Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [80]
The stairwell appeared ahead as a large black rectangle stamped from the floor, and the closer Young got, the deeper the candlelight traveled. It should have shown him stairs and the wood slats of the banister, but he saw neither, only an orange glow undulating on the opposite wall like sunlight off a floating mirror.
Water, he realized. The sea had risen within his house nearly to the top step. The heavy thudding from the bedroom had to be furniture. A bureau, perhaps, bumping against the ceiling as the water rose and fell.
Young set the candle on the floor and walked to the door that led to his second-floor gallery. He opened it. “In a second I was blown back into the hall.”
The wind snuffed the flame, then blew the candle and its holder to the far reaches of the house. From within the darkness of the hall, the doorway appeared as a rectangle of wild gray air. The power of the wind shocked Young; it also inflamed his curiosity. Another man might have sought shelter in one of the second-floor bedrooms, but Young, drawn by the sheer power of the storm, fought his way back toward the door.
He kept close to the wall. He winched himself forward from doorknob to doorknob. At the door, he fastened his hands around the frame and hauled himself outside. “The scene,” he said, “was the grandest I ever witnessed.”
It was as if he were aboard a ship in a storm. Waves swept through his neighborhood. One witness said the waves looked like the “sides of huge elephants.” Each embodied a destructive power nearly beyond measure. A single cubic yard of water weighs about fifteen hundred pounds. A wave fifty feet long and ten feet high has a static weight of over eighty thousand pounds. Moving at thirty miles an hour, it generates forward momentum of over two million pounds, so much force, in fact, that at this point during the storm the incoming swells had begun destroying the brand-new artillery emplacements at Fort Crockett, which had been designed to withstand Spanish bombardment. Debris made the waves especially dangerous. Each wave propelled huge pieces of wreckage that did to houses what the reinforced prow of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus did to great warships. One man reported dodging a giant piano embedded in the crest of a wave, “its white keys gleaming even in the darkness.”
The only other house still standing belonged to a family named Youens, with the mother, father, son, and daughter still inside. Two minutes later, Young saw the Youens house begin a slow pirouette. “It turned partly around and then seemed to hang as if suspended.”
At about the same time, the wind changed direction from east to southeast, and again intensified. Young felt himself compressed against the wall of his gallery. “Mr. Youens’ house rose like a huge steamboat, was swept back and suddenly disappeared,” Young said. He thought of the family inside. “My feelings were indescribable as I saw them go.”
Now he was alone, his house an atoll in a typhoon. The water continued to rise. “At one bound it reached my second story and poured in my door, which was exactly thirty-three feet above the street. The wind again increased. It did not come in gusts, but was more like the steady downpour of Niagara than anything I can think of.”
The wind tore loose one of the posts that supported the gallery roof. The post struck Young, gashed his head, and left him dazed, but he did not fall. The wind held him in place. The door seemed about to tear loose. If the house fell, he resolved, he would grab the door, rip it free, and use it as a raft.
Slats from the gallery rail blew away “like straws.” The remaining posts cartwheeled into the sea. The gallery roof lifted upward as if hinged, then blew away over the top of the house. With a shriek of wood and iron the gallery floor wrenched