Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [82]
25TH AND Q
What Joseph Saw
SOMETHING STRUCK THE house with terrific force. The house moved. It slid from its foundation and began to list. Joseph was standing near a window beside Isaac’s oldest children, Allie May and Rosemary. “As the house capsized, I seized the hand of each of my brother’s two children, turned my back toward the window, and, lunging from my heels, smashed through the glass and the wooden storm shutters, still gripping the hands of the two youngsters. The momentum hurled us all through the window as the building, with seeming deliberation, settled far over. It rocked a bit and then rose fairly level on the surface of the flood.”
Joseph and the two girls found themselves on top of an outside wall. They saw no one else. “All the other occupants of that room, nearly fifty men, women and children, it appeared, were still trapped inside, for the house had not yet broken up.”
The only exit from the house was the now-horizontal window through which Joseph and the children had passed. Joseph lowered the top half of his body through the window and shouted, “Come here! Come here!”
No one came. No one called out. The space below the window was utterly black. Periodically the house rose with the current, then settled, raising the water within to the level where the window glass had been. Anyone still inside would be completely submerged.
Joseph had heard that drowning men seized anything that came near. He sat on the window casing and began swinging his feet in the water. “I had hoped that some of the trapped ones within the room might catch my feet and so be pulled out,” he said. “My efforts were wasted and I finally gave them up. I have no words to tell the agony of heart I experienced in that moment.”
THE BEACH
Ruby Credo
AS SOON AS Ruby Credo’s parents finished chopping holes into the floor of their parlor, they began preparations to evacuate to higher ground. If Dr. Cline planned to ride out the storm in his own house, that was his choice. Anthony Credo had no intention of doing likewise. He and his family were just about to leave when a neighbor, Mrs. Theodore Goldman, appeared at the door with her son, hoping to shelter in the Credos’ house. Mrs. Goldman did not trust her own house, she said. Her husband did, however, and he was still there. He refused to leave.
The Credos put on some coffee and gave Mrs. Goldman and her son some dry clothes. In that short time, the water deepened to the point where Credo saw that leaving would be more dangerous than staying.
He had built a storm shelter behind his house, a one-room chamber atop six-foot posts. He believed, at first, that his children would be safest there. He swam them over one by one. As he watched other houses in the neighborhood disintegrate, he changed his mind. He retrieved his children. If something terrible happened, he wanted his family together. His two grown daughters were with their husbands, and he presumed them safe. His son William, visiting his fiancée, was a grown man and could take care of himself. It was the young ones he worried about most—little Ruby and her sisters, and son Raymond. The shuttling back and forth to the storm shelter unnerved him. He could carry only one child at a time.
“The water was rising rapidly to the second floor,” Ruby said, “so Papa helped us climb from the outside through dormer windows to the attic bedrooms, where Mr. Goldman and his mother had moved. The water had risen so fast Mama hadn’t time to grab her cherished black satin corset from downstairs.” The family had little to do but watch the storm intensify. “We stood at the windows and watched the houses around us break up, wash away, and become battering rams to knock and tear others apart as they were hurled and swept about. The water kept rising; the sounds of the storm were frightening; the house creaked and groaned as if it were in some kind of agony.”
Night had fallen. Ruby sat on the corner of a bed opposite Mrs. Goldman and her son. The wind accelerated. A streetcar rail pierced the roof and penetrated