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Port of Galveston, known to many as the Western Ellis Island.
tradition laid down by Hippocrates, who believed climate determined the character of men and nations.
Ever since the great fire of 1885, Galveston had required that roofs be shingled with slate instead of wood
By 1900, the city was reputed to have more millionaires per square mile than Newport, Rhode Island.
They consumed the spoken word the way later men would consume television.
It was a pattern new to Isaac.
This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.
thermal stream encountered moist monsoon air blowing in from the sea from the southwest.
The monsoon crossed the point where zero latitude and zero longitude meet, and entered the continent over Nigeria. Where these winds collided, they produced a zone of instability. The air began to undulate.
troposphere, the first layer of sky and the realm where all weather occurs.
“virga.”
“Convection.”
Cape Verde.
satellite analysis could not detect a trigger suggested that tropical storms might be influenced by forces too subtle to measure.
In chaos theory, these points of broadly similar behavior were “strange attractors.” Subtle forces could launch a system from one attractor to another—
Dakar.
tell big stories and tell the truth.” He chose the weather.
“a flowing of air.”
advance guard
similar the undersea landscape, or bathymetry, of Galveston Bay was to that of the Bay of Bengal.
few newspapers had taken to running the service’s weather forecasts opposite the often-superior forecasts of astrologers and assorted weather prophets.
Here before him was the West of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in which Phileas Fogg, an Isaac-like character of precision and rigor, raced across the Great Plains during the American leg of his journey around the globe.
relied on their own meteorological savvy—and assorted almanacs, crackpots, and backwoods lore—to produce their own forecasts of the weather, just as they produced
But America as a whole was shifting rapidly toward a consumer culture in which remote factories produced the things families needed.
In this staunch, straight-backed time when a man could not weep and a woman could not smoke, there was always dancing.
Smoking was a moral blight. “In
By early 1898, the nation’s bloodlust was high. The explosion of the battleship Maine, its true cause a mystery, had sent the nation tumbling irrevocably toward war with Spain.
influence of the waves, exactly as Captain Nemo had done thirty years earlier in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “Jules Verne,” Lake wrote, “was the director-general of my life.”
deep-water port
Icebergs ten feet high flowed down the Mississippi past New Orleans.
No one, however, seemed to grasp the implications of this: that so vast a body of water could be blown from its basin.
Falling droplets met ascending droplets. The collisions formed
terminal velocities capable of propelling them all the way to the
But hurricanes defeat this cycle. They use wind to harvest moisture and deliver it to their centers.
The result can be rainfall more akin to the flow from a faucet than from a cloud.
Camille’s rain fell with such ferocity it was said to have filled the overhead nostrils of birds and drowned them from the trees.
virga
The War Department was then still in charge of Cuba,
as it had been ever since the end of the Spanish-American War.
behavioralist approach to storms.
romantic view, a psychoanalytic approach,
that was the product of the island’s long and tragic experience.
Where the Americans saw numbers, the Cubans saw poetry.
Dark poetry, perhaps—the works of Poe and Baudelaire—but poetry all the same.
The Weather Bureau’s reluctance to use words like hurricane and cyclone inadvertently reinforced the bravado of sea captains like Halsey.
they tailored fact to suit their expectations.
The winds spiraling toward the storm’s center now traveled at such a high rate of speed, they began to generate centrifugal force that sought to push them back out again.
The storm had undergone an intensification known to late-twentieth-century hurricanologists as explosive deepening,
Yet the Galveston storm shoved before it a surge that was over fifteen feet deep.
A strong wind will develop a surge in any body of water.
