Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [13]
An ARMY SURGEON examined Isaac. He saw a lean young man of middle height with angular features, lively dark eyes, and an expression of sobriety that made you want to tell him some awful joke just to see if he could laugh. The surgeon had seen many boys like this, but under very different circumstances, and he wanted to tell this boy not to be so frightened, that his next stop was Fort Myer, not Bloody Run. Like most boys from the country, Isaac’s face was sun-torched to a point about three-quarters up his forehead where his skin turned trout-belly pale. The boy had good hands. Strong, weathered, nicked. Enterprising hands. The doctor pronounced him fit.
Isaac and three other new men climbed into a wagon led by two strong horses and driven by a man in uniform. The wagon took them west through a neighborhood the driver called Georgetown, where three- and four-story brick houses stood jammed side by side. The wagon turned south and clattered across the Georgetown Bridge into Virginia, where it continued to climb until it reached Arlington Heights.
Even in the steam of that hot afternoon, the view was stunning. To the east was the great dome of the Capitol gleaming in the heat. A mile or so closer was the Willard Hotel and the tuft of forest that masked the president’s mansion. A great stone tower dominated the landscape. It rose hundreds of feet into the sky and dwarfed every other building in sight. The tower was not yet finished. But how much higher could it possibly go? Nearer at hand, Isaac caught flashes of the Arlington mansion of Robert E. Lee and the great cemetery now aborning on its grounds.
The first soldier to greet Isaac was 1st Sgt. Mike Mahaney, a gruff Civil War veteran who showed Isaac to an oblong room with one window, running water, two double desks, and four beds. The fort’s commander, Capt. Dick Strong, his natural seriousness amplified by his heavy beard, welcomed the new men and gave them his stock charge: “You will cheerfully obey all orders without question and refrain from saying anything either commendatory or condemnatory.”
Isaac received a cavalry saber as part of his official kit. He loved its heft, and its cold hard lines, and how it evoked the stories he had heard men tell of Pickett’s Charge. Soon Isaac found himself on horseback, learning how to kill men at a gallop—even though American military strategists, horrified by the carnage of the Civil War, had by then lost their taste for cavalry assaults. Isaac was a fine backcountry horseman, and caught on so quickly that Sergeant Mahaney placed him in charge of a squad of other recruits, some of whom had come from big cities and had never ridden horses.
Isaac led them around the track at vicious speeds, forcing some to wrap their arms around their horses’ necks.
This could not have won him many friends.
THE HEART OF the weather service, and the thing that had to exist before there could even be such a service, was the telegraph. It allowed for the first time in history the rapid, simultaneous transmission of weather observations from stations thousands of miles away.
At Fort Myer, Isaac took apart and rebuilt telegraph transmitters to learn what caused the “click.” A badly mauled telegraph pole stood in a squad room where its top extended into the skylight. Isaac learned to climb the pole and to string telegraph wire.
He also learned to send and receive messages and to use a special code developed by the weather service to save time and reduce the costs of transmission. The word madman indicated a morning barometric pressure of 28.33 inches. A wind of 57 miles an hour was embalm. The code word for a wind of 150 miles an hour was extreme. The cipher allowed a telegraph operator to pack a lot of information into just a few words. One example: “Paul diction sunk Johnson imbue hersal.” Decoded, it meant: “St. Paul, 29.26 inches barometric pressure, –4 degrees temperature, wind six miles per hour, maximum temperature 10 degrees, dewpoint –18 degrees. This observation