by Erik Larson
Under ordinary circumstances, the process of rain production depletes clouds. The “sink rate,” or the rate at which water leaves a cloud, exceeds the supply of moisture arriving from the air and sea below, causing clouds to dissipate like ghosts returning to the afterworld. But hurricanes defeat this cycle. They use wind to harvest moisture and deliver it to their centers. As the wind races along the surface of the sea, it increases the rate of evaporation and captures spindrift and foam. The faster the wind blows, the more vapor it picks up and the more energy it transfers to the storm. The resulting surge of condensation and heat in the storm’s core causes even greater volumes of air to rush into the sky. Pressure falls again. Wind velocities increase. The cycle repeats itself.
The result can be rainfall more akin to the flow from a faucet than from a cloud.
In 1979 a tropical storm named Claudette blew off the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston and deluged the town of Alvin, Texas, with forty-two inches of rain in twenty-four hours, still the U.S. record for sheer intensity. A Philippine typhoon holds the world’s record, dropping 73.62 inches in twenty-four hours. Total accumulations have been higher, however. Ninety-six and a half inches of rain once fell on Silver Hill, Jamaica, over four days. That’s eight feet. In 1899 a hurricane dropped an estimated 2.6 billion tons of water on Puerto Rico. Hurricane Camille, which came ashore on the Gulf Coast in August 1969, was still flush with water two days later when it reached Virginia. With no advance warning from the Weather Bureau, it jettisoned thirty inches of rain in six hours. Hillsides turned to mud, then to an earthen slurry that flowed at highway speeds. In Virginia alone, 109 people lost their lives.
Camille’s rain fell with such ferocity it was said to have filled the overhead nostrils of birds and drowned them from the trees.
GALVESTON
Louisa Rollfing
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, was a big day in the home of August and Louisa Rollfing, a day for serious celebration. August, the housepainter secretly identified as a deadbeat in the Giles directory, had managed at last to make the final payment on the family’s treasured piano. The moment had a resonance beyond the purchase itself. The piano was, literally, an anchor. It was heavy and big; just moving it into the house had required a huge effort—it had to be lifted in through a window.
This was their seventh house in Galveston. The house was a rental like all the others, but the piano made it feel more permanent, and Louisa badly needed such a sign. She was tired of moving. At each new address she had thrown herself into the task of making old and worn rooms look not only new, but as if they belonged to people of wealth.
She and August had been through so much turmoil, both individually and together. Both had come to America from Germany, August first at the age of one and with tragic bad timing. He and his parents arrived just as the Civil War began. His father, William, was promptly drafted, and just as promptly killed.
Louisa came to America much later, as a young woman. She had lived on an island in the North Sea, but had grown restless. There was so much talk of America. It started when a man named Daniel Goos came back to the island to visit family and told everyone of his big sawmill in a place called Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he had a wife and children and a large home. He needed more workers. He offered to take sixty people back with him to America. He would guarantee them jobs and advance them money for their passage. Many people Louisa knew went with him and they in turn sent for brothers, sisters, cousins, and sweethearts, until it seemed as if everyone was headed for America. A cousin and his wife now lived in Lake Charles and wrote often, each letter arriving at Louisa’s house in a huge yellow envelope that her father placed in the window, a beacon of adventure that drew Louisa and her siblings at a run. “Just to hear the word America caused an excited feeling,” Louisa wrote.
Each year more people left. The island got smaller and smaller. Her work as a housekeeper and companion for an elderly woman, Madam Michelson, made it positively tiny. There were days, it seemed, when Madam was the only person she saw. Louisa was lonely and dissatisfied and the idea of America crept deeper and deeper into her heart, until one day she simply resolved to go.
Her cousin sent her a ticket. She packed her things. Her confidence held until the night before her journey when she found herself lying awake, her heart racing, sleep an impossibility. “All at once I realized what it meant to leave everyone that was dear to me.” The only thing that kept her going was the fact that her cousin would be waiting for her at the other side of the world. “I will never forget, when I saw Mother at the window, her big blue eyes filled with tears, smiling bravely—I had to run into the house and put my arms around her and kiss her again.”
Louisa sailed on the North German Lloyd liner Nurnberg, accompanied by two young widows she had met in the emigrant hotel where everyone stayed before the voyage. Louisa was booked to travel in something called steerage, but had no idea what that meant. No one had told her she was supposed to bring her own blanket. Aboard ship, she and her new friends entered a great chamber “with nothing but wooden boxes on short wooden legs, with a thin mattress of straw on it, nothing else—they called them beds! Rows and rows of them. At the entrance was a great barrel, and we wondered for what?”
Louisa estimated that two hundred people occupied the hold, including complete families. “Oh I thought I would die. And cried bitterly. The two young widows felt just as bad as I did, and we shook hands that we would not be separated.”
Soon after the voyage began, everyone got seasick, and the purpose of the great barrel became all too evident.
Louisa rebelled. She and her friends accosted an officer and demanded a more private place. They were women, after all. And single.
The officer had never before heard such a request, but agreed to look into the matter and later that day offered them a room in the stern, even to build them a partition for privacy—provided they could gather enough other single women to make the effort worthwhile. Louisa and her friends corralled thirty-four.
The journey to New Orleans and from there to Lake Charles took forty-two days. Her adventures began as soon as she arrived. She tried her first banana, and fell in love with it. She met her first black man. She was walking through a lovely stand of pine trees, when he appeared suddenly on the path ahead. “I got so scared that I just sat down, but he only said ‘Good Day’ and passed. He did not kill me.”
She caught the measles. “I got very sick,” she said. “For a long time someone had to be up all night with me, and I did not even know it.” She finally got out of bed six weeks later. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw that someone had cut off all her hair. She weighed only eighty-nine pounds, one-third less than when she had stepped off the boat. She had been beautiful. Now she was ugly. She was weak and vulnerable to other illness. A doctor advised that she move to a place with a healthier climate, perhaps Galveston.
Her train was halfway across one of the trestles that spanned Galveston Bay when she awoke and saw only water on both sides of her coach. She was terrified. She had not known Galveston was on an island and wondered how exactly she had ended up aboard a boat.
She was glad, later, that she had been unable to see the flimsy trestle. “I would have been scared even more.”
In Galveston, Louisa took work as a housekeeper for a family named Voelker. On a Sunday visit to the home of Mrs. August Rollfing, the widow of a sea captain who had drowned in a storm off Galveston, she met Mrs. Rollfing’s nephew, also named August. He was, Louisa confessed, “the nicest looking young man I had ever seen.”
Not just handsome—but talented. He was a painter, and he played guitar and piano, and sang so beautifully. “He had a lovely tenor voice and I enjoyed it more than anything else in the world.”
Some while later he proposed to her, if a mite obliquely. “Don’t you think, Louisa, we could always be happy together, and that we should get married?”
It was a lucky thing that neither put much stock in omens.
One evening in November 1885, a week before their wedding, Louisa sat working on her wedding dress, a wonderful thing of gray cashmere with lace trim. She stopped work around midnight, folded the dress carefully, and brought it up to the room. “I wasn’t even asleep when the fire whistle blew, and we saw a fire over at the north.”
A powerful north wind was blowing—a blue norther—which quickly fueled the fire and blew sparks and large flaming cinders onto downwind homes. Another house caught fire. Then another. Louisa threw on some clothes, as did everyone else in the Voelker house, and all watched the blaze. No one thought the Voelkers’ house might be in danger. The fires were still all so distant.
Butterflies of flame drifted through the sky. One moment the air was hot with radiated heat, the next, bitterly cold from the fierce north wind. A neighbor’s house caught fire. Voelker climbed to his roof with a garden hose. Everyone else began hauling things out of the house. Louisa placed her trousseau in a trunk, which wound up on the sidewalk. The house caught fire. Trees caught fire. The trunk caught fire. Even Louisa’s coat caught fire.
That night half of Galveston burned to the ground, and with it Louisa’s trousseau—but, luckily, not her dress.
August and Louisa married on schedule. Even disaster could not dampen their spirits. “I can’t imagine anybody happier than we were at that time,” she recalled. “It took so very little to make us happy and contented.”
During one of their many walks, they spotted a small white house for rent at 32nd and Broadway, and leased it the next day. It had a front porch, back porch, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and a picket fence that surrounded the yard. Louisa threw herself into fixing it up. She bought a bed with a red canopy. She put up cream curtains with red tiebacks and made a red-and-white bedspread. She bought a large rug, lace curtains, and a hanging lamp with prisms and colored glass. She made a drape to cover a window in the living room that opened on the kitchen, and August decorated one side with a painting of flowers, fruit, and cupids. Soon the house was awash in rich colors touched with flowers and gold. “We felt as if we had heaven on earth.”
Louisa sewed to raise extra cash, and took in more and more work. Was it too much work, she wondered forever after—too much for a woman pregnant with her first child?
Peter August was born April 8, 1888, months too soon. “He was just like a little doll and his little hand would lay in my hand.” Her doctor told her to nurse the baby every two hours, but she could not. She was sick and weak and Peter August refused to nurse. “I did not have any experience, maybe he could have been saved if I had Mother near me.”
Her son lived seventeen days.
For the funeral, Mrs. Voelker placed tiny white rosebuds over Peter’s body and one rose in his hand. Louisa was too sick to accompany her baby to the cemetery. She watched as August placed the boy in a tiny white coffin and carried him to a carriage parked out front. It was days before Louisa could go to the cemetery. “When I came the first time they had his full name laid out with little white shells, and planted violets, and they were growing, for they came every day and watered them.” August ordered the construction of a small wooden cross, then painted it himself. With ever so much care he painted his son’s name and the dates of his life on the cross-spar, in gold letters.
“Now we had a place to go,” Louisa remembered, many many years later. “It was our first sorrow.”
She could not imagine loving her husband more.
Another child followed, “our little Helen,” born fifteen months later. Louisa was fiercely proud and thought the child the most beautiful creature on earth, although in fact the baby was quite plump. “I can’t see any nose,” August teased. Louisa was furious. At night she placed Helen in a baby buggy under a big, loosely draped mosquito net. “She looked like a little fat angel.”
Two years later, another baby arrived, this one August Otto. The couple’s landlady, a Mrs. Carville, came to visit the new baby, and saw for the first time all that Louisa and August had done with the house. She promptly raised the rent. August was irate.
They moved. Then moved again, had another baby—Atlanta Anna, or simply “Lanta”—and moved again. One thing after another forced them to leave houses into which Louisa had poured her soul. But the sixth house made it all seem worth it. “We found a very nice small two-story at such a reasonable price, that I could hardly believe it.” Again she fixed it up, to the point where one Sunday afternoon an elderly couple, guests for dinner, arrived and wound up hopelessly confused, thinking they had come to the home of rich people, until Louisa, who had watched from the parlor window, gaily opened the front door and announced, “It is the right place!”
But it was not. Something was wrong. Someone else apparently had poured a soul into this house, but this soul had not yet departed. Evenings, after Louisa had put the children to bed, she sat alone until about ten o’clock, the time when August usually returned from rehearsing the amateur musicals in which he sang (sang, perhaps, alongside Isaac Cline, another tenor). She would settle in the living room to sew or read, but always she was seized by the same strange feeling. “It always felt as if something was looking over my shoulder; when I looked around there wasn’t anything.”
One night August felt it too. “I was alone,” he said, “and still wasn’t alone; there was something creepy around me.”
They resolved to move yet again. “I was awfully disappointed,” Louisa said. “Everything was so pretty and I was tired of cleaning and fixing.”
They found another little two-story house, at 18th and O½, about ten blocks from Isaac’s house and only two and a half blocks from the beach.
That summer—the summer of 1900—little August disappeared. It was a Sunday afternoon. The children were out playing. Louisa called them in for dinner. Helen and Lanta came, but not August. They had dinner, and still August did not come, and Louisa and her husband began to worry. The beach had always been an anxiety for Louisa, as it was for most parents in Galveston’s beach neighorhoods. “I went east and August went west,” she wrote. She walked the sand until exhausted, but did not find the boy. When she turned the corner onto her street, she saw that a crowd of children had gathered on the sidewalk in front of her house. She knew the worst had happened. She wanted to run to the house, but could not. Her limbs felt so heavy. She could hardly move.
She saw no one on the first floor. She climbed to the second and there found her husband. She said nothing, asked nothing. Soon her husband told the story—how little August and a friend had wandered to the beach, and walked and walked without realizing the distance. The walk back had taken forever.
Louisa served her son his dinner. Then the rest of the family, including young August, set out for an evening stroll. Louisa stayed back for a little while, in the warm light of dusk. She cried. And when she was done, she too walked to the beach and caught up with her family. It was a lovely evening, the sea so peaceful and edged in the gold of the setting sun, the mist blending all the blues and golds and the black and white of the hundreds of people who strolled also along the beach, none aware that for a few moments that afternoon she believed her heart broken for all time.
On Saturday, September 1, August made that last payment on the piano. Next, he resolved, he would find a piano teacher for Helen.
“If we had known what the future had in store,” Louisa wrote, “we would not have had any pleasure in anything we did enjoy so.”
THE LEVY BUILDING
Isaac’s Map
AT THREE O’CLOCK in the morning, Tuesday, September 4, a lightning strike knocked out the incandescent-lamp dynamo at the Brush Electric Power plant in Galveston and cast the city’s public buildings into darkness. The blackout showed how quickly people had grown dependent on electric lights, how willingly they abandoned the bad old days of gas jets, lamp oil, and kerosene.
At the police station, officers scrambled to find some means of lighting the station and its jail cells. A witness found an eerie scene: “A
large assortment of miscellaneous lamps and lanterns shed faint gleams of light that were distressing to behold.” The police had scavenged two calcium-carbide bicycle lights from the department’s two patrol bicycles. Two old “bull’s-eye” lamps dating to the 1870s “cast a flickering yellow ray of light within a radius of about eight inches.” The police found and deployed three old railroad lanterns, which burned bright for ten minutes, then began to waver. The art of trimming and coaxing such lamps had been lost. The officers located the station’s old gas jets, but these were in such poor shape they dared not light them. They did not possess any candles.
Isaac heard the first clap of thunder at 3:48 A.M., and later noted the time in the station’s daily journal. He stayed up to listen, partly out of professional responsibility, partly because, like all meteorologists ever born, he loved thunderstorms. He walked onto his second-floor porch and there noted the occurrence of each electric burst, and how different the lightning was from that in Tennessee. In the knob country of his childhood it writhed across the sky in ruptured webs. Here it came in blue-white shafts, each spasm like the flare of flash powder from a photographer’s trowel. In that instant, Galveston became an Arctic city of silver and black, a dying mariner’s dream.
The loudest thunder occurred at 4:57 A.M., Isaac noted, the last at 5:20. The storm had come from the southeast, the direction of Cuba.
After breakfast, Isaac walked to the office. High above the warehouses along the wharf he saw thickets of masts and spars and the tall funnels of steamships. Some mornings, the varnish and brass caught the sun and made this tangle of line and wood gleam as if glazed by an ice storm. When the breezes were sluggish, smoke from coal-fueled steamships drifted over the streets in fat indigo plumes until the entire wharf seemed to smolder. One of the newest arrivals was the big British Roma, which had docked Sunday after a passage from New York. Its captain had the improbable name Storms.