Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [67]
Poe had been watching the lighthouse. Swells broke high against its base and at times cast spray nearly its full height, but it seemed the strongest thing in sight. Except for the lighthouse and the cottages of its keepers and the crown of an occasional live oak, all he saw was water. The rain sounded as if a hundred men with ball peen hammers had stationed themselves along the north side of the coach.
The train halted.
The lighthouse was a quarter mile away.
Eighty-five passengers resolved to stay with the train, believing it heavy enough to withstand the storm. A train, after all, was the biggest, strongest thing most people knew.
Poe did not trust it. He did not like the way the coach shimmied in the wind. He did not like the way the water seemed to converge from the north and south shores of the peninsula, or the speed at which it rose. Small waves now broke across the open platforms at each end of the car.
Poe and nine other passengers abandoned the train. Keeping close to one another, they moved slowly across the flooded plain toward the lighthouse. The eighty-five others remained aboard.
Scores of other storm refugees already were inside the lighthouse. They had gathered first at keeper Claiborne’s house, which stood on a shallow plateau that constituted the only high ground for miles around. But the water had risen too fast. Claiborne rigged a lifeline from his house to the lighthouse door. Men held the rope with one hand, and carried women and children to the door on their backs.
By the time Poe arrived, nearly two hundred people were inside the lighthouse. The darkness of the shaft was pierced only by the gray light from the doorway and a window high up the lighthouse shaft. When he looked up through the murk, he saw two hundred people staring down from seats they had claimed along the spiral stairway that rose one hundred feet through the core of the lighthouse. He and the other train refugees were the last to enter before the sea blocked the door.
Just before he stepped inside, Poe looked back at the train. Torrents of rain obscured his view, but he thought the train had begun moving again. Smoke billowed from its stack and tumbled away over the sea.
Soon the rain and spindrift blocked his view completely. He stepped inside, wondering if he had made the right choice.
SOMEWHERE DOWN THE track, the train stopped again. Maybe the water drowned its fire, or shoved an obstacle in its path. Maybe a freak gust simply blew it from the tracks.
By Sunday morning, all eighty-five passengers were dead.
OVER THE DIN of the storm, Poe and the others heard what sounded like an artillery bombardment. They soon realized the soldiers at Fort San Jacinto on Galveston Island, just across the channel, had begun firing the fort’s heavy guns. The guns boomed well into the night. Marie Berryman Lang, daughter of the assistant lighthouse keeper, remembered it all so clearly: the waves that slammed against the lighthouse as the water rose within its base and drove the two hundred refugees ever higher up its spiral shaft; the heat and desperate humidity that caused the children to cry for water; and all the while, beyond the chaos, that lonesome booming of the guns, like the drumbeat of an Army cortege.
“It was the poor soldiers,” she learned the next morning, “crying for help.”
25TH AND Q
A Gathering of Toads
AS THE DAY progressed, Isaac Cline grew increasingly concerned about the storm. He only had to look out his office window to see that the strong north wind had pushed the waters of Galveston Bay over the wharf and into the streets of the city. By afternoon, the Gulf and the bay seemed about to converge. Clearly something extraordinary was happening—and yet there had been so little clear warning. Friday night the barometer had actually risen, and he had seen nothing of the brick-red sky that was thought to herald a hurricane. The only true sign of danger lay in the great swells, which in the few hours since his dawn visit to the beach had grown