its way to the sea, now turned and flowed back up-stream. The suck of the suddenly opened wickets seemed to annul the power of gravity. Even the American felt the pull; part of its waters continued down the main channel, but part took the up-channel, and flowing through the weir entered the by-pass. The level at Sacramento gauge fell half a foot in ten minutes.

  The General started home to bed. As he drove his car along the dry streets under the bright moon, he again felt that sense of the unreality of disaster on such a night. Yet the opening of the weir was sending down water which would flood thousands of acres in the delta. Already he had sent out the warning.