Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [71]
“I was so confident that August would go there,” she said, “but he didn’t.”
AT ABOUT TWO O’CLOCK Galveston time, in the midst of Louisa’s drive, the wind shifted. Until then the wind had blown consistently from the north, the weaker left flank of the hurricane. Now the wind circled to the northeast and gained intensity. Isaac noticed the change, but most people, including Louisa, did not. They were too busy seeking shelter or had battened themselves within their homes. The stories Louisa told her hosts of what she had seen on her journey frightened them. With Louisa’s help, they began bracing the windows and doors. They nailed an ironing board across a window. A neighbor came over with her two children seeking shelter or company and brought the total number of people in the house to ten. They closed all the upstairs doors and gathered on the stairway. They had a pitcher of water and a lantern. Soon they heard the shattering of windows and blinds in the bedrooms behind the doors they had just closed. “It sounded,” Louisa said, “as if the rooms were filled with a thousand little devils, shrieking and whistling.”
She watched quietly as Julia and Jim’s piano slid from one downstairs wall to another, then back.
AVENUE P½
Parents and Their Choices
SAM YOUNG
AT TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon, Dr. Young started back to his house at the northeast corner of Bath and P½, one block north of Isaac Cline’s house and adjacent to the Bath Avenue Public School. Thinking his family safe in San Antonio, he prepared for the storm’s arrival—prepared, that is, to enjoy it, and savor every destructive impulse. Young was a member of that class of mostly landlocked men who believed God put storms on earth expressly for their entertainment.
Young’s yard was a plateau of land five feet above sea level, yet by the time he got home he found the yard under two feet of water. This did not trouble him, for he had seen high water before. He took a chair on his gallery and watched the storm. The water rose gradually and soon began to climb the stairs toward him. Even this did not worry him. “My house, a large two-story frame building, stood on brick pillars about four feet high,” he said, “so I had no fear of the water coming into my house.”
A young black boy worked for Young as a valet. Young sent him home, then began closing shutters and windows and securing doors, intent mainly on getting these tasks done before nightfall.
Around four o’clock, he began to see that he had been wrong about the water. Two feet now covered his ground floor, and the level was still rising—not gradually, anymore, but rapidly. Visibly. Like water flowing into a bathtub.
Young had noticed the change in wind direction. “The wind had hauled further to the east and was blowing at a terrific rate.” The shift accounted for the more-rapid increase in depth, Young knew. Galveston sat astride a portion of Texas coastline canted forty-five degrees toward the northeast. All morning the north wind had impeded the progress of the incoming storm tide, causing water literally to pile up in the Gulf. Now, with the wind blowing from the northeast, a portion of that pent-up tide—but by no means the bulk of it—began to come ashore. The wind blowing southwest along the Texas coast pushed the sea into Galveston’s East Side.
More fascinated than appalled, Young moved a chair to a second-floor window and watched the water as it flowed along Avenue P½. (He makes no mention of seeing Isaac Cline or Joseph struggling home, although the last block of their journeys would have been within his view.) The water moved fastest at the center of the street where the high curbs channeled the water and vastly increased its velocity, just like the narrow pipes used by city water systems to increase water pressure. The street had become a causeway for wreckage. Young saw boxes,