Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [26]
His heart racing, Isaac looked upstream. Men had gathered and with their bare hands were plucking fish from the water. Large fish. As Isaac walked toward the men, he saw a fish two feet long drift slowly by. He moved closer. The fish did nothing. He reached for the fish. It kept still. Isaac thrust his hands into the water, and two things happened: He caught the fish; he froze his hands.
It was August in Texas but water had abruptly filled the riverbed and this water was the temperature of a Tennessee creek in January, so cold it paralyzed fish.
But where had the water come from? Isaac scanned the skies for the rolling black-wool cloud typically raised by blue northers, but saw nothing.
Days later, townsmen recovered the bodies of the carriage driver and his two female passengers.
A week later, the mystery of the ice-water flood was solved.
Visitors from the town of Ben Ficklin fifty miles up the Concho came to San Angelo and reported that a monstrous hailstorm had struck about ten days earlier, the day of the flood. The storm discharged stones the size of ostrich eggs that killed hundreds of cattle and fell in such volume they filled erosion gulches and piled to depths of up to three feet on level ground. The ice melted quickly.
For Isaac, this was explanation enough. The deadly flood was the downstream flow of flash-melted hail. He wrote an article on the incident for the weather service’s Monthly Weather Review, edited by Cleveland Abbe. To Isaac’s “surprise and chagrin,” Abbe rejected the article on grounds it was too far-fetched to be believed.
The rejection stung. Isaac had been there when the flood came through. He saw the fish. He had thrust his hands in the ice-cold water. The shock of it on that August day in Texas was embedded in his brain.
Isaac could not let it go. Hail became a transient obsession. He tracked down reports of monster hail from all over the country. It was true, he wrote, that no one previously had reported a hailstorm so big as to produce a river of fish-paralyzing ice water, but on June 30, 1877, hailstones as large as oranges killed ponies at Yellowstone Valley, and on June 2, 1881, in White Hall, Illinois, hailstones the size of goose eggs piled to twelve inches deep, and on June 12, 1881, hailstones as large as a man’s fist fell on three counties in Iowa and piled to depths of two or three feet, and on June 16, 1882, hailstones up to seventeen inches around and weighing two pounds fell at Dubuque, Iowa.
Which was Isaac’s loyal, obedient, oblique, three-cushion way of stating that the great Cleveland Abbe had been wrong to reject his paper. Isaac was nothing if not credible, and did not like having his credibility challenged.
ISAAC FELL IN LOVE.
The Signal Corps had moved his station to Abilene where Isaac began attending the city’s Baptist church, led by Pastor George W. Smith. He was struck by the beauty of the music, and more to the point, by the beauty of the young organist who produced it. The woman was Cora May Bellew, a niece of Pastor Smith’s who was living in the pastor’s house.
“She was a beautiful, brilliant and cultured girl,” Isaac wrote. “She had more attraction for me than any woman I had ever known.”
He wooed her, won her, and, on March 17, 1887, married her. He remained true to his belief that one’s time should be used efficiently, an ethos that Frederick Winslow Taylor soon would bring to American industry. An inefficient man, Taylor said, was like “a bird that can sing but won’t sing.”
Isaac could sing, and did.