Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [10]
Zebrowski proposed that the answer might lie in the science of “nonlinear dynamics”: chaos theory and the famous butterfly effect. He framed the question this way: “Could a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?”
To Zebrowski, the fact that the most detailed satellite analysis could not detect a trigger suggested that tropical storms might be influenced by forces too subtle to measure. He noted that a tiny change in the variables entered into computer models of hurricane development could yield dramatic variation later on. “One simulated storm may veer northward while another continues westward, one may intensify while another is dying, or one may stand stationary while another gallops toward a shoreline.”
Every hurricane, however, had characteristics similar to those of every other hurricane. Each, for example, developed thunderstorms and began to rotate. In chaos theory, these points of broadly similar behavior were “strange attractors.” Subtle forces could launch a system from one attractor to another—a chance gust of wind, a plume of hot sea, maybe even the sudden burst of heat from a British frigate during a gunnery drill off Dakar.
“Add a little glitch, a metaphorical butterfly, to a complex process,” Zebrowski wrote, “and sometimes you get an outcome no rational person would ever have expected.”
AS GALVESTON STEAMED, the world seethed. The Boxer Rebellion intensified. The British public grew weary of the Boer War. When Boer snipers fired on a British troop train, a British general ordered every house within ten miles burned to the ground. The order shocked London. A madman assassinated Italy’s King Humbert. In Paris, another assassin tried to kill the shah of Persia. Bubonic plague turned up in London and Glasgow. William Jennings Bryan stumped for the presidency and railed at America’s new imperialist bent, in particular the widely held belief that expansion overseas was America’s destiny. “Destiny,” he thundered, “is the subterfuge of the invertebrate.…”
The speech ran on for eight thousand words. Despite the heat, the house was packed.
THE SEAS WERE busy. A few ships must have encountered the thunder and rain but apparently their crews did not see it as anything unusual. They hung canvas to catch the rain. Steamers raised sails to save coal. Frigate birds wheeled in the cantaloupe dawn.
Galveston spun through space at nine hundred miles an hour. The trade winds blew. Great masses of air shifted without a sound.
Somewhere, a butterfly opened its wings.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Violent Commotions
DESPITE THE GREAT demands of a nineteenth-century farming life, Isaac and his brother, Joseph, remembered the world of their childhood, in the knob-hilled terrain of Monroe County, Tennessee, as an Eden-like realm through which they wandered with little parental restraint. As a hobby, and to raise spending money, Isaac trapped muskrat, mink, and otter. He rose early to check his traplines before his daily chores began. His chores began at 4:00 A.M. He was six years old.
The Cline farm was among the richest in the knobs. In fall, at acorn time, passenger pigeons gathered in the oak trees in such great numbers they hid the treetops. The land was lush with apples, peaches, strawberries, and persimmons. Ghosts populated the black places under its forests. Isaac’s uncle swore as fact that once during a hunting trip he had seen a headless woman who told him she was searching for a jug of whiskey buried fifteen years earlier by her husband. Stories circulated of a strange apelike creature spotted in the hills, and these too seemed like country tales, until the day armed