Sudden Sea (4 page)
If you were one of the millions looking for work, you might ride the rails south. It could take a week to reach the Keys from New York. If, on the other hand, you were one of the lucky few who managed to keep your shirt through the crash, you wouldn’t make the trip to Florida until January or February, when winter settled into the Northeast, and then you’d have a couple of comfortable options.
If you had a sturdy car, a Lincoln, say, or a Pierce-Arrow, you might drive yourself, flying down the two-lane blacktop roads, pushing forty-five miles an hour with the accelerator to the floor, and stopping overnight every three hundred miles or so — West-erly to New York; New York to Richmond; Richmond to Pinehurst, North Carolina; Pinehurst to Sea Island, or maybe St. Augustine. Then on to Palm Beach or St. Petersburg. Getting there was half the adventure.
Another option was to put the Lincoln on a flatbed railcar and book a drawing room on the
Southern Flyer.
If you were headed to Florida for the season, you would probably stay at the palatial new Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach or the Vinoy Park in St. Petersburg. Days filled with sun, golf, and tennis would meld into gossamer nights. Everyone dressed for dinner — the gentlemen in tuxedos, the ladies in evening gowns — and after dinner there might be a rubber of bridge, an excursion to the dog races, or dancing in the moonlight to the mellow music of Meyer Davis and His Society Orchestra. The other drawing card was spring training. The Yankees trained in St. Pete’s, and you could stroll over to the sandlot any afternoon, push open the gate, and take a seat in the bleachers. No ticket needed and admission was free. You might catch Lou Gehrig coming to the plate. ’Thirty-eight would be his last full season, and there was a kid in center field named DiMaggio who was really something.
The Boston Braves were over in Sanford. The central Florida town was so sleepy, it only woke up when the ballplayers moved in. The diamond was in the center of town, right across the street from a pretty little yellow stucco house, home to the county jail. When the umpire called, “Play ball,” the sheriff unlocked a cell and released a prisoner to keep score.
In ’38, swing music was all the rage. The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing, Tommy Dorsey, was playing at Roseland. At converted speakeasies, renamed roadhouses, couples cut the rug doing the Lambeth walk. Town bands played in the parks on long summer nights, silver trombones flashing and the red eyes of Havana cigars winking in the fading light.
The Yearling
by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings topped the bestseller list, and there were new novels by Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and P. G. Wode-house. But the book everyone was talking about was Daphne Du Maurier’s
Rebecca.
Such diversions were a momentary escape from the grim news of the day. In Europe an erstwhile housepainter was bullying his neighbors and threatening to march into Czechoslovakia unless Prague sliced off the Sudetenland. With memories of trench slaughter still fresh, the democracies were weakening. Britain’s Neville Chamberlain was tiptoeing into talks with Hitler, prepared to cave in, sell out, concede, whatever was necessary to avert a second war. The Czechs were crying betrayal. Wars were raging around the globe. The civil war in Spain was in its third year. China and Japan were fighting in the Pacific, and in London’s Bow Street Court, Countess Barbara Hutton HaugwitzReventlow was battling with her titled Danish husband for custody of their two-year-old son, Lance. The count was promising the beautiful five-and-dime-store heiress “three years of hell and headlines.”
In America men peddled apples on streets that had once seemed paved with gold. FDR was in the White House, force-feeding the ailing nation an alphabet soup of relief programs. Martin Dies (D-Texas), chairman of the newly formed House Un-American Activities Committee, was battling with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins to have Harry Bridges, president of the West Coast longshoremen’s union, deported; New York’s new mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was trying to clean up after Tammany Hall’s flamboyant Jimmy Walker. The Depression ground on. Soup lines were getting longer, and prosperity seemed as illusory as the kingdom of Oz, soon to be a major motion picture. Americans heard it all on the radio. Tuning in had become a new national pastime.
In homes across the country, the radio occupied a place of prominence. The big Philco console was a popular model — almost three feet of dark polished wood in an Art Deco design with gleaming dials. Like an honored guest, the radio was attended to closely but not understood fully. Families clustered around it, their attention fixed on its luminous face, imaginations drawing pictures to illustrate the words that came through the silvery mesh. Most listeners couldn’t explain how the voice of a stranger, spoken from a great distance, came out of a polished box, but they accepted its validity on faith and never missed their favorite shows:
Amos ’n’ Andy
and
The Green Hornet (“Faster, Kato, faster”);
the CBS News, with the young correspondents William Shirer and Edward R. Murrow reporting live from Berlin and London; and late in the evening, the remotes of the big bands — Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Glenn Miller
(“From the Pennsylvania Hotel’s Café Rouge in New York City, Pennsylvania six, five o-o-o”).
Sunday evening was the most popular listening time. Living rooms filled with the voice of Lowell Thomas, dean of news commentators:
“Good evening, everybody. Today in Berlin, Nazi Germany staged a demonstration for its Führer as the rest of Europe tensely awaited a decision for war or peace.”
On the radio, as in the movies, the news was a prelude to the featured attraction. Sunday nights, it was the
Chase and Sanborn Hour
on NBC at eight o’clock. For sixty minutes, storms of wind and war took a backseat to the banter of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, prime-time radio’s number one star.
When the comic and his smart-mouth dummy signed off at nine o’clock on the eighteenth of September, the storm that would become the Great Hurricane of 1938 was blowing on Florida’s doorstep.
A Shift in the Wind
W
hen the first Neolithic man stepped out of the cave and looked up at the sky, he was attempting to predict the weather. We have been trying with varying degrees of success ever since. At the most fundamental level, weather is a cosmic balancing act. Because the earth is tilted on its axis, the sun doesn’t warm it evenly. The most concentrated heat is at the equator, where the sun’s rays are most direct; the least heat is at the poles.
Like a planetary central air conditioner, weather works to correct this inequity, shifting air so the tropics won’t toast, the poles won’t freeze, and we shall be spared a new ice age. Since the tropics are always hot and the poles are always cold, most of the unstable weather happens in the mid-latitudes. There, in the hospitable temperate zones, where the often frenetic pushing and shoving matches between warm and cold fronts occur, hurricanes and other epic weather dramas are played out.
In 1938, the first hint of trouble came early in September, when summer residents from Long Island to Cape Cod were closing up their beach houses, turning the water off to keep the pipes from bursting in winter and locking the doors for the first time all season. Halfway around the world at the Bilma oasis in the Sahara Desert, French meteorologists noticed a slight shift in the wind. An area of unstable air was passing over northwest Africa. Within a day or two, it had moved into the Atlantic around the Cape Verde Islands.
Every week or so, somewhere in the tropical seas off the northwest coast of Africa, a cluster of clouds comes together and takes on a sinister shape. Scattered thunderclouds tighten into a ring, and the winds within them begin to spiral. Only one out of every ten will intensify to hurricane force, and what makes one whorl of unstable air grow into a hurricane for every nine that peter out is as much conjecture as science. These incipient storms seem to be temperamental creatures, as sensitive to their surroundings as orchids, and they start to sputter unless atmospheric conditions are exactly right.
For a hurricane to form, the sea must be at least two hundred feet deep and the water surface more than 26° Celsius or about 80° degrees Fahrenheit. The cloud cluster must be close to the equator, but not too close. Five degrees north or south of the equatorial line and there’s not enough planetary spin to create a cyclone. Thirty degrees north or south and there isn’t enough humidity in the air to fuel the storm.
Given ideal conditions — warm, wet air; a revolving planet; uninterrupted sun-warmed seas; and no islands or volcanic mountains in the way to slow it down — and left to cruise across the Atlantic undisturbed, a cloud cluster may turn itself into a hurricane. The word derives from Huracén, the god of evil, whom the earliest Caribbean tribes feared above all other gods. The elements of wind and water were Huracén’s weapons, and when he hurled them across the islands, the destruction was swift and absolute.
The French observation was beamed by shortwave radio to weather posts along the Caribbean Sea lanes. It clattered into the U.S. Weather Bureau station in Jacksonville, Florida, via Teletype, a vague threat amid a jumble of observations received from ships at sea and Caribbean port towns, from other U.S. weather posts, and from thousands of volunteer weather watchers across the country.
On September 4, the unstable air blowing from the Sahara gathered in the fertile Cape Verde breeding ground. Lying about four hundred miles west of Senegal in northwest Africa, the islands sit squarely in the path of the trade winds. Between them and the next landfall stretches a vast tropical incubator — two thousand miles of open, sun-warmed sea. So many North Atlantic hurricanes originate off Cape Verde that it is called “Hurricane Alley.” The unstable air combined with moisture built up from the heat of the equator and formed a cluster of thunder-clouds. The cloud cluster began to whirl. Floating nice and easy across the tropical seas, it pushed west on the Spanish Main, carried on the same powerful currents that brought Columbus from Europe to the New World. Lolling along at ten or twelve miles an hour, it covered 250 to 300 miles a day, drifting west at the same steady rate, encountering mile after mile of open water. With each mile, it grew stronger.
The spinning storm moved over warm tropical seas, where the air was humid and full of water vapor, the fuel that keeps a storm growing. As it swept across the ocean, gathering speed and strength, it blew the tops off waves, adding even more vapor to the air and more energy to its storehouse.
When surface winds reached twenty-five miles an hour, the system became a tropical depression. When they increased to fifty or sixty miles per hour, it became a tropical storm. When sustained winds reached seventy-four miles an hour, the storm reached the intensity of a tropical cyclone. A tropical cyclone has several names. In the Pacific Ocean it’s called a typhoon. In the Philippines, a
baguio.
In the Tasman Sea, Australians call it a willy-willy. If it develops in the North Atlantic, it is called a hurricane.
At full strength, a tropical cyclone is an extreme low-pressure zone with more destructive might than the entire world arsenal. In one day it releases as much energy as the United States consumes in electric power in six months. If a way were ever found to harness one of these monster storms, the world’s energy and water problems would be solved. No other force of nature can match its power, and nothing can stop it except another hurricane.
To understand its mechanics, imagine a toy top, one of those old-fashioned wooden ones with a string that wraps around it. Yank the string and the top takes off, spinning rapidly while simultaneously skidding across the floor. Now magnify that image millions of times. Like a top, a hurricane has two distinct movements — the rotation within and its forward push. The wind inside spirals around a central low-pressure axis, creating a tightly spinning whirlwind. The closer the wind is to the center, the faster it spins. The wind outside is an independent atmospheric force, pushing the disturbance forward in a specific direction and at a specific speed.
By the night of September 16, the random cloud cluster had traveled some fifteen hundred miles from Cape Verde to the Caribbean. Now a major cyclone, it was set on a collision course with Florida.
Hurricane Watch
Friday, September 16
T
he hurricane watch began at the Jacksonville station of the U.S. Weather Bureau about suppertime on Friday, the sixteenth of September, when Grady Norton picked up a radio signal from a Brazilian freighter. The SS
Alegrete,
bound for her home port of Belém, had sailed into a cyclone in the Atlantic Ocean off the Leeward Islands. She reported pounding seas, seventy-five-mile-per-hour winds, and a barometric reading of 28.31 inches and falling.
If you were casting a hurricane hunter, a superhero battling the forces of wind, wave, and floodwater, Grady Norton would be an unlikely choice. A slight man of forty-three with thinning sandy hair, he was more Dagwood than Clark Kent. Norton combed his hair straight back, wore round oversize glasses, and in photographs often had a startled look. He had little formal education. His three favorite teachers were mythology, the Bible, and Shakespeare, and he quoted liberally from them to describe the weather he watched. Norton had worked in the U.S. Weather Bureau for almost twenty years, with time out for service in the Army Signal Corps during World War I. In 1935 he was named director of the Weather Bureau’s first hurricane center.
The original U.S. Weather Bureau was chartered by an act of Congress in 1870 and officially designated the Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce. As the name implies, it was devised as a tool for trade. A central Washington office, linked by telegram to a network of twenty-four observatories across the country, was set up to monitor the weather and issue daily forecasts. If storms, squalls, blizzards, frosts, and other Acts of God were predicted accurately, the thinking went, businesses could take protective measures and commerce would prosper. Within a few years, the agency had more than three hundred weather stations from coast to coast.