Soon, however, the sky filled with puffy clouds, Cumulus humilus, the pretty fair-weather cumulus of the finest summer days. As the wave advanced, these grew fatter and taller. High clouds arrived next, first icy cirrus, then a gray ceiling of cirrostratus. The skies got darker, the cloud ceiling lower. A fine drizzle began to fall. A squall line of thunderstorms followed, cousins of the great storms that just a few days earlier had driven the shopkeepers of Dakar to seek shelter. The storms brought thunder and lightning, but were nowhere near as intense as they had been over the West African bulge. They dropped the temperature at sea level to below 70 degrees. For anyone acclimated to the humid warmth of the tropics, suddenly the air was downright cold. It was jacket weather on Cape Verde.
The squalls passed. The sky cleared. The cycle began again.
WHEREVER THE AUGUST wave traveled, it dropped the pressure exerted by the atmosphere. At first the decline was slight, but soon warm air flowed upward through the thunderheads heating the air and reducing its weight, thereby reducing the pressure it exerted on the ocean surface. The heating produced a basin of low pressure that drew air, as wind, from surrounding regions of higher pressure. Meanwhile, ambient upper-level winds whisked away the air exiting from the top of the storm. The faster the upper air departed, the faster the lower air arrived. A few clouds became so immense they began to shape the behavior of the entire mass.
The storm could have continued growing, but conditions were not quite right. The air moving from its top had begun to descend, but in a form very different from when it first entered the storm. Stripped of its moisture, this descending air was cool and dry. Cataracts of spent air fell toward the sea beyond the boundaries of the storm, but the storm’s appetite had grown so large it now summoned this air as well. The cool air became caught—“entrained”—in the moist sea-level winds rushing toward the storm. As this dry air mixed with the moist, it banked the fires rising through the clouds above.
For the moment, the system stabilized.
IN GALVESTON, THE humidity was nearly one 100 percent. To move was to drip. It was too hot to put on a bathing suit. “Brown is the new color for bathing suits,” the Galveston News reported in the caption of a photograph showing the latest in coastal chic. “This one of a rich leaf brown mohair has yoke, collar and bands of white mohair striped with black braid.”
Mohair.
Every day an ad in the Galveston News for Dr. McLaughlin’s Electric Belt asked: “Weak Men—Are You Sick?”
MOST TROPICAL DISTURBANCES dissipated over the open sea. They collided with powerful winds from the west that dipped from the middle latitudes and blew the tops off their thunderheads. They encountered pools of cold water. They entrained so much dry air they lost their passion. Their pillars of smoke and light became mist. Most of the time.
Occasionally they became killers, although exactly why remained a mystery even at the end of the twentieth century. Satellites sharpened the ability of forecasters to monitor hurricane motion but could not capture the instant of transfiguration. No matter how closely meteorologists analyzed satellite biographies of hurricanes, they still could not isolate the exact coding that destined a particular easterly wave to a future of murder and mayhem. Satellites could document changes in temperature of a few thousandths of a degree and capture features as small as a foot wide or a few centimeters tall. “But suppose,” wrote Ernest Zebrowski Jr., in Perils of a Restless Planet, “that a tropical storm develops, and that we play back the data record of the previous few days. What do we find as we go back in time? A smaller storm, and yet a smaller disturbance, then a warm moist windy spot, then a set of atmospheric conditions that looks no diffferent from that at many other locations in the tropics.”
Zebrowski proposed that the answer might lie in the science of “nonlinear dynamics”: chaos theory and the famous butterfly effect. He framed the question this way: “Could a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?”
To Zebrowski, the fact that the most detailed satellite analysis could not detect a trigger suggested that tropical storms might be influenced by forces too subtle to measure. He noted that a tiny change in the variables entered into computer models of hurricane development could yield dramatic variation later on. “One simulated storm may veer northward while another continues westward, one may intensify while another is dying, or one may stand stationary while another gallops toward a shoreline.”
Every hurricane, however, had characteristics similar to those of every other hurricane. Each, for example, developed thunderstorms and began to rotate. In chaos theory, these points of broadly similar behavior were “strange attractors.” Subtle forces could launch a system from one attractor to another—a chance gust of wind, a plume of hot sea, maybe even the sudden burst of heat from a British frigate during a gunnery drill off Dakar.
“Add a little glitch, a metaphorical butterfly, to a complex process,” Zebrowski wrote, “and sometimes you get an outcome no rational person would ever have expected.”
AS GALVESTON STEAMED, the world seethed. The Boxer Rebellion intensified. The British public grew weary of the Boer War. When Boer snipers fired on a British troop train, a British general ordered every house within ten miles burned to the ground. The order shocked London. A madman assassinated Italy’s King Humbert. In Paris, another assassin tried to kill the shah of Persia. Bubonic plague turned up in London and Glasgow. William Jennings Bryan stumped for the presidency and railed at America’s new imperialist bent, in particular the widely held belief that expansion overseas was America’s destiny. “Destiny,” he thundered, “is the subterfuge of the invertebrate.…”
The speech ran on for eight thousand words. Despite the heat, the house was packed.
THE SEAS WERE busy. A few ships must have encountered the thunder and rain but apparently their crews did not see it as anything unusual. They hung canvas to catch the rain. Steamers raised sails to save coal. Frigate birds wheeled in the cantaloupe dawn.
Galveston spun through space at nine hundred miles an hour. The trade winds blew. Great masses of air shifted without a sound.
Somewhere, a butterfly opened its wings.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Violent Commotions
DESPITE THE GREAT demands of a nineteenth-century farming life, Isaac and his brother, Joseph, remembered the world of their childhood, in the knob-hilled terrain of Monroe County, Tennessee, as an Eden-like realm through which they wandered with little parental restraint. As a hobby, and to raise spending money, Isaac trapped muskrat, mink, and otter. He rose early to check his traplines before his daily chores began. His chores began at 4:00 A.M. He was six years old.
The Cline farm was among the richest in the knobs. In fall, at acorn time, passenger pigeons gathered in the oak trees in such great numbers they hid the treetops. The land was lush with apples, peaches, strawberries, and persimmons. Ghosts populated the black places under its forests. Isaac’s uncle swore as fact that once during a hunting trip he had seen a headless woman who told him she was searching for a jug of whiskey buried fifteen years earlier by her husband. Stories circulated of a strange apelike creature spotted in the hills, and these too seemed like country tales, until the day armed officers captured a naked “wild man” and penned him at the center of town. Sinkholes could open overnight. One swallowed Joseph’s plow. Another turned Boyd’s Pond, a swimming hole on the Cline farm, into what Joseph called “our most thrilling devil’s haunt”—the place where a boy was said to have boasted he would “swim the pond four times or go to hell.” The boy finished the fourth circuit when the water began to whirl around him. He struggled, threw his arms up in panic, and plunged from view.
The law of convenient epiphany would place the trigger for Isaac’s decision to become a meteorologist in the funnel of a tornado that swept into nearby Fork Creek Vall
ey one Saturday night, lifted the bed of a sleeping child, and deposited the bed in an orchard one hundred yards away, the child still aboard and safe, the bed intact. Or perhaps in the great skeletons of lightning that clutched the sky so many August nights. These things played a part, no doubt. Lightning was barely understood, tornadoes not at all. To a boy in a land of ghosts and wild men, how could they not be alluring?
But other forces played on Isaac. He came of age in a time of broad technological awakening, in an America transformed by steam and telegraphic communication. He read everything by Jules Verne. Between bouts of plowing, while giving his mule, Jim, a rest, he would join Phileas Fogg and Captain Nemo on their elaborate adventures. Isaac loved science—his greatest dream was to write a scientific treatise on something, anything, as long as it resonated the world over—but he also loved the Bible, so much so that toward the end of his years in high school his friends urged him to become a preacher. At sixteen, he entered Hiwassee College in Tennessee, where he studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, Latin, and Greek. A few friends had set their sights on becoming lawyers, and for a time Isaac joined them in reading the works of Sir William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century English jurist, but never with a serious desire to practice. “I first studied to be a preacher, but decided that I was too prone to tell big stories,” he later explained. “Then I studied Blackstone for a while and soon learned that I was not adept enough at prevarication to make a successful lawyer. I then made up my mind that I would seek some field where I could tell big stories and tell the truth.”
He chose the weather.
ACTUALLY, THE WEATHER chose him.
Gen. William B. Hazen, in charge of the U.S. Signal Corps since 1880, wanted only the best men for his new weather service. Smart men, moral men, scientific men, but above all, strong men capable of wading against a mounting sea of skepticism about the corps’ ability to report and forecast the weather. He wrote to college presidents asking them to recommend likely candidates from their graduating classes.
The president of Hiwassee College, J. H. Bruner, recommended Isaac.
“I accepted with pleasure,” Isaac wrote, “for it was just the kind of work I wanted.” General Hazen telegraphed instructions directing him to report to Washington on July 7, 1882.
ISAAC REACHED WASHINGTON’S Pennsylvania Railroad Station early on the morning of July 6. He was twenty years old and had spent his entire life in the hollows of Tennessee, but suddenly his world got much larger. Gigantic. The minute he stepped from the train he found himself standing where a president’s blood had flowed. A marker showed the exact place where President James Garfield had been shot one year earlier by Charles J. Guiteau. Guiteau was hanged the week before Isaac’s arrival. Now the platform was crowded with men whose great bellies and muttonchop whiskers spoke of power. Already the air was sticky and hot. It smelled of horses and smoke. The men wore black suits. They did not appear to suffer in the heat, but the air carried a certain added pungency. Never had Isaac seen so many people gathered in one place, amid so much noise and such a rich battery of scents. The whistles of locomotives shrieked; their boilers hissed. He heard an intermittent ringing and knew instantly it came from telephones somewhere within the station. Shiny black cabs clattered to the station doors, hailed by porters pushing high-wheeled handcars. Isaac saw telegraph poles so heavily strung with wire they looked like the backs of grand pianos. And there was talk of still more wire—that soon cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington would be lighted with electricity.
Isaac was exhausted, lonely, thrilled. He took a cab to the hotel booked by General Hazen, and there spent the rest of the day indulging in a very uncharacteristic pursuit: doing nothing. Partly it was the fatigue. But mainly this young man who had trapped the night forests of Tennessee at the age of six was frightened. He had never been in a city this big before. He was afraid even to let the hotel out of his sight.
He might have been a lot more anxious if he had known of the controversy that swirled at that moment around the Signal Corps, and of the scandal that triggered it, a scandal whose shock waves would roll forward like a storm swell to shape the events of Saturday, September 8, 1900.
But that night the only thing swirling seemed to be the mosquitoes clouding the gas lamps on the street below.
THE CRIME ITSELF could have happened in any bureau of the government, the juxtaposition of money and men always a chancy thing. That it happened within the Signal Corps, however, gave it an incendiary power beyond expectation. It had the effect of undamming a reservoir of complaint.
The corps had grown accustomed to controversy ever since Congress designated it the mother agency for the nation’s first weather service. “Meteorology has ever been an apple of contention,” wrote Joseph Henry, the first director of the Smithsonian, “as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those who have attempted to study them.” Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God’s province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent. Mark Twain, merciless as always, parodied the government’s efforts: “Probable northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer swapping around from place to place, probably areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning.”
But this new controversy was different. In 1881, police arrested Capt. Henry W. Howgate, chief financial manager of the Signal Corps, for embezzling nearly a quarter million dollars, this in an age when dinner at a nice restaurant cost thirty-five cents. He was arrested, convicted, and jailed. In the spring of 1882 prison authorities allowed Howgate to go home under guard to see his daughter, who was then visiting from Vassar. He escaped and was still at large when Isaac arrived in Washington.
For the weather service’s critics, the Howgate scandal was the last straw. Secretary of War Robert T. Lincoln launched an investigation of the Signal Corps with particular emphasis on the service. He found it had few financial controls, a very limited pool of experienced forecasters, and a training academy—Fort Myer—that spent a lot more time putting men through cavalry drills than teaching them to forecast the weather. General of the Army P. H. Sheridan, around whom the aura of Civil War heroism still glowed bright, declared Fort Myer a waste of money. The all-important Chicago Board of Trade filed a formal petition with Congress demanding reform. Complaints also rose from within the Signal Corps itself, where some veteran military officers, among them a Major H. H. C. Dunwoody, opposed a push by General Hazen to conduct primary research into the causes and character of weather. Dunwoody objected in particular to Hazen’s hiring of civilian scientists like Cleveland Abbe, easily the most prominent practicing meteorologist of the nineteenth century. The assault got personal when a Pennsylvania congressman accused General Hazen of cowardice in the Battle of Shiloh.
There were many things you could be in the new America, but a coward was not one of them.
An ARMY SURGEON examined Isaac. He saw a lean young man of middle height with angular features, lively dark eyes, and an expression of sobriety that made you want to tell him some awful joke just to see if he could laugh. The surgeon had seen many boys like this, but under very different circumstances, and he wanted to tell this boy not to be so frightened, that his next stop was Fort Myer, not Bloody Run. Like most boys from the country, Isaac’s face was sun-torched to a point about three-quarters up his forehead where his skin turned trout-belly pale. The boy had good hands. Strong, weathered, nicked. Enterprising hands. The doctor pronounced him fit.
Isaac and three other new men climbed into a wagon led by two strong horses and driven by a man in uniform. The wagon took them west through a neighborhood the driver called Georgetown, where three- and four-story brick houses stood jammed side by side. The wagon turned south and clattered across the Georgetown Bridge into Virginia, where it continued to climb until
it reached Arlington Heights.
Even in the steam of that hot afternoon, the view was stunning. To the east was the great dome of the Capitol gleaming in the heat. A mile or so closer was the Willard Hotel and the tuft of forest that masked the president’s mansion. A great stone tower dominated the landscape. It rose hundreds of feet into the sky and dwarfed every other building in sight. The tower was not yet finished. But how much higher could it possibly go? Nearer at hand, Isaac caught flashes of the Arlington mansion of Robert E. Lee and the great cemetery now aborning on its grounds.
The first soldier to greet Isaac was 1st Sgt. Mike Mahaney, a gruff Civil War veteran who showed Isaac to an oblong room with one window, running water, two double desks, and four beds. The fort’s commander, Capt. Dick Strong, his natural seriousness amplified by his heavy beard, welcomed the new men and gave them his stock charge: “You will cheerfully obey all orders without question and refrain from saying anything either commendatory or condemnatory.”
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.