A GOOD READ BETWEEN TROPICAL STORMS (OR IS IT CYCLONES)

 (Ed.'s Note: With Tropical Storm Alberto gone and another one threatening to develop into a hurricane, our drainage-challenged city is in for a good flooding if it makes land anywhere near here. Bike and hike trails and sports parks won't do us any good like a good drainage system would. Remember that when it rains for an hour all our major thoroughfares are impassable. If that happens and you can't wander off into the city, here's a good read on a real hurricane.)

By Juan Montoya
I was going through my old books yesterday after watching the Weather Channel (El Guero Chano) and I remembered reading the account of a hurricane (or typhoon in the Pacific?) from Jack London's The Heathen.

The Tower Book Edition was first printed on March 1946, but the actual stories in the collection date back to his early days, between 1909 and 1911, more than a century ago. Now, lest someone accuse me of stealing London's stuff let me say at the outset that I will only use one or two pages of perhaps a 20-25 page short story to illustrate the power of these storms at sea and his mastery at story-telling.

In this account, London is on a 70-ton pearler heading to Papeete, in French Polynesia, after a successful pearl-buying trip. Enjoy.

"Wind? Out of all my experiences I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the clothes off our bodies. I say tore them off, and I mean it.

I'm not asking you to believe it.

I am merely telling something that I saw and felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is enough. One could not face that wind and live.
It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it increased and continued to increase.

Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like.
Perhaps sand is not the right comparison.

Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself. Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mud-banks - no, it is beyond me. Language may be adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind.

It would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not attempting a description.

I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind. More – it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up in the maw of the hurricane and hurled on through that portion of space which previously had been occupied by the air...

... I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when the center smote us. The blow we received was an absolute lull. There was not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening. Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful pressure of that wind.

And then, suddenly, the pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I were about to expand, to fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom composing my body was repelling every other atom, and was on the verge of rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a moment. Destruction was upon us.

In the absence of the wind and its pressure, the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom of a pail of water.

There was no system to them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas.

They were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a man had ever seen. They were splashes, monstrous splashes, that is all, splashes that were eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts, explosions.

They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another, they collided. They rushed together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man ever dreamed of, that hurricane-center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell-pit of sea water gone mad."

(Now was that awesome writing or what? Do yourself a favor. Read the entire story or better still buy the book for the entire account. It's a keeper.)