Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [107]
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 coastline 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 flow just 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 the 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