Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [93]
ISAAC SEARCHED FOR his wife. A photograph exists of what once was his neighborhood. Taken by someone standing near the Ursuline convent and looking south, it provides a view very much like what Isaac must have seen when he emerged from the house at 28th and P on Sunday morning. The ruins of the Bath Avenue Public School stand to the left. Where his house should be, there is only a plain of lumber.
At first glance, the wreckage in the foreground seems to be a homogeneous mass of wood reaching all the way to the horizon, where a pale line demarks the Gulf of Mexico. Close examination with a magnifying glass, however, reveals the base of a wooden swivel chair, a wicker seatbottom, a steamer trunk, and a surprise. At the right, about where Isaac and his family came to rest, four men stand amid the wreckage. Three are in shirtsleeves and appear to be digging. The fourth stands nearby, watching closely. This man looks like Isaac. Impossible, of course. But he is Isaac’s height, has Isaac’s small beard. Despite the heat, he wears a suitcoat and hat.
As Isaac searched, he encountered other men and women hunting for their families and friends. They traded information: a woman found here, a man there, a large collection of corpses down near the beach. It is possible that during his search, Isaac encountered a Houston man named Thomas Muat, who came to Isaac’s neighborhood looking for his own daughter, Anna, eighteen years old. She had arrived in Galveston a week earlier to visit friends and was staying at the home of David McGill, at 26th and Q, one block west of Isaac’s house. McGill was a friend of the Muat family.
The Muats had expected Anna home on Sunday night, but that afternoon learned that no trains had been able to leave Galveston. After a long, anxious night with no word from his daughter, McGill resolved to go to Galveston first thing Monday morning. He and his brother-in-law and two other men boarded one of the first trains that tried to reach Galveston, but got only as far as La Marque, near Texas City. They continued on foot to Virginia Point and there got some disconcerting news: Already that day, the men of Virginia Point had buried two hundred bodies that had drifted across the bay from Galveston.
Muat and his companions used copper wire to lash together three fallen telegraph poles, then hammered a board across the top for a platform. They launched their raft beside one of the railroad causeways and pulled themselves along from piling to piling. Three times the raft capsized. Three times they righted it and moved on, until finally, as daylight faded, they reached the wharf. “What we experienced beggars description,” Muat said. “We had to walk over human bodies, cattle, broken box cars and barbed wire, reaching the city about 8 o’clock.”
Too exhausted to search, they managed to find a boardinghouse still in operation. Early the next morning, they set out for 26th and Q, and soon found that the McGill house had been “swept out of existence.”
They searched further and located McGill’s wife at a house a dozen blocks away. The last she saw of Anna, she told Thomas, was after the house had broken apart. Her husband and Anna had wound up on one segment of roof, Mrs. McGill on another. Anna had cried for help, but Mrs. McGill could do nothing. She had not seen them since.
“The only hope we have,” Muat said, at the time, “is that my daughter may have been picked up here and is not yet in a condition to tell.”
In the absence of a body, there was always hope. Isaac continued his search. But as conditions worsened—as fears of disease grew and as more and more corpses turned up (among them Anna Muat’s)—the hunt for miracles and bodies became more complicated. Hope receded, and simple emptiness took its place.
DAILY JOURNAL
Tuesday, September 11
I. M. Cline, Local Forecast Official, still unable for duty.
GALVESTON
“Not Dead”
EVERY DAY, THE editors of the Galveston News removed a few