Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [60]
They played in the yard for as long as the rain let them. It came in fits, and gave them fits. With each fresh squall, they leaped laughing onto the porch. When the rain stopped, they plunged back into the yard. Mud clotted their shoes. Their dresses were soaked. This was heaven.
The high curbs along the street formed a shallow canyon through which the water ran like a broad brown river, full of all kinds of interesting things. Ragged squares of wood. Boards. Trinkets. A signboard with lettering. Even an occasional snake. Toads were everywhere, climbing into the yard to escape the water.
“As we watched from the porch we were amazed and delighted to see the water from the Gulf flowing down the street. ‘Good,’ we thought, ‘there would be no need to walk the few blocks to play at the beach, it was right at our front gate.’ ”
THE ENRAGED SEA drew adults by the hundreds. A great crowd gathered at the Midway, a ten-block stretch along the beach with cheap restaurants that sold beer and boiled clams, and with ramshackle stores that peddled souvenirs, candy, seashells, and stereoscopic postcards. The adults came by streetcar, hoping maybe to ride it out over the waves, but found the car had to stop well before the beach. They walked the rest of the way through pools of water. Many described the spectacle as “grand” and “beautiful.” The rain struck like pebbles. The wind flayed umbrellas to their metal spines. Men and women facing the sea found their backs soaked, their fronts mostly dry. One witness reported that a few people, “with abundant foresight, appeared on the scene in bathing suits and of course were right in it from the jump.”
Walter W. Davis, who had come to town on business from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was in his hotel Saturday morning about eleven o’clock when he heard people talking about how the breakers in the Gulf had become so huge they were now destroying the small shops of the Midway.
Davis did not see much of the ocean in Scranton. This he had to see for himself.
He took one of the trolleys. The trestle, he saw, ran out over the wild surf, but no cars ran on it now. The waves crashed against the rails. Big combers rolled right into the Midway itself. “The sight was grand at the time. I watched the waves wash out and break all those shell houses, theaters and lunch rooms, until I saw that the waves were coming too close for comfort.”
He turned around and headed back to his hotel. It was about 12:30 now. He discovered that the streetcars had stopped running altogether. He had to walk back, at times wading through water up to his knees. The rain “felt like hail when it struck my face.”
But the storm still held a powerful attraction for him. When he reached his hotel, he did not change his clothes. He had lunch in the hotel dining room, then set out for the bay side of the island.
Here too water flowed onto the city streets, but this water came from the bay. Blown by the north wind, it climbed over the piers and onto the Strand. Water raced in from the Gulf and from the bay, the former propelled by the sea, the latter by the powerful north wind. It seemed as if Galveston were a gigantic ship sinking beneath the sea.
Davis stood on a high sidewalk. The water came in so fast he could actually see it rise. It flowed below him like a spring creek, and raised translucent fins of water behind the legs of horses. Clumps of horse excrement splashed into the current and spiraled down the block. The hulls of great ships elevated by the extreme tide now towered above the warehouses of the wharf. All the ships were tightly moored, many with anchors dropped and chains reinforcing the thick rope hawsers that tied them to the piers. All seemed to have started their boilers. Smoke blew from their funnels in jagged black clouds that tore south over the Strand.
A crate drifted past. The wood paving began to float. A man fell, laughing, and let the current sweep him half a block.
Davis watched, transfixed, until he realized the water had topped the sidewalk itself and was now rippling