To casual observers of the weather, the pattern is familiar. The advent of a new hurricane is announced to great fanfare. The storm appears on the radar, making its way across the ocean as a sort of psychedelic Tasmanian Devil, its long rain bands rotating like pummeling arms. If the cyclone slows down, if its maximum sustained surface winds drop to a speed between 39 and 73 mph (34 to 63 knots), it is downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. Hurricane Henri was thus demoted as it approached landfall in Westerly, Rhode Island, on Aug. 22. By Sunday night, it had dwindled into a mere tropical depression, cruising southwest of Hartford, Connecticut, with 35-mph winds. Just another overhyped upstart, peaking early, flaming out.
To less casual observers, this picture looked altogether different. Henri left tens of thousands of households without electricity in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Coastal communities in Connecticut were evacuated. Severe flooding was widespread. See the aerial photos of Middlesex County, New Jersey, to put a “mere tropical depression” in perspective. Hype saves lives. A storm need not be Hurricane Katrina to leave a devastating wake.
What exactly happens during a major weather system’s destructive transit? In 1941, the historian and novelist George Rippey Stewart published Storm, the “biography” of a storm privately nicknamed “Maria” (pronounced as in Mariah Carey, not Maria Montessori) by a character known as the Junior Meteorologist. Maria is born in the Pacific, off the Japanese coast, and, over the 12-day course of its existence, crosses the ocean to play hell on California. “A storm itself had most of the qualities of a living thing,” Stewart explains in a 1947 introduction to his book. This conceit, which elevates the pathetic fallacy to its own art form, may have been novel but is anything but gimmicky. The book is a dynamic system of natural science, psychology, poetry, myth, and even adventure in a Jack London vein.
The Junior Meteorologist, or J.M., one of Storm’s many human if mostly archetypal characters, names storms after his past loves. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Storm was beloved by “U.S. Army Air Corp and Navy meteorologists during World War II. When Reid Bryson, E.B. Buxton, and Bill Plumley were assigned to Saipan in 1944 to forecast tropical cyclones they decided to name them after their wives.” The convention, clearly susceptible to feminist critique, has persisted in modified form. Today, some storms are given women’s names, some men’s, but Stewart’s significant legacy is that they are personified as complex individuals, not simply as villains. In the storm’s eye, it elicits weak-kneed bargaining with God. At a safer remove, we allow ourselves curiosity, admiration, even awe.
Stewart was fascinated by names. His most famous work is Earth Abides, a 1949 work of post-apocalyptic science fiction that has never been out of print, but not far behind is Names on the Land, a deep history of American toponyms. (It is published, like this new edition of Storm, by New York Review Books.) Stewart’s interest in naming was a feature of his passion for the untold stories and hidden processes that are subsumed into their own symbolism. Not for nothing did Stewart dedicate Storm to 15 entities that, though they may sound a bit bland on paper, were the first and last line of West Coast storm defense: the California Division of Highways, the California Division of Water Resources, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the U.S. Weather Bureau, and so on.
Storm is famous for popularizing an arguably outdated naming convention. It also seems to have cemented many of the conventions of a disaster movie, and it reads like a slightly less roided-up version of one — more The Perfect Storm than, say, San Andreas. Though Maria is Storm’s “heroine,” the book achieves narrative momentum not primarily by its minute and beautiful account of physical forces. Yes, it is instructive to read about heat transfer, pressure systems, hydrology, soil erosion, the structure of snow, the behavior of animals, even, significantly, the decay of plants. But, as in any disaster movie, impersonal global processes are brought into focus by how they affect human activity, how they challenge the pluck and daring of their antlike victims.
It is mostly benign critical trickery to argue, as Nathaniel Rich does in his excellent introduction, that Stewart “violates a fundamental law of novel writing—that one’s protagonist should have an inner life, or if not that, free will, or if not that, at very least a consciousness.” Stewart’s prose has something for everyone, on the same folksy principle that holds for the weather: If you don’t like it, just wait. It ranges from the sententiously Biblical or mythopoetic to the rhapsodic to the homespun to the gritty. The variety and specificity of Stewart’s language lend heft to the most windily insubstantial abstractions. That said, like any disaster flick, Storm would fizzle out without its ensemble cast of meteorologists, linemen, plow operators, dam technicians, highway patrolmen, and beleaguered travelers.
Storm is at the bottom a man-versus-nature adventure story in which nature is fleshed out more thoroughly and lovingly than usual and man is defined less by what he thinks and feels than by what he does to survive. Only a climatologist or a mystic could read a depopulated version of Storm with anything like the enjoyment its human drama provides.
These human dramas, and not the inhuman presence of Maria, are what make the novel’s artistic and commercial success so surprising: They are relatively small, and not just sub specie aeternitatis. The novel doesn’t rely on blockbuster set pieces like outrunning a lava flow, surfing a landslide, or hopscotching through a city as an earthquake breaks it into pieces. Its focus is on the mostly unglamorous things that the little guy must do to protect modern civilization from the elements: fixing a broken snowplow axle in 3-foot drifts, descending a wet ladder into the bowels of an overflowing dam, climbing an icy utility pole in the middle of nowhere to restore power to the cities. Storm is about work and workers. It is about difficult decisions. Do we flood the farmland to save the cities? Can we go looking for lost travelers? Have we prepared for the worst?
Stewart takes a storm’s-eye view, naturally, but he is at his best when showing us those connections that only a human being can register, let alone care about. Here, a rotting tree bole to which the book returns repeatedly plunges from its precarious spot, snapping Pole 1-234-76 of the Central Transcontinental Lead:
Except for two hikers who had sat upon the bole for a few minutes in 1923, no human being had ever known anything about it. During the half-hour following its fall down the mountain-side, nobody knew that it had fallen. But the fall affected the lives of many people over a hemisphere.
A man in Boise was delayed fifteen minutes in getting a call through to Sacramento and lost a prospective job.
A girl in Omaha was prevented from talking to her mother in Honolulu before she went into the operating-room, not to return alive.
Storm is full of such chaos theory cause and effect. The salient point for us is not that nature is incomprehensibly vast and unpredictable but that it creates problems that we have to fix. It bears repeating: The book is dedicated not to a storm but to the people who prepare for it, venture out into it, clean up after it. Storms, we will always have with us. The real story is what we do about them.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
