Storm

by George R. Stewart

  He had lost both his fights. First he flooded the highway, and in the end he had to open the wickets. Flooding the asparagus country was a nasty business; but at least it saved the city—like sacrificing a platoon to save a battalion. And somebody had to take the responsibility. The next few days might raise some excitement. But barring accident, the levees and by-passes would carry the runoff; the rivers would crest successively, and the storm was over.

  Yet other storms would come; again the brown water would rise against the levees. In the end the levees would go down—a hundred years, a thousand years; but in the end they would go, and the men who built them.

  Perhaps it was only that he had lost a night’s sleep; he felt old. He sensed a great weariness, of storms that came and went, of water that fell as rain and rushed through the rivers, only to return again as rain. He knew there was a quotation, not Bret Harte this time, something more ancient. What was it all about—this ceaseless, ineffective activity of storms, and of men? Then he found the quotation somewhere back in his mind: “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they also return again.” The cold northwest wind eddied about the General’s neck, and he shivered.

  5

  The Old Master was dead. A drenching, a chill—and he had never rallied.

  “Gosh!” said Whitey. “It won’t be like the same place without him dropping in to see what the map looked like. As long as I remember, he was so old he never seemed to get older.”

  The Chief and the J. M. bent together over the map. It looked much the same as it had during the weeks before the coming of Maria. The Pacific High, rearing like some sea-monster, thrust itself against the California coast and joined with a continental high over the Great Basin. Far to the north lay the storm-track. Over New York City was Little Maria; the new storm which had brought the chinook to the northern plains was moving across Manitoba; Victoria, magnificent in maturity, held the Gulf of Alaska.

  But neither the Chief nor the J. M. was really thinking of the map.

  “He was a good weather-man—for his day,” said the Chief. “You know, I can’t help liking the way he went—with his boots on. The barometer rose a little, and he forecast clearing; he left his umbrella in the rack, and went out on his own convictions.”

  “Crazy,” said the J. M.

  “Bad judgment at least,” said the Chief. “He was an old man. Probably he was a little gone. I don’t mean to say he’d have done a thing like that when he was at his best. In those days he had a real feeling for weather. Without the instruments and reporting-service we have today, I’ve known him to make some amazing forecasts. I don’t yet know how he did it.”

  “Luck, maybe,” said the J. M.; he talked more boldly to the Chief now.

  “Well, in this world who doesn’t need luck? Hn-n? And forecasting will be a mighty dull business when it’s no guessing and all slide-rules.”

  In the pause the J. M. knew that he should say something; he felt the glancing reference to himself and all the new meteorology; but he did not think of any words, and the Chief went on. Somewhere in the Chief, the J. M. realized now, there was a vein of poetry.

  “Storms or men,” he was saying. “Hn-n? They get born, and they grow up, and they get old and die. (Some of them die before they grow up.) Everything is always changing, and always it comes back to what it was before. Storms come and go, but there’s always weather. I’ve seen a lot of them—storms and men. Each one is different. There are the big bluffers, and the sneaks, and the honest dependable ones. Some of them will sulk for days, and some will stab you in the back, and some walk out on you between night and morning, and some do exactly what you expect of them.”

  “It’s all a matter of air-mass properties and relationships,” said the J. M. stubbornly, still remembering that remark about the slide-rule. “And in men, doctors say, it’s glands working.”

  But the Chief did not seem to notice. “Storms and men—they’re all different, and yet they’re all the same. Each little storm starts out hopefully, but until it’s all over, you can’t say whether it was better than the ones that went before it—or as good.”

  The J. M. felt the implication of that remark too, but there was nothing to say.

  “And in the end,” the Chief went on, “it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Every storm mixes up the air a bit. Sometimes it raises quite a hullabaloo. Then it’s gone, and there you are in a high-pressure area just where you were before, with maybe another storm showing up on the edge of the map. Month in, month out, a lot of wind blows, but at the end of the year everything is just about where it was before.”

  The Chief moved on to other work. The J. M. still looked at the map.

  Maria was dead—completely vanished. Perhaps off the Olympic Peninsula or Vancouver Island there might be areas of drizzle and shower, but no ships were there to report. The air which had composed Maria twenty-four hours before had now turned to new courses and revolved around other centers of activity. But she had been a good storm—Maria!

  He turned back over his charts. He told himself that it would be a good idea to study, scientifically, the history of that storm. Actually, he realized that he was sentimental about Maria. Twelve days back he found that first little closed isobar shaped like a football which he had drawn half way between Titijima and Hatidyosima. Day by day, in twenty-four hour jumps, he followed Maria across the Pacific. She grew larger; her fronts became more sharply defined, her winds more violent. He saw her on the day when she smashed the Byzantion. The great outburst of polar air drove her to the south, and then blocked her passage inland. From her sixth to her eleventh day she had brought rain and snow to California. She had given birth to Little Maria. Then, with a rapidity remarkable even for a storm, she had died.

  From south of Kamchatka the Junior Meteorologist followed the long blue line of a cold front southwestward along the chain of the Kuril Islands and across the Sea of Japan. Somewhere along that line a new wave should be forming—a wave which might develop into a great storm like Maria. But now no ship happened to be at the proper location.

  6

  The Captain was spruce in his uniform of the Highway Patrol. He drove into the garage at Donner Summit, and talked with the Superintendent.

  “How’s everything?” he asked, noticing that the Superintendent was heavy-eyed and tired-looking.

  “Quiet enough today. We were blocked eight hours, the other night.”

  “Tellin’ me? We had our own time with the traffic that you—that couldn’t get through.”

  “Well, she beat us; that’s all. We lost the road.”

  “Tough! Yes, that sure was tough!—But, say, that’s not what I stopped in about. Maybe you can help us. A fellow and a girl left Frisco the first night of the storm—driving for Reno. Haven’t been located since. D’you hear of it?”

  “Haven’t had time for papers or for radio—except weather reports.”

  “A service-station man we talked to last night in Auburn is pretty sure they were the ones he sold some gas to. So they’re probably along this road all right.”

  “Yes, they would be.”

  The Superintendent thought back through the days of the storm. He knew every foot of his road; he could remember for weeks a detail which another man would not have noticed in the first place.

  “Come on,” he said. “There’s a spot we’ll take a look at, just down from the crest of the Pass here. I noticed a broken snow-stake there, back about the beginning of the storm; it didn’t look just like snow-plow work.”

  At the place, they got out of the car. The day was cold on the Pass after the storm—a steel-sharp wind from the north, close to zero. They found the broken snow-stake, and floundered through the snow-wall toward the edge of the cliff. (There had been no snow-wall on the first night of the storm.) They peered over the
hundred-foot drop; even through the snow, jagged rocks stuck out.

  “Look!” said the Superintendent, pointing.

  During the last night it had not snowed, and now on the shining white surface far below them the two men made out an intricate criss-cross of delicate markings.

  “Coyote tracks—he must have smelled something!”

  They went back to the Maintenance Station for a shoveling crew. The truck had to go down around the curve of the road, and then the men went in toward the base of the cliff on skis.

  After fifteen minutes digging, they found the car. It was badly smashed.

  The Captain looked upward toward the top of the cliff. “Blinded in a snow-flurry, probably,” he said.

  They wrapped each body in a blanket, made sleds by fastening two skis side by side, and dragged them across the deep snow to the highway.

  7

  Once again the clipper was well upon its course. Day after day the flight had been postponed, through that week while the storm held dominion. Now once more, the great and gentle swirl of air which men call the Pacific High lay above the far-reaching ocean between the Hawaiian Islands and North America. Northeast by east, the pilot laid his course, until at a point calculated in advance by compromise of distance and wind-conditions, he must turn more toward the east.

  Ten days before, the same pilot had flown toward Honolulu. Then he had skirted to the south of the center of high pressure. Today, men skilled in the ways of the air had charted his route farther north, so that for two-thirds of the distance steady southwest winds might aid his flight.

  The sky without clouds, the unfeatured ocean, gave no points of reference. Once again poised between sky and ocean, the great clipper seemed to hover motionless.

  8

  On the Pass where old trapper Greenwood and hawk-nosed Elisha Stevens first led the way, a golden sun in a blue sky shone dazzlingly on the fresh white snow. The cedars were dark green columns, powdered with shining crystals. Cars lined the highway. Costumed in red and blue, dark-goggled against the glare, the skiers moved swiftly across the snow. Where the violet-gray shadows of the firs lay upon the whiteness, the skiers pulled their jackets close, but in the sunshine they cast back their jackets and rejoiced in the brisk air. In the ski-tracks the light of the sun, refracted among the snow-crystals, gleamed in ethereal blue.

  In that world as clean and beautiful as mortal man can ever know, the skiers came to play; but along the highway the men in the plows still worked on. The road between the ten-foot snow-walls was like a deep-cut trench. With cutter-bars deep in the snow-wall, the spouting rotaries cast their white fountains far among the trees. The storm was over, but the storm would come again. All must be ready. The road was safe and two lanes wide. But the plows would keep working until the snow was thrown back clear to the line of the orange-painted snow-stakes; then, when the next storm came, there would be a reserve and margin of safety laid up against its attack.

  On the railroad the trains moved freely, but there too the plows were busy. The rotaries and the flangers must pass back and forth until all was clear and clean. The railroad must fight the storm not only while it was present, but also after it had gone and before it came.

  Where the washout had halted the streamliner, a track crew, prying with crow-bars and hacking with axes, had dislodged the carcass of Blue Boy from the two pipes. Now they had re-ballasted and re-aligned, and were finishing off. Downstream, in the still tumultuous waters of the North Fork, the fragments of the dismembered boar, hourly growing more bloated, rolled toward the sea.

  Back and forth along the highway shuttled the green trucks of Telephone. In the shadow, snow still clung heavily, but in the sun the spans were unloading—slu-ush, slu-ush; the wires vibrated sharply for a few moments and then were still. The linemen inspected the work done hastily in the storm. Where the tree-bole had gone through the Transcontinental Lead, they set a new pole, strung wires of bright copper, and then gathered up the duplex which had served for the emergency.

  The chipmunk whose burrowing had removed gravel from beneath the tree-bole had not been disturbed when it rolled away; but with the tree-bole gone, cold had penetrated to his tiny hibernaculum, and he had stirred for a while uneasily in his sleep. Now the snow had drifted deep above him. He was warm, and had again sunk into a death-like slumber.

  At French Bar Dam the water was no longer spilling over the top. Mrs. Martley mended the torn knees of her husband’s pants, wondering what in the world he could have scraped them against.

  High above the Pass a plane moved from the east. Its metal glittered in the sunlight. It followed the steady hum of the Reno beam. The pilot looked down upon the far-stretching, snow-covered mountains—quiet, beautiful. Like twisting furrows in the snow he saw the highway and the railroad; as straighter lines he made out the faint trace of poles and wires. He passed the air-beacon on the crag. Over Blue Canyon he picked up the Oakland beam, and—turning—set his last course for the airport on the Pacific.

  9

  The words of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.

  10

  Again the northwest wind possessed the City. The flowers flared, yellow and blue, from the stands. The air was fresh; sunshine filled the streets. Above the tall buildings the proud flags of the great companies flaunted against the clear blue sky.

  From those citadels the commanders against the storm reviewed the last combat and planned the next. The General Manager read the report on the blocked culvert, and ordered some construction to prevent its happening again. The L. D. thought of his thousands of miles of dipping and rising wires; he looked over reports from dams and power-houses, checking storm-damage, searching for weak points in construction and personnel. In the Telephone Building the District Traffic Superintendent reviewed the storm—“That one nearly missed us; not much damage or interruption of service, taking the system as a whole; hope we do as well next time.” At the airport the Chief Service Officer had everybody on the carpet to see just why trip one-six-five had got into that unstable air; somebody was likely to be out of a job.

  High above the City—blue, blue and white, maroon, crimson and black—the great banners stood out stiffly, rippling in the steady northwest wind.

  11

  The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem: The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

  12

  Steadily the great sphere of the earth spun upon its axis, and moved in its unvarying course around the sun. From far-off Venus a watcher of the skies (if such we may imagine) viewed it as a more brilliant planet than any to be seen from the earth. It gave no sign that storms or men disturbed its tranquil round. Bright against the black of midnight, or yellow at the dawn, it hung in the sky—unflickering and serene.