Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [66]
He had cabled ahead to reserve a room at the Tremont Hotel downtown and steeled himself for a long, wet walk—until he saw the Tremont’s horse-drawn bus waiting in front of the station, with fifteen people already seated. The water was up to the seat bottoms. He waded aboard. The bus plowed its way to the hotel.
Some of the new arrivals resolved to wait out the storm in the station, which seemed to be the sturdiest building around. The first floor was flooded, so they climbed to the second, picking their way carefully up a staircase lighted only by the “eerie” glare of a few railroad lanterns. One elderly man, believed to be some sort of scientist, carried a barometer in his baggage and now propped the device on the floor. “Every few minutes,” according to one account, “he would examine it by the flickering railroad lantern and tell the people that the atmospheric pressure was still falling and that the worst was yet to come.”
This did not endear him to the other passengers. Later, some would express an interest in dashing the barometer against the floor.
Another passenger from the Houston train, David Benjamin of the Fred Harvey chain of railroad eating houses, set out from the station to keep a business appointment two blocks away.
The man he had planned to meet was gone. Benjamin, perhaps thinking the storm soon would subside, made an appointment to return at three o’clock.
“It was all I could do to get back to the station,” he said, “and it is needless to say that I never kept the appointment.”
He was not worried about the storm, however. And no one else seemed terribly worried either. Galveston apparently took such things in stride.
The first “intimation” of the true extent of the disaster, Benjamin recalled, “came when the body of a child floated into the station.”
THE SECOND TRAIN, operated by the Gulf and Interstate line, was coming from Beaumont, Texas, although many of its passengers were from New Orleans and other points in Louisiana. About noon it was rolling slowly along the flooded tracks on the Bolivar Peninsula, a slender finger of the mainland east of Galveston that was separated from the city by the ship channel. The tracks ended at Bolivar Point, near a tall lighthouse operated by keeper H. C. Claiborne and his assistant, who lived in two pretty houses on the lighthouse grounds. The train consisted of one locomotive and two coaches packed with ninety-five passengers, including John H. Poe, a member of the Louisiana State Board of Education. Poe lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the town where Louisa Rollfing had first experienced America. Friday night he had caught a Southern Pacific train out of New Orleans for a business trip to Galveston. He had reached Beaumont early Saturday morning, and changed trains for the last leg of the journey.
At Bolivar Point, the train was to be run aboard a big ferry, the Charlotte M. Allen, for a brief voyage across the ship channel to Galveston.
Poe watched as the ferry fought its way from Galveston toward Bolivar through swells so high they broke over its bow. Black smoke from the ship’s funnel rocketed south with the wind. Now and then the ship disappeared behind curtains of rain.
The captain steered the ship well to the north of the Bolivar pier to compensate for the wind, but apparently failed to gauge its true strength. He tried again and again to bring the ferry to the pier. Crewmen stationed along the ship’s rails held tight against the wind and the rocking of the hull.
The captain gave up.
To Poe and his fellow passengers, accustomed to the ease and can-do precision of transportation at the turn of the century, the sight of a ferry captain giving up and turning back was astonishing. And troubling.
The train remained in place a few moments, as if stunned by this act of technological betrayal. Steam exhausted from its cylinder housings gouged the water covering the tracks. The conductor ordered the train back to Beaumont. As the engine pushed the