Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [98]
As far as the station was concerned, things could have been worse. Joseph was indeed injured, but not as badly as he seemed to think. He had never dealt well with injury or illness. Blagden, luckily, was well and full of energy. The Levy Building was still sound.
Isaac could not help it, but now and then a thought whispered through his mind that he should have come to the Levy Building with his family, instead of trying to weather the storm at home. Why had he chosen that course? Was it pride? For the sake of appearances?
Joseph, underneath his demonstrations of sympathy, seemed all too aware that he had called it right and Isaac had not.
There were dreams. Isaac fell asleep easily each night and dreamed of happy times, only to wake to gloom and grief. He dreamed that he had saved her. He dreamed of the lost baby. “A dream,” Freud wrote, in 1900, in his Interpretation of Dreams, “is the fulfillment of a wish.”
During the week he worked on his official report on the storm. Psychically, it was a difficult task. His wife was still missing. The air stank of rotting flesh and burned hair. Always in the past he had been able to separate himself from the meteorological events he described. Hot winds. Paralyzed fish. He was the observer looking upon these phenomena through glass. But this storm had dragged him to its heart and changed his life forever. As he sat down opposite his typewriter, human ash dusted each fresh sheet of paper.
He began: “The hurricane which visited Galveston Island on Saturday, September 8, 1900, was no doubt one of the most important meteorological events in the world’s history.”
There was so much he wanted to say, but could not—how headquarters and the West Indies Service had failed to recognize the storm as a hurricane, how even he had not understood the signs of warning until too late. That was the most difficult part. He could not describe these conjoined failures, for to do so would have been to damage the bureau in its struggle for credibility.
Instead, he wrote: “Storm warnings were timely and received a wide distribution not only in Galveston but throughout the coast region.”
He left out the specific character of these warnings, and the fact that none mentioned a hurricane.
As he wrote, a question consumed him: Why did so many people die? No previous storm on the U.S. mainland had come even close to causing such loss. Why this one? Was he, Isaac, partly to blame?
As if to address the question, he described how on Saturday morning he began warning the public to seek a safe place to spend the night. “As a result thousands of people who lived near the beach or in small houses moved their families into the center of the city and were thus saved.” In later years, the number of people he claimed to have warned increased to twelve thousand.
Isaac struggled also with how to tell the story in a dispassionate, scientific way, and bleach it of his personal experience. He found this impossible. This was his storm. What he knew of it came from living through it.
In a few austere paragraphs, he described the collapse of his house and his night on the wreckage. He devoted a single line to Cora’s apparent death: “Among the lost was my wife, who never rose above the water after the wreck of the building.”
His account was spare, nothing like the florid writing so common in his time.