Isaac's Storm (50 page)

He
retired
in
1935,
at
the
bureau's
request,
and
opened
a
small
art
shop
on
Peter
Street
in
New
Orleans.
He
never
remarried.
He
mourned
the
passing
of
slower
days
before
cars
and
aircraft,
but
he
filled
his
time
to
the
maximum.
He
filled
it
with
burnt
umber
and
cerulean
blue,
linseed
oil
and
turpentine,
and
the
cold
caress
of
ancient
bronze.

"Time
lost
can
never
be
recovered,"
he
said,
"and
this
should
be
written
in
flaming
letters
everywhere."

Isaac
Monroe
Cline
died
at
8:30
P.M.,
August
3,1955,
at
the
age
of
ninety-three,
just
as
Hurricane
Connie
emerged
from
the
Caribbean.
Joseph
died
a
week
later.
The
two
had
not
spoken
for
years.

The
Law
of
Probabilities
 

WILLIS
MOORE
BELIEVED
the
Galveston
hurricane
to
be
a
freak
of
nature.
"Galveston
should
take
heart,"
he
wrote,
"as
the
chances
are
that
not
once
in
a
thousand
years
would
she
be
so
terribly
stricken."
But
another
intense
hurricane
struck
in
1915.
It
hurled
a
schooner
and
its
crew
over
the
top
of
the
seawall
into
the
city.
Throughout
the
storm,
there
was
dancing
at
the
Hotel
Galvez.
Other
hurricanes
struck
or
came
very
near
in
1919,
1932,
1941,
1943,
1949,
1957,
1961,
and
1983.
The
1961
storm
was
Carla,
which
caused
the
mass
evacuation
of
a
quarter
million
people
from
Galveston
and
surrounding
lowlands.
The
seawall
held
Carla
at
bay,
but
the
storm,
as
if
frustrated,
launched
four
tornadoes
into
the
city,
destroying
120
buildings
over
twenty
blocks.

The
death
toll
in
Galveston
from
all
these
hurricanes
together
was
under
one
hundred,
yet
toward
the
end
of
the
twentieth
century,
meteorologists
still
considered
Galveston
one
of
the
most
likely
targets
for
the
next
great
hurricane
disaster.
Unlike
their
peers
in
the
administration
of
Willis
Moore,
they
feared
that
the
American
public
might
be
placing
too
much
trust
in
their
predictions.
People
seemed
to
believe
that
technology
had
stripped
hurricanes
of
their
power
to
kill.
No
hurricane
expert
endorsed
this
view.
None
believed
the
days
of
mesoscale
death
were
gone
for
good.
The
more
they
studied
hurricanes,
the
more
they
realized
how
little
they
knew
of
their
origins
and
the
forces
that
governed
their
travels.
There
was
talk
that
warming
seas
could
produce
hyper-canes
twice
as
powerful
as
the
Galveston
hurricane.
Insurance
companies,
appalled
by
Hurricane
Andrew
and
fearing
much
worse,
quietly
began
pulling
out
of
vulnerable
areas.
In
the
last
years
of
the
century
a
hurricane
with
the
banal
name
Mitch
killed
thousands
in
Latin
America
and
sank
a
lovely
sail-powered
passenger
ship.
The
Army
Corps
of
Engineers
discovered
a
curious
quirk
in
the
New
York-New
Jersey
coasdine
and
proposed,
soberly,
that
even
a
moderate
hurricane
on
just
the
right
track
could
drown
commuters
in
the
subway
tunnels
under
Lower
Manhattan.
The
seas
rose;
summers
seemed
to
warm;
the
Bering
Glacier
began
to
pulse
and
flowjust
as
it
had
one
hundred
years
before.
But
in
the
narrow
blue-bordered
lands
of
Galveston,
extravagant
new
homes
rose
on
forests
of
stilts
adjacent
to
blue
evacuation
signs
that
marked
the
island's
only
exit.
Whenever
a
tropical
storm
threatened,
residents
converged
on
die
city's
gleaming
Wal-Mart
to
buy
batteries
and
flashlights
and
bottled
water.
Once,
in
a
time
long
past
when
men
believed
they
could
part
mountains,
a
very
different
building
stood
in
the
Wal-Mart's
place,
and
behind
its
mist-clouded
windows
ninety-three
children
who
did
not
know
better
happily
awaited
the
coming
of
the
sea.

NOTES
 

IT
IS
ONE
thing
to
write
Great
Man
history,
quite
another
to
explore
the
lives
of
history's
little
men.
Theodore
Roosevelt
left
volumes
of
material;
Isaac
Monroe
Cline
left
little.
Indeed,
all
that
Isaac
possessed
prior
to
September
8,
1900,
was
destroyed.
How,
then,
does
one
fill
in
the
blanks?
I
approached
the
problem
the
way
a
paleontologist
approaches
a
collection
of
bones.
Even
with
so
little
to
go
on,
he
manages
to
stretch
over
those
bones
a
vision
of
how
the
creature
looked
and
behaved.
I
have
been
absolutely
Calvinist
about
the
bones
of
this
story
—
dates,
times,
temperatures,
wind
speeds,
identities,
relationships,
and
so
forth.
Elsewhere,
I
used
detective
work
and
deduction
to
try
to
convey
a
vivid
sense
of
what
Isaac
Cline
saw,
heard,
smelled,
and
experienced
in
his
journey
toward
and
through
the
great
hurricane
of
1900.

Luckily,
Isaac
left
a
memoir,
Storms,
Floods
and
Sunshine,
published
in
1945.
It
reveals
little
of
his
emotional
life,
but
provided
insights
into
the
character
of
late-nineteenth-
and
early-twentieth-century
America
that
one
would
be
hard-pressed
to
find
elsewhere.
Where
else
could
one
learn
that
the
state
of
Arkansas
had
become
so
fed
up
with
improper
pronunciations
of
the
state's
name
that
it
passed
legislation
making
the
official
pronunciation
"Arkansaw"?

I
hunted
Isaac's
trail,
too,
through
the
wonderfully
rich,
achingly
fragile
archives
of
the
Weather
Bureau,
lodged
in
the
new
National
Archives
Annex
outside
Washington
—
a
place
that
makes
deep
historical
research
not
a
chore
but
an
exciting
and
always
profitable
journey.

I
touched
records,
it
seemed,
that
no
one
had
touched
for
the
better
part
of
a
century.
I
handled
the
very
telegrams
that
Willis
Moore,
chief
of
the
bureau,
himself
had
touched.
I
sneezed
a
lot.

Equally
important,
if
more
sterile,
were
the
microfiche
copies
of
Clara
Barton's
papers
at
the
Library
of
Congress.
Barton
knew
her
place
in
history.
She
kept
letters
and
drafts
of
letters,
telegrams
and
drafts
of
telegrams,
even
mundane
communications
aimed
at
securing
free
transportation
to
and
from
Galveston.
(The
Pullman
Palace
Company
gave
her
a
richly
appointed
Palace
car,
which
railroads
agreed
to
pull
at
no
charge.)
Most
striking
was
her
growing
frustration
at
the
discord
that
always
seemed
to
accompany
her
forays
into
the
field.

The
single
most
valuable
trove
of
documents
on
the
hurricane,
however,
lies
in
Galveston's
Rosenberg
Library,
God's
gift
to
any
student
of
the
great
hurricane.
The
library
has
hundreds
of
letters
and
personal
accounts
that
describe
the
storm,
and
over
four
thousand
photographs,
some
quite
macabre.
I
mined
the
library's
holdings
for
anything
that
might
provide
a
fragment
of
my
dinosaur's
skin.
I
used
photographs
as
original
documents
and
spent
hours
studying
them
with
a
magnifying
glass.
I
used
details
from
these
photographs
to
decorate
the
scenes
in
Isaac's
Storm.
For
example,
I
describe
in
one
section
what
Isaac
saw
from
the
house
where
he
and
his
daughters
came
ashore
the
night
of
the
storm.
Incredibly,
the
Rosenberg
archive
has
a
photograph
of
exacdy
that
view.

One
resource
I
found
exceptionally
useful
was
the
library's
very
detailed
map
of
Galveston
in
1899
(see
"Fire
Insurance
Map,"
in
Sources),
an
immense
bound
volume
that
told
me
Isaac's
house
was
one
of
the
largest
in
the
neighborhood,
that
it
had
a
slate
roof,
a
small
stable
out
back,
and
porches
or
"galleries"
on
the
north
and
south
sides.
The
map
showed
me,
too,
where
his
house
stood
in
relation
to
the
homes
of
neighbors
like
Dr.
Samuel
O.
Young
and
Judson
Palmer.
It
showed
me
that
as
Isaac
headed
toward
the
city
Saturday
morning
after
his
first
visit
to
the
beach
he
would
have
passed
near
a
wood-planing
mill,
a
bulk
coffee
roaster,
and
numerous
livery
stables,
some
occupying
entire
blocks.
Each
must
have
perfumed
the
day.
Anyone
transported
to
Isaac's
time,
I
contend,
would
have
found
the
air
permeated
by
the
scent
of
horse
sweat
and
manure.

In
places
I
relied
on
my
own
observations.
I
did
so,
for
example,
in
describing
the
big
fat
dragonflies
of
Galveston
Island,
the
behavior
of
seagulls
in
a
north
wind,
and
the
colors
of
wave
crests
during
a
tropical
storm.
I
was
lucky
enough
on
one
visit
to
arrive
just
after
a
severe
tropical
storm
and
before
the
arrival
of
another.
At
one
point,
as
the
sun
fell,
I
found
myself
lost
on
a
narrow
spit
of
land
somewhere
east
of
Corpus
Christi,
with
radio
newscasters
reporting
that
everyone
living
near
the
beach
was
being
urged
to
evacuate
by
nightfall.
The
sea
never
looked
so
lovely,
and
so
deadly.

I
HAVE
TRIED
to
keep
these
notes
as
concise
as
possible.
Where
a
citation
refers
to
a
document
used
only
once,
a
full
description
of
the
document
follows
immediately.
In
all
other
cases,
the
citation
refers
to
a
more
complete
bibliographic
reference
in
the
Sources
section.

Telegram

1.
Do
you
hear:
Telegram,
National
Archives.
General
Correspondence.

The
Beach:
September
8,1900

3.
Not
everyone
found
Galveston
a
fairy
land
of
wealth
and
gleaming
streets.
The
sixteenth-century
Spanish
called
it
the
Isla
de
Malhado,
the
"Isle
of
Misfortune."
Yellow
fever
scourged
the
place
in
1867
and
prompted
Amelia
Barr,
a
resident
whose
husband
and
two
sons
died
in
the
outbreak,
to
call
it
the
"city
of
dreadful
death."
On
the
hottest
days,
she
wrote,
the
city's
tropical
climate
could
be
unbearable.
"An
hour
or
two
of
pouring,
beating,
tropical
rain,
and
dien
an
hour
or
two
of
such
awful
heat
and
baleful
sunshine,
as
the
language
...
has
no
words
to
describe."
The
port
thrived,
but
at
the
expense
of
global
goodwill.
The Galveston
Wharf
Company
held
such
monopolistic
control
over
the
wharves
that
the
company
became
known
from
New
York
to
Liverpool
as
the
Octopus
of
the
Gulf.
Gen.
P.
H.
Sheridan
took
the
occasion
of
a
visit
to
Galveston
to
issue
one
of
the
most
infamous
geographical
slanders
of
all
time.
"If
I
owned
Texas
and
hell,"
he
said,
"I'd
rent
out
Texas
and
live
in
hell."
3.
He
taught
Sunday
school:
First
Baptist
Church.