Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [81]
Young remained pinned to the wall, one foot inside the doorway. He could not move. “It was an easy thing to stay there for the wind held me as firmly as if I had been screwed to the house.”
The wind grew even stronger. Young estimated it reached 125 miles an hour. “The wind at 125 miles an hour is something awful,” he said. “I could neither hear nor see.”
He turned his head against the rain until he was looking inside the house. The rain slammed against the interior walls with such force it exploded in pixels of light. “The drops of rain became luminous,” he said. It looked “like a display of miniature fireworks.”
The wind grew so strong it planed the sea. “The surface of the water was almost flat. The wind beat it down so that there was not even a suspicion of a wave.”
He could not open his eyes. A lion roared at his ears. That his house still stood seemed impossible. “I began to think my house would never go.”
He gripped the facing of the door. He waited. He planned to kick his raft free of the house at the first sign of collapse. He did not have long to wait.
ALL OVER GALVESTON freakish things occurred. Slate fractured skulls and removed limbs. Venomous snakes spiraled upward into trees occupied by people. A rocket of timber killed a horse in midgallop.
At the expensive Lucas Terrace apartment building, Edward Quayle of Liverpool, England, who had arrived in Galveston with his wife three days earlier, happened to walk past a window just as the room underwent a catastrophic depressurization. The window exploded outward into the storm along with Mr. Quayle, who rocketed to his death trailing a slipstream of screams from his wife.
At another address, Mrs. William Henry Heideman, eight months pregnant, saw her house collapse and apparently kill her husband and three-year-old son. She climbed onto a floating roof. When the roof collided with something else, the shock sent her sliding down into a floating trunk, which then sailed right to the upper windows of the city’s Ursuline convent. The sisters hauled her inside, dressed her in warm clothes, and put her to bed in one of the convent cells. She went into labor. Meanwhile, a man stranded in a tree in the convent courtyard heard the cry of a small child and plucked him from the current. A heartbeat later, he saw that the child was his own nephew—Mrs. Heideman’s three-year-old son.
Mrs. Heideman had her baby. She was reunited with her son. She never saw her husband again.
THE HOUSE SHUDDERED, shifted, became buoyant. For a few queasy moments, Dr. Young felt himself exempt from gravity’s effect. The time had come. He tore the gallery door loose and dove for the sea. Like the survivor of a sinking liner, he kicked hard to put distance between himself and the house. “The house rose out of the water several feet, was caught by the wind and whisped away like a railway train, and I was left in perfect security, free from all floating timber or debris, to follow more slowly.”
The current drew him over the city. He saw few landmarks but believed he soon passed over the Garten Verein. Moments later he too careened toward the Ursuline convent, but his door got caught in a large whirlpool of water and wreckage. “I was carried round and round until I lost my bearings completely.”
When the whirlpool dissipated, the inflowing sea again captured his raft. It swept him northwest for fifteen blocks until his door docked itself against a mound of wreckage. “It was very dark, but I could see the tops of some houses barely above the water; could see others totally wrecked, and others half submerged.” He saw no lights, however. And no people. “I concluded that the whole of that part of town had been destroyed and that I was the only survivor.”
He remained in that place aboard his door for the next eight hours. The wind rippled over his clothing. Porcupine rain jabbed his scalp and hands. Blood seeped from the gash in his head. In all that time he heard only one human voice, that of a woman somewhere in the distance crying for help. He had never been so cold