Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [75]
At 6:30 P.M., Isaac, ever the observer, walked to the front door to take a look outside. He opened his door upon a fantastic landscape. Where once there had been streets neatly lined with houses there was open sea, punctured here and there by telegraph poles, second stories, and rooftops. He saw no waves, however. The sea was strangely flat, its surface blown smooth by the wind. The Neville house across the way now looked so odd. It had been a lovely house: three stories sided in an intricate pattern of fish-scale shingles and shiplap boards and painted four different colors. Now only the top two-thirds protruded from the water. Every slate had been stripped from its roof.
The fact he saw no waves was ominous, although he did not know it. Behind his house, closer to the beach, the sea had erected an escarpment of wreckage three stories tall and several miles long. It contained homes and parts of homes and rooftops that floated like the hulls of dismasted ships; it carried landaus, buggies, pianos, privies, red-plush portieres, prisms, photographs, wicker seat-bottoms, and of course corpses, hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. It was so tall, so massive that it acted as a kind of seawall and absorbed the direct impact of the breakers lumbering off the Gulf. The waves shoved the ridge forward, toward the north and west. It moved slowly, but with irresistible momentum, and wherever it passed, it scraped the city clean of all structures and all life. If not for the wind, Isaac would have heard it coming as a horrendous blend of screams and exploding wood. It shoved before it immense sections of the streetcar trestle that once had snaked over the Gulf.
Something else caught Isaac’s attention, as it did the attention of nearly every other soul in Galveston.
“I was standing at my front door, which was partly open, watching the water, which was flowing with great rapidity from east to west,” he said. Suddenly the level of the water rose four feet in just four seconds. This was not a wave, but the sea itself. “The sudden rise of 4 feet brought it above my waist before I could change my position.”
For those inside the house, it was a moment of profound terror. (Joseph claims to have been utterly calm. He says the rise occurred just after he had called his brother outside to try to persuade him, privately, that the best course was to evacuate for the center of town.) Four feet was taller than most of the children in the house. Throughout the city, parents rushed to their children. They lifted them from the water and propped them on tables, dressers, and pianos. People in single-story homes had nowhere to go. In Isaac’s house, everyone hurried to the second floor. The brothers herded the refugees into a bedroom on the windward side, reasoning that if the house fell over, they would all be on top, not crushed underneath.
Isaac judged the depth of the water by its position in his house. His yard, he knew, was 5.2 feet above sea level. The water was ten feet above the ground. That meant the tide was now 15.2 feet deep in his neighborhood—and still rising. “These observations,” he noted later, for the benefit of skeptics, “were carefully taken and represent to within a few tenths of a foot the true conditions.” It was, he acknowledged, incredible. “No one ever dreamed that the water would reach the height observed in the present case.”
ONE BLOCK NORTH, Dr. Young observed the same impossible increase. Since five o’clock he had noted a change in the direction of the wind. It had begun circling to the east and gained velocity, as did the current. “The debris fairly flew past, so rapid had the tide become,” he said. At 5:40 P.M., he observed a sudden acceleration of the wind. He knew the time exactly because his clock had stopped and he had just finished resetting it by his watch.