Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [4]
Isaac got out of bed, careful not to wake Cora. Joseph’s intrusion annoyed him. There was tension between the brothers. Nothing open—at least not yet. Just a persistent low-grade rivalry.
He and Joseph descended to the kitchen, careful to avoid waking the children, and there by sheer force of habit Isaac put on a pot of coffee. They talked about the weather. A familiar dynamic emerged. Joseph, as the younger brother and junior employee eager to prove himself, made the case too strongly that something peculiar was happening and that Washington must be informed. Isaac, ever confident, told Joseph to get some sleep, that he would take over and assess the situation and if necessary telegraph his findings to headquarters.
Isaac dressed. He stepped out onto the first-floor porch. With most of the block that faced him across Avenue Q still undeveloped, he had an unobstructed view of the sky and the cityscape to the north. He saw lime-washed bungalows and elaborate three-story homes with gables, bays, and cupolas, and just beyond these the big Rosenberg Women’s Home and the Bath Avenue Public School. At the corner, to his right and across the street, stood the three-story home of the Neville family, windows open, dew and drizzle darkening its intricate slate roof. Ever since the great fire of 1885, Galveston had required that roofs be shingled with slate instead of wood as a safety precaution, but in just a few hours the shingles from the Neville house, Isaac’s house, and thousands of others throughout Galveston would begin whirling through the air with an effect that evoked for many older residents the gore-filled afternoons they spent at Chancellorsville and Antietam.
Isaac harnessed his horse to a small two-wheeled sulky that he used mostly when hunting and with a gentle click of the reins set out for the beach three blocks south.
IT WAS A gorgeous morning, the breeze soft and suffused with mist, jasmine, and oleander. Stratus and cumulus clouds filled most of the sky, some bellying almost to the sea, but Isaac also saw patches of dawn blue rimmed with cloudsmoke. To his left, behind the clouds, the sun had begun to rise and at odd moments it turned the clouds orange-gray, like fire behind smoke. Seagulls hung in threes at fixed points in the sky where they rode head-on into the unaccustomed north wind, wing tips flinching for purchase. The wheels of Isaac’s sulky broadcast a reassuring crunch as they moved over the pavement of crushed oyster shells.
By now the most industrious children were rising to do their chores and get them out of the way so they could go to the beach as early as possible. Everyone reveled in the refreshing coolness. Rabbi Henry Cohen was awake and preparing for Saturday’s services. Dr. Samuel O. Young, an amateur meteorologist and secretary of the Galveston Cotton Exchange, was having breakfast and planning his own early-morning trip to the beach. At 18th Street and Avenue O½, in a small two-story rental house, Louisa Rollfing made breakfast for her husband, August, who was due downtown that morning to continue the painting of a commercial building. Louisa looked out the window and as always felt just a hint of disappointment, or maybe sorrow, for although she liked Galveston, she still was not used to the landscape. To her, palms and live oak did not qualify as trees. She missed the great green-black forests of her childhood home in Germany with trees “so old and large, that in some places it is almost dark in daytime.”
Visitors approaching Galveston from the sea saw it as a brilliant swath of light between sea and sky, like mercury floating on a deep blue plain. In the summer of 1900, a boy named John W. Thomason Jr.—later to become a well-known writer of military history—arrived to spend his vacation with his grandfather in a cottage off Broadway, half a dozen blocks from Isaac Cline’s office. “The Gulf breeze cooled the city at nightfall; one of the most beautiful beaches in the world