Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [2]
The prolonged heat had warmed the waters of the Gulf to the temperature of a bath, a not-unhappy condition for the thousands of new immigrants just arrived from Europe at the Port of Galveston, known to many as the Western Ellis Island. Some camped now on the beach near the Army’s new gun emplacements, steeling themselves for the long journey north to open land and the riches promised them by railroads intent on populating America’s vast undeveloped prairie. In a pamphlet called Home Seekers, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe described the lush land of the Texas coast as “waiting to be tickled into a laughing harvest.” The railroad come-ons painted Texas as a paradise of benign weather, when in fact hurricanes scoured its coast, plumes of hot wind baked apples in its trees, and “blue northers” could drop the temperature fifty degrees in a matter of minutes. To Isaac, such quirks of weather were a fascination, and not just because he happened to be the chief weatherman in Texas. He was also a physician. He no longer saw patients, but had become a pioneer in medical climatology, the study of how weather affects people, and in this carried forth a tradition laid down by Hippocrates, who believed climate determined the character of men and nations.
Hippocrates advised any physician arriving in an unfamiliar town to first “examine its position with respect to the winds.”
As FRIDAY NIGHT ebbed into Saturday, the air at last cooled. The sudden change in temperature would come as a delightful surprise to others in Galveston, but to Isaac it was one more flicker of trouble.
He let his mind wander through the house. He heard no sound from the children’s bedrooms. His eldest daughter, Allie May, was now twelve; his middle daughter, Rosemary, was eleven. His youngest, Esther Bellew, was six, but he still called her his baby. He heard nothing also from his brother, Joseph, who lived in the house. Eight years earlier, Joseph had come to work for Isaac as an assistant observer. The two men were still close, but soon any tie between them would be severed for all time and each would pass the remainder of his life as if the other never existed. Joseph was twenty-nine. Isaac was thirty-eight.
Isaac’s house stood at 2511 Avenue Q, just three blocks north of the Gulf. It was four years old and replaced a previous house that had burned in a fire in November 1896. Isaac had ordered this house built atop a forest of stilts with the explicit goal of making it impervious to the worst storms the Gulf could deliver. It had two stories, with porches or “galleries” off each floor in the front and rear, and a small building in the backyard that served as a stable. The house was ideally situated. On Sundays Isaac and his family would join the torrent of other families walking down 25th Street toward the big Victorian bathhouses built over the Gulf. Sometimes they walked to Murdoch’s; other days they chose the Pagoda Company Bath House, with its two large octagonal pavilions and sloping pagoda roofs. The Clines reached it by walking the length of a 250-foot boardwalk that began at the foot of 24th Street, rose 16 vertical feet above the beach, and ran another 110 feet out over the waves, as if its builders believed they had conquered the sea for once and for all. An electric wire ran to a pole far out in the surf, where it powered a lamp suspended over the water. At night bathers gathered like insects.
Isaac heard the usual sounds that sleeping houses make, even houses as strong as his. He heard the creaking and sighing of beams, posts, and joists as the relatively new lumber of his home absorbed the moisture of the night