Isaac's Storm (20 page)

Isaac
was
no
doubt
glad
to
be
rid
of
Baldwin.
The
man
had
been
a
drag
on
performance
and
morale.
It
is
likely,
too,
that
Baldwin
made
fun
of
Isaac.
Certainly
Baldwin
was
given
to
pranks
and
poking
fun.
To
a
man
like
that,
Isaac
had
to
have
been
an
irresistible
target.
With
Baldwin
gone,
however,
Isaac
found
himself
short
of
hands.
Moore
promised
him
a
junior
observer
named
Ernst
Giers,
but
at
the
last
moment,
for
reasons
Moore
felt
no
obligation
to
explain,
Moore
rerouted
Giers
to
Carson
City,
Nevada.
The
abrupt
reassignment
moved
Isaac
to
a
rare,
if
quiet,
expression
of
complaint.
He
telegraphed
Moore:
"Giers
not
having
arrived
impossible
to
get
along
without
experienced
assistance
in
Baldwin's
place."

Moore
sent
him
John
Blagden.

THE
BUREAU'S
MAPMAKER
used
colored
chalk
to
compose
the
Exchange
map.
He
noted
pressures,
temperatures,
rainfall,
and
wind
direction
on
a
large
blackboard
painted
with
an
oudine
of
the
country.
That
morning,
Dr.
Samuel
O.
Young,
the
secretary
of
the
Cotton
Exchange
and
an
amateur
meteorologist,
came
by
to
observe
the
process.

For
the
last
week,
Young
had
been
keeping
close
track
of
the
weather.
Nothing
in
the
official
reports
from
the
Weather
Bureau's
Central
Office
indicated
that
a
tropical
cyclone
might
be
forming
in
the
Caribbean,
but
Young
believed
the
signs
were
there.

He
stood
quiedy
beside
the
mapmaker.
There
was
somediing
soothing
about
the
tap-tap-tap
of
the
chalk,
as
the
mapmaker
deftly
noted
wind
speed
in
Chicago,
temperature
in
New
York,
pressure
over
the
Rockies.
An
R
meant
rain,
S
snow.
An
M
stood
for
missing.

Under
Moore,
only
disaster
or
downed
telegraph
lines
made
an
M
acceptable.

Tiny
circles
with
arrows,
like
the
symbols
for
male
and
female,
soon
covered
the
map.
An
open
circle
meant
clear
skies.
A
cross
meant
cloudy.
The
arrow
showed
the
direction
of
the
wind.

The
mapmaker
drew
his
isobars
with
assurance
and
grace,
the
chalk
making
a
sound
like
skates
on
ice.
He
applied
the
dotted
isotherms
with
special
gusto,
in
Gading
bursts
that
turned
his
knuckles
white.

Typewriters
cackled.
A
telephone
rang.
Motes
of
chalk
dust
drifted
in
the
gray
light,
like
virga
from
a
cloud.

Dr.
Young
paid
special
attention
to
the
notations
the
mapmaker
applied
along
the
Gulf
and
Adantic
Coasts.
"When
the
observations
at
Key
West
were
recorded,"
Young
wrote,
"I
saw
that
the
barometer
was
low,
that
the
wind
was
from
the
northeast
and
that
the
map
as
a
whole
showed
pretty
plainly
cyclonic
disturbances
to
the
soudi
or
southeast
of
Key
West."

There
was
no
specific
symbol
on
the
map
that
indicated
a
tropical
cyclone.
Young
deduced
its
presence
from
the
unusual
pattern
of
pressure
and
wind.
He
noted
also
the
high-pressure
zones
that
still
lingered
over
the
Midwest
and
Northeast.
To
him,
the
play
of
isobars
and
wind
suggested
a
cyclone
might
be
churning
in
the
sea
somewhere
south
of
Florida,
perhaps
Cuba,
and
he
said
as
much
to
the
mapmaker.

"He
agreed
with
me,"
Young
wrote,
"but
said
his
office
had
received
no
notice
of
anything
of
the
kind."

THERE
WAS
BAD
weather
in
Cuba
—
mal
tiempo.
There
was
also
bad
blood.
Willis
Moore's
passion
for
control
had
gouged
a
deep
chasm
between
Cuban
and
U.S.
meteorologists.

Moore
and
officials
of
the
bureau's
West
Indies
hurricane
service
had
long
been
openly
disdainful
of
the
Cubans.
It
was
an
attitude,
however,
that
seemed
to
mask
a
deeper
fear
that
Cuba's
own
meteorologists
might
in
fact
be
better
at
predicting
hurricanes
than
the
bureau.
In
August,
Moore
moved
to
hobble
the
competition
once
and
for
all.
The
War
Department
was
then
still
in
charge
of
Cuba,
as
it
had
been
ever
since
the
end
of
the
Spanish-American
War.
Moore's
chief
liaison
on
the
island
was
H.
H.
C.
Dunwoody
(now
Colonel
Dunwoody),
the
bureaucratic
intriguer
who
had
helped
undermine
Moore's
predecessor,
Mark
Harrington.
Through
Dunwoody,
Moore
persuaded
the
War
Department
to
ban
from
Cuba's
government-owned
telegraph
lines
all
cables
about
the
weather,
no
matter
how
innocent,
except
those
from
officials
of
the
U.S.
Weather
Bureau
—
this
at
the
peak
of
hurricane
season.

It
was
an
absurd
action.
Cuba's
meteorologists
had
pioneered
the
art
of
hurricane
prediction;
its
best
weathermen
were
revered
by
the
Cuban
public.
Over
the
centuries,
storm
after
storm
had
come
to
Cuba
utterly
by
surprise,
until
1870
when
Father
Benito
Vines
took
over
as
director
of
the
Belen
Observatory
in
Havana
and
dedicated
his
life
to
finding
the
meteorological
signals
that
warned
of
a
hurricane's
approach.
It
was
he
who
discovered
that
high
veils
of
cirrus
clouds
—
rabos
de
gallo,
or
"cock's
tails"
—
often
foretold
the
arrival
of
a
hurricane.
He
set
up
a
network
of
hundreds
of
observers,
runners,
and
mounted
messengers
to
watch
for
changes
in
the
weather
and
spread
the
alarm.
After
Vines's
death
in
July
1893,
Father
Lorenzo
Gangoite
took
his
place
at
Belen
and
likewise
devoted
his
life
to
storm.

But
the
Weather
Bureau
under
Willis
Moore
wanted
hurricanes
all
to
itself.
After
the
war,
Moore
headquartered
the
Indies
network
in
Havana.
Dunwoody
served
as
the
bureau's
senior
representative
on
the
island,
but
the
man
who
actually
ran
the
stations
day
by
day
was
a
bureau
manager
named
William
B.
Stockman,
the
local
forecast
official
for
Havana,
who
saw
the
people
of
Cuba
and
the
Indies
as
a
naive,
aboriginal
race
in
need
of
American
stewardship.

"It
was
at
first
very
difficult
to
interest
the
various
peoples
in
the
warning
service,"
Stockman
wrote
to
Moore
in
a
voluminous
June
1899
report
on
the
Indies
service's
first
full
year
of
operation,
"as
the
inhabitants
of
the
islands
are
very
very
conservative
and
it
is
most
difficult
to
get
them
to
adopt
any
measures
that
radically
differ
from
those
pursued
by
their
forebears,
and
forecasting
the
approach
of
storms,
etc.,
and
displaying
warning
signals
or
issuing
advisory
statements
relative
thereto,
was
a
most
radical
change
—
the
inhabitants
being
accustomed
to
hear
of
these
phenomena
only
upon
their
near
approach
to
a
place
or
after
it
had
passed
in
the
vicinity."

It
was
as
if
Father
Vines
had
never
lived,
and
the
Belen
Observatory
had
ceased
to
exist.
Eventually
Belen's
Father
Gangoite
discovered
Stockman's
remarks.
By
then,
however,
the
corpses
floating
in
the
hot
seas
off
Galveston
had
freighted
Stockman's
words
with
a
brutal,
unintended
irony.

Stockman
was
a
ponderous
bureaucrat,
given
to
writing
immense
reports
about
tiny
things.
When
he
filed
his
second
annual
report
on
July
31,
1900,
even
the
professors
and
clerks
at
the
Central
Office
rebelled,
and
these
were
men
accustomed
to
levels
of
tedium
that
would
have
driven
ordinary
men
to
suicide.
Internal
memos
flew
from
department
to
department,
politely
recommending
that
Stockman
be
muzzled.
On
August
15,
Professor
E.
B.
Garriott,
one
of
die
bureau's
most
senior
scientists,
wrote
to
the
chief
clerk:
"I
am
loth
to
criticize
the
work
of
a
man
who
has
shown
commendable
zeal
in
the
prosecution
of
that
work.
Nevertheless
I
am
constrained
to
say
that
if
the
Official
in
Charge
at
Havana
could
curb
a
tendency
toward
verbosity
and
avoid
iterations
and
reiterations
in
successive
communications
of
matter
that
is
irrelevant
and
immaterial
to
the
subject
heads,
a
great
deal
of
time
and
labor
would
be
saved
both
at
Havana
and
the
Central
Office."

Willis
Moore's
recommendation
was
a
bit
less
florid:
"Kindly
tell
him
to
save
himself
much
work."

In
most
other
respects,
however,
Stockman
was
a
good
man
to
have
in
Havana.
He
shared
Moore's
obsession
with
control
and
reputation,
as
did
the
men
Stockman
placed
in
charge
of
the
hurricane
stations
on
outlying
islands.
Like
Moore,
Stockman
worried
about
the
damage
likely
to
occur
through
the
issuance
of
unwarranted
storm
alerts.
In
the
Indies
service,
however,
this
concern
took
on
a
colonial
cast.
The
poor,
ignorant
natives
were
too
easily
panicked.
Restraint
was
the
white
weatherman's
burden.
It
was
paramount,
he
wrote,
that
the
service
avoid
causing
"unnecessary
alarm
among
the
natives."

He
saw
conspiracy
everywhere.
The
Cubans,
he
believed,
were
trying
to
steal
the
bureau's
weather
observations
to
improve
their
own
forecasts.
He
spent
a
good
part
of
August
1900
investigating
a
man
who
called
himself
Dr.
Enrique
del
Monte
and
claimed
to
be
a
professor
at
the
University
of
Havana.
In
April,
del
Monte
had
published
a
well-received
essay,
"The
Climatology
of
Havana,"
in
the
bureau's
own
Monthly
Weather
Review.
Briefly,
del
Monte
had
even
worked
for
Stockman.
But
now
Stockman
believed
del
Monte
to
be
a
fraud,
perhaps
even
an
agent
of
the
Belen
Observatory.

Stockman
composed
a
nine-page
letter
to
Willis
Moore,
dated
August
10,
which
he
devoted
entirely
to
del
Monte.
He
parsed
del
Monte's
article.
In
the
essay,
the
doctor
had
described
his
observatory
and
the
shelter
that
housed
its
instruments,
and
told
readers
it
was
located
on
a
particular
train
line
in
Havana.
Ah
—
but
no
such
observatory
existed!
Stockman
checked.
"The
shelter
described
for
the
exposure
of
the
thermometers
exactly
describes
the
structure
used
for
said
purpose
by
the
Belen
College
Observatory."