Isaac's Storm: The Beach–Part I

The small red book fit into a vest pocket and listed nearly all Galveston's established citizens—its police officers, bankers, waiters, clerics, tobacconists, undertakers, tycoons, and shipping agents—and rated them for credit-worthiness, basing this appraisal on secret reports filed anonymously by friends and enemies.

Upon first meeting Isaac, men found him to be modest and self-effacing, but those who came to know him well saw a hardness and confidence that verged on conceit.

Many years later he would write, "If we had known then what we know now of these swells, and the tides they create, we would have known earlier the terrors of the storm which these swells...told us in unerring language was coming."

An invisible paisley of plumes and counterplumes formed above the earth, the pattern as ephemeral as the copper and bronze veils that appear when water enters whiskey.

"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."

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.

He reached Hispaniola in August 1498 expecting to savor the perquisites of rank, but found rebellion and turmoil.

He used the hangings as a pretext to arrest Columbus and lock him in chains, a degree of public humiliation that speaks clearly of some deeper passion filling Bobadilla's portfolio.

Isaac's train passed through an austere landscape of grays and browns, the trees like upended spiders, but to him all of it was dazzling.

He remained true to his belief that one's time should be used efficiently, an ethos that Frederick Winslow Taylor soon would bring to American industry.

The station itself, he wrote was in "execrable" condition.

Where Abilene had been a rude new town still redolent of fresh-cut wood, Galveston had substance.

In fact, in all 251 pages Joseph barely mentioned Isaac at all, and then only in the most cursory way.

Moore never missed a chance to burnish the reputation of the Weather Bureau or to boost his own political stature.

The survivors believed the worst was over. "This evidence of abatement was hailed with shouts of joy, and was confirmed in a few minutes by the action of the wind, which gradually backed to the north and northwest."