Isaac's Storm: Part III

Only a confluence of storms, he believed, could produce such intensity.

Legend holds that the sea convinced Isaac of the same thing—that he raced back to the office, galvanized the station into a flurry of action, then sped back to the beach and warned everyone he saw to flee the city or retreat to the center of town.

But Isaac's response, and that of his station, was in reality more ambivalent.

A few hours after Isaac's trip to the beach, the Alamo's Captain Hix made his visit to the station—the visit in which he was told the coming storm was an innocuous "offspur" of one that had struck Florida.

Judson was adamant.

A lushly planted esplanade of oleander, live oak, and Mexican dagger divided Broadway, but the heavy rains of the past month and the fresh downpours of the morning had turned the esplanade into a wonderfully slippery flume of mud, through which the children stomped and slid despite stern shouts from parents on the adjacent sidewalks.

As Cohen watched, he heard fragments of the story: The sea had risen; it had destroyed the Midway; the bathhouses were about to collapse into the Gulf; the streetcar trestle was so thoroughly undermined it could not possibly stand much longer.

With cinematic timing, a sledgehammer of wind struck the house with so much force it knocked plaster from the walls.

Between gusts, the diners continued talking business with a nonchalance that had to be contrived.

Between gusts, the diners continued talking business with a nonchalance that had to be contrived.

Marie Berryman Lang, daughter of the assistant lighthouse keeper, remembered it all so clearly: the waves that slammed against the lighthouse as the water rose within its base and drove the two hundred refugees ever higher up its spiral shaft; the heat and desperate humidity that caused the children to cry for water; and all the while, beyond the chaos, that lonesome booming of the guns, like the drumbeat of an Army cortege.

Isaac's and Joseph's accounts diverged in subtle ways that seemed to shed light on their later estrangement.

Isaac's and Joseph's accounts diverged in subtle ways that seemed to shed light on their later estrangement.

Joseph enciphered the message, then fought his way to the Strand.

It was truly a transitional moment: There he was, at the cusp of the twentieth century, using the telephone to send a telegram.