The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [8]
There’s coal in Alaska—coal fields and diamond mines, veins of gold, silver, copper—and the fastest way to get it out of the territories and sold is by rail. If President Wilson relents, if the United States joins the Allies against Germany, the war effort will demand Alaska’s wealth. No one wants war, and yet everyone is excited by the possibility. Impatient to finish laying track and begin surveying for a deepwater port, the Engineering Commission has already made mistakes, mistakes for which weather was blamed, and Bigelow has been sent north to prevent more of them from happening. Last year, all the equipment shipped up from Panama’s completed canal—steam shovel, dredge, and crane—sank in the inlet. An unexpected storm blew in, the wind hit fifty knots, two barges crashed into floe ice and sank. So now the commission has decreed that no work proceed before the weather forecast is known. And forecasts depend on maps. To the initiated, air has features as clear as land, features that can be drawn, lines that divide one degree from another. Interpretations of those drawings may vary, opinions among meteorologists diverge, but good maps are absolute; they are irrefutable.
The bureau provides large-scale outlines of North America, printed on both opaque and tissue-thin folios. On the opaque maps, Bigelow enters temperature and pressure readings, delineating highs and lows with isotherms and isobars, fancy words for the lines he makes, sweeping over topography in waves and circles. On the translucent overlays, he indicates wind and precipitation, using directional arrows and a code of symbols for rain, snow, sleet, and fog. He plots his own data—readings he has taken and reported to the central office—as well as observations from all the other stations in North America, numbers he decodes from a long, daily cable message. But without a light table like the one at which he worked in Seattle, he sometimes makes mistakes, and even more of them when dogs are howling. Pen in hand, he startles at the sound, rakes its nib across ten or twenty degrees of longitude.
Half wolf, three quarters wolf, all wolf—the sound of sled dogs after dinner is like nothing Bigelow has ever heard before, one howls and then another answers and so it goes until dawn. Horses aren’t much use when snow is four feet deep, and the few automobiles shipped into Anchorage are good for nothing but sport—ice derbies and mud races—and the railroad isn’t finished, it’s barely begun. So anyone who plans on getting anywhere walks on snowshoes or travels behind a team.
When sled dogs aren’t working they’re staked, and Bigelow has grown accustomed to the sight of chains disappearing into the dens the dogs dig in the snow. But, invisible as the animals are when he walks through town, they fill the night with their wailing, like hideous hymns to the devil—once they begin, stars wink out and the bright moon sinks in the sky. Fingers in his ears, wool watch cap, earmuffs, parka hood: he can’t find a way to muffle the howling. Even Rigoletto, cranked up and blaring from the trumpet, is no good, the tenor’s lament threading eerily through the howling of the dogs. The death of civilization, the death of reason, it seems to Bigelow, tearing up one map and then another.
He binds the completed maps in volumes of 120 pages, each holding two months’ worth of recorded observations, paths of major storms extrapolated for comparison to those of years past and hence. Current theories of forecasting presuppose that atmospheric history tends, like human history, to repeat itself, an idea that some meteorological scientists consider facile. And, sometimes, sitting