Isaac's Storm (7 page)

Isaac
received
a
cavalry
saber
as
part
of
his
official
kit.
He
loved
its
heft,
and
its
cold
hard
lines,
and
how
it
evoked
the
stories
he
had
heard
men
tell
of
Pickett's
Charge.
Soon
Isaac
found
himself
on
horseback,
learning
how
to
kill
men
at
a
gallop
—
even
though
American
military
strategists,
horrified
by
the
carnage
of
the
Civil
War,
had
by
then
lost
their
taste
for
cavalry
assaults.
Isaac
was
a
fine
backcountry
horseman,
and
caught
on
so
quickly
that
Sergeant
Mahaney
placed
him
in
charge
of
a
squad
of
other
recruits,
some
of
whom
had
come
from
big
cities
and
had
never
ridden
horses.

Isaac
led
them
around
the
track
at
vicious
speeds,
forcing
some
to
wrap
their
arms
around
their
horses'
necks.

This
could
not
have
won
him
many
friends.

THE
HEART
OF
the
weather
service,
and
the
thing
that
had
to
exist
before
there
could
even
be
such
a
service,
was
the
telegraph.
It
allowed
for
the
first
time
in
history
the
rapid,
simultaneous
transmission
of
weather
observations
from
stations
thousands
of
miles
away.

At
Fort
Myer,
Isaac
took
apart
and
rebuilt
telegraph
transmitters
to
learn
what
caused
the
"click."
A
badly
mauled
telegraph
pole
stood
in
a
squad
room
where
its
top
extended
into
the
skylight.
Isaac
learned
to
climb
the
pole
and
to
string
telegraph
wire.

He
also
learned
to
send
and
receive
messages
and
to
use
a
special
code
developed
by
the
weather
service
to
save
time
and
reduce
the
costs
of
transmission.
The
word
madman
indicated
a
morning
barometric
pressure
of
28.33
inches.
A
wind
of
57
miles
an
hour
was
embalm.
The
code
word
for
a
wind
of
150
miles
an
hour
was
extreme.
The
cipher
allowed
a
telegraph
operator
to
pack
a
lot
of
information
into
just
a
few
words.
One
example:
"Paul
diction
sunk
Johnson
imbue
hersal."
Decoded,
it
meant:
"St.
Paul,
29.26
inches
barometric
pressure,
—
4
degrees
temperature,
wind
six
miles
per
hour,
maximum
temperature
10
degrees,
dewpoint
—
18
degrees.
This
observation
was
at
8:00
P.M.
and
the
local
prediction
called
for
fair
weather."

But
the
service
insisted
that
its
men
also
know
the
tried-and-true
visual
methods
of
military
communication.
Isaac
learned
how
to
send
messages
using
flags,
torches,
and
the
heliograph,
which
used
a
mirror
to
send
bursts
of
light
over
long
distances
and
was
deployed
later,
in
April
1886,
during
the
Army
campaign
to
capture
Geronimo.
Signal
practice
was
awkward
and
difficult,
especially
at
night
when
it
required
torches.
These
nocturnal
sessions
frequently
involved
"midnight
travel
in
the
rain,
over
muddy
roads
in
black
darkness,
the
horses
choosing
the
proper
route,
as
we
could
not,"
recalled
H.
C.
Frankenfield,
who
also
arrived
at
Fort
Myer
in
1882.
Two
decades
later
the
bureau
would
assign
Frankenfield
the
task
of
figuring
out
where
the
great
hurricane
of
1900
had
come
from.

Isaac
became
adept
at
signaling
in
every
medium,
but
most
recruits
did
not
take
this
aspect
of
their
training
very
seriously.
They
did
not
take
much
of
anything
seriously.
Often
recruits
told
each
other
in
advance
what
messages
they
would
send.
One
lieutenant
deliberately
marched
a
squad
of
new
recruits
double-time
off
the
edge
of
a
three-foot-high
porch.
Another
officer,
seeking
to
impress
a
carriage
full
of
young
women,
suddenly
ordered
his
squad
to
signal
the
word
asafoetida,
a
medicinal
ingredient
that
few
knew
how
to
spell.
This
prompted
a
moment
of
stunned
silence,
followed
by
a
great
flapping
of
flags
evocative
less
of
an
elite
signal
squad
than
a
flock
of
startled
pigeons.

One
morning
a
recruit
named
Harrison
McP.
Baldwin,
the
clown
of
his
class,
raced
out
in
the
predawn
light
for
morning
rifle
drill,
and
executed
without
flaw
all
the
required
maneuvers.

Without
his
rifle.

No
one
noticed.

Years
later,
Baldwin
went
to
work
for
Isaac
Cline
in
Galveston.
He
was
an
able
clown,
an
abysmal
weatherman.
It
was
a
failing
that
Isaac
would
find
intolerable,
but
one
that
probably
saved
Baldwin's
life.

IT
ADVANCED
SLOWLY.
Eight
miles
an
hour,
maybe
ten.
It
moved
west
and
slightly
north
and
covered
about
two
hundred
miles
a
day,
roiling
the
seas
and
erecting
an
electric
wall
of
clouds
visible
to
ships
far
outside
its
arc
of
influence.
The
first
formal
sighting
occurred
Monday,
August
27.
The
captain
of
a
ship
at
latitude
19
N,
longitude
48
W,
in
the
open
sea
below
the
Tropic
of
Cancer
halfway
between
Cape
Verde
and
the
Antilles,
noted
in
his
log
signs
of
unsettled
weather.
He
recorded
winds
blowing
from
the
east-northeast
at
Force
4,
a
"moderate
breeze."
Thirteen
to
eighteen
miles
an
hour.
His
barometer
showed
30.3
inches.
 

He
dismissed
the
storm
as
a
distant
squall.
 

BETWEEN
BOUTS
OF
mounted
swordplay,
Isaac
journeyed
deep
into
the
mysteries
of
weather.
Meteorology
was
an
emerging
science
rooted
not
so
much
in
rigorous
research
as
in
stories
and
adventures,
which
only
enhanced
the
mystery.
By
gaslight,
with
the
bells
of
Washington
tolling
softly
in
the
summer
steam,
he
immersed
himself
in
the
millennial
quest
to
understand
wind,
and
in
the
hunt
for
the
Law
of
Storms,
one
of
the
driving
scientific
explorations
of
the
nineteenth
century.
He
found
it
all
as
compelling
as
anything
by
Verne,
a
great
sweeping
saga
full
of
crimson
clouds,
hundred-foot
waves,
and
strange
occurrences.
He
read
how
men
caught
in
the
fiercest
storms
found
the
decks
of
their
ships
carpeted
with
exhausted
horseflies
and
how
the
survivors
of
a
colonial
hurricane
emerged
to
find
deer
stranded
in
trees.
In
the
Caribbean,
wind
had
lifted
cannon.

Weather
was
a
national
obsession
and
had
been
for
centuries.
Countless
men,
including
some
of
the
most
prominent
of
their
times,
kept
daily
track
of
the
weather
and
often
for
decades
on
end.
Thomas
Jefferson
kept
a
lifelong
weather
journal
and
on
July
4,
1776,
despite
certain
other
pressing
matters,
noted
the
temperature
in
Philadelphia
to
be
a
lovely
76
degrees.
Samuel
Rodman
Jr.,
a
prominent
Massachusetts
merchant,
and
his
son
Thomas
together
produced
an
uninterrupted
daily
record
that
began
in
1812
and
continued
for
three-quarters
of
a
century.
Such
detailed
journals
told
nothing
about
the
fundamental
forces
that
powered
the
weather,
but
they
gave
the
men
who
kept
them
a
sense
of
mastery
over
nature.
By
recording
the
weather,
quantifying
it,
comparing
it
year
to
year,
they
demystified
it
at
least
to
the
point
where
storms
ceased
to
be
punishments
meted
by
God.

But
with
God
at
least
partly
out
of
the
way,
the
mystery
only
deepened.
The
first
"scientific"
definition
of
wind,
by
Anaximander,
a
Greek
natural
philosopher,
would
have
seemed
laughably
primitive
to
Isaac,
but
for
its
time
six
centuries
before
the
birth
of
Christ,
it
was
a
wonder
of
ingenuity.
He
called
it
"a
flowing
of
air."

But
what
was
air?

The
first
person
to
show
conclusively
that
air
had
substance
was
Philo
of
Byzantium
during
the
third
century
B.C.
He
attached
a
tube
to
a
glass
globe,
then
inserted
the
open
end
of
the
tube
into
a
dish
of
water.
When
he
placed
the
globe
in
shadow,
the
water
rose
within
the
tube.
When
he
exposed
the
globe
to
sunlight,
the
level
fell.
"The
same
effect,"
he
wrote,
"is
produced
if
one
heats
the
globe
with
fire."

He
did
not
know
it,
but
he
had
stumbled
upon
the
fundamental
engine
that
drove
the
world's
weather
and
that
two
thousand
years
later
would
power
the
ships
of
Columbus
and
his
peers
briskly
over
and
with
dismaying
regularity
under
the
seas.
He
had
missed
the
broader
question:
If
heat
could
cause
a
small
volume
of
air
to
drive
water
up
and
down
a
tube,
what
could
it
do
to
the
vast
sea
of
air
that
covered
the
world?

Aristotle
proved
beyond
doubt
that
air
had
mass
when
he
demonstrated
that
a
container
filled
with
air
could
not
also
be
filled
with
water.
Did
this
mean
that
air
had
weight?

Aristotle
flattened
an
airtight
leather
bag
and
weighed
it,
then
filled
the
bag
with
air
and
weighed
it
again.
Nothing
changed.
He
concluded,
erroneously,
that
air
was
weightless.