Alexander Key
Revolving Monsters

    In the path of the North Equatorial Current and for 1000 miles east and west of Martinique lies the deadliest hatchery in our hemisphere. It is the breeding place of monsters – a voracious species of sea thing whose appetite for destruction must appall even the Creator. Every August and September I watch warily for their coming – warily, yet with an interest comparable with a small boy’s morbid fascination in rattlesnakes. I have felt the passing of a number of these leviathans from afar, but only once have I come in direct contact with one. It was, fortunately, a smallish specimen; I waited for its arrival with anticipation and curiosity, and days later, when its tail had done with lashing, I was very, very glad to see it go. I’m speaking of hurricanes.
    This lesser specimen should have been enough to satisfy anyone’s curiosity, but for a host of reasons it only whetted an interest that has been growing ever since. Because my home is on the Gulf Coast, and I have merely to glance out the window to see the blue caldron where all kinds of weather, from good to foul, are in the continual process of being brewed, the matter of weather is of vital concern – as it is to every coast dweller. The old oaks and cedars about the place all lean fearfully away from the water, and generations of hurricanes have twisted them until they look like something out of Hänsel und Gretel. The house itself has taken many beatings before my time, and it is destined to take many more. Now the season is on again. Perhaps as you read this I will be out nailing battens over the shutters, preparing for the big one that is already overdue.
    When the last one hit, I had lately returned from too long a stay inland, and I didn’t know an isobar from an azimuth. From all accounts I had read, I had only a vague conception of the titanic size and force of these doldrum monsters; as for the actuality of one – the rain, the rising waters, the unbelievable slamming wind and its strange effect upon its victims – I was totally unprepared. And so began a search to answer a flood of questions. If some of these findings seem utterly amazing, well, it is only to be expected of such an amazing subject. That I risk controversy on almost any statement is also to be expected. There is nothing in the world like a hurricane – not even another hurricane.
    To all who have ever had the unforgettable experience of one, a great hurricane is the most tremendous spectacle in all nature, and by every count the most monstrous and destructive. Volcanoes and earthquakes are not excepted. This statement will be challenged, so to challengers I submit the following, inconceivable, yet true:
    To Mount Pelée on Martinique, and to Krakatoa off the Java coast, go top honors for volcanic horror. When each blew the lid off the world, the racket was heard nearly 1000 miles, and each destroyed a city and some 30,000 persons. The Barbados hurricane in 1780 destroyed half a dozen towns and cities, killed more than 50,000, und left u path of wreckage extending at least 4000 miles – how much farther no one knows. The minimum area directly affected by the track of this hurricane was more than 1,000,000 square miles – a minimum, mind you, that has probably been exceeded many times.
    Incidentally, this 1780 monster played an important part in American independence, for it sank thirteen British men-o’-war along the Atlantic coast and in the Bahamas, and so severely damaged sixteen others that they were of little use for long afterward.
    Earthquakes? The list of their dead is almost beyond estimate. One of the worst on record occurred in Japan in 1703, when a total of 200,000 died, many of them from the aftereffects. But this figure is equaled by a terror of a hurricane known as the Backergunge cyclone – what a name for a monster! – that roared across the mouth of the Ganges in 1876. And it was exceeded five years later by the Haiphong typhoon – also a hurricane – that swept the China coast with the unparalleled toll of 300,000 lives. For the value of destroyed property, the New England hurricane of 1938 probably leads all calamities, even the Chicago fire, the San Francisco and Japanese earthquakes, and the Mississippi floods.
    But all comparisons become as nothing when we look deeper and discover the relationship that seems to exist between hurricanes and earthquakes, not to speak of climate and floods.
    Is it possible for a hurricane to cause an earthquake? And what of floods and their effect on climate?
    The Spanish call it “huracán,” after the Carib name; in the Pacific off Mexico it is the “cordonazo” – or “lash” – “of St. Francis”; Filipinos know it as a “baguío”; the Chinese speak of it dramatically as the ” mother of the winds,” and from them we have the name “typhoon”; to west-coast Australians it in a “willy-willy” – which should not be confused with the little williwaw of the Strait of Magellan; shellbacks and Gulf Coasters refer to it as a “breeze o’ wind,” or simply “big breeze.” But whatever men may call it, they are all speaking of the same thing.
    Specifically, a hurricane is a tropical cyclone with a wind velocity of seventy-five miles an hour or more. They are hatched alike in the warm seas around the globe wherever conditions happen to be right for their incubation, and the only difference between any of them is a geographical peculiarity that may cause inlanders to blink. A hurricane has never been known to cross the equator – and all those born to the north or it revolve counterclockwise. Those to the south spin in the opposite direction. This rule holds true in regard to every whirlwind on the earth’s surface, even to waterspouts and our Midwestern tornado.
    Why? To this poser, my friend the weatherman asked, “Have you ever heard of Buys Ballot’a law?”
    I hadn’t. “Buys Ballot,” said my friend, “was a Dutchman. Over a century ago he discovered that if you stand with your back to the wind anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, the air pressure will always be lower on your left. In the Southern Hemisphere the reverse is true.”
    It is caused by the rotation of the earth and the difference in the weights and the speeds of the air masses at the equator and the poles. For an idea of the way it works, stir up a tempest in a teacup by dragging your spoon from left to right across the surface of the liquid, and study the two whirlpools thus set in motion. And look carefully, for the play of light on the whirls is deceiving.
    Mynheer Ballot’s law explains a great deal when we remember how cold air, which is heavy, rolls downhill toward the valleys of rising hot air, which is light. When we take these ingredients to the doldrums off Martinique, season them with trade wind, sea water and burning August and September heat, then we have the mixture that produces and hatches the hurricane egg.
    Actually, meteorologists are divided into several schools of thought on the subject, and each reticently admits that there is much to be learned. In general, however, they all agree to this: that the intense heat on a great area of calm tropic sea expands the air Bnd sends it rising, along with immense quantities of vapor. The result is a partial vacuum which brings the heavier air rolling toward it from alt rides. As the heavier air rolls in, the forces explained by Mynbeer Ballot’s Jaw give the whole mass an ominous rotation. Then it is off like a monstrous top, traveling with the trade winds, As it drifts out of the clutch of the trades, it may come under the influence of the prevailing westerlies, and so recurve to the northeast. Other forces may swing it away from this general track and cause it to veer madly.
    The fact that a hurricane has two movements – the progressive forward motion and the whirling motion – was not known until comparatively recent times. The intrepid Captain Dampier was one of the first to notice these movements and to air his views, though few took him seriously. Ben Franklin was the next to comment upon them, and he was rewarded by having a storm named after him. Then another American, W. C. Redfield, came forth with a paper that aroused considerable interest. But it took the Englishman, Lieutenant Colonel Reid, of the Royal Engineers, to do the first careful sleuthing on the subject. Like our own Matthew Maury, who astounded the maritime world by charting the oceans’ currents from a study of ships’ logs, Reid uncovered the mystery of the hurricane by the same process. Published more than 100 years ago, Reid’s hook, The Law of Storms, was written after a careful examination of the logs of innumerable ships. For the hurricane addict it is an exciting book, and it forms the basis of most of the later studies on the monster’s habits.
    In the copy of Reid’s book that came accidentally to my hand, I became interested in the trials of the British frigate Blanche, in command of Commodore Farquhar, later Sir Arthur Farquhar. Something made me glance again at a neat, faded signature on the title page. The book was Sir Arthur’s own copy.
    No single spot on our Atlantic or Gulf seaboard is safe from hurricane wind and tide. Actually, there is not a foot of coast from Panama to Halifax that has not been pounded, beaten, wrecked or changed and rebuilt by hurricanes. Time rolls on and people forget. New Englanders forgot in the fall of ’38. What happened that September has happened many times in the not-so-remote past, and it will happen again in the future.

    The New England Breeze of ’38
    Upon hatching, the thing may be small at first, sometimes less than fifty miles in diameter, but it fattens on heat and low pressure and vapor. With abundant food it can quickly become a titan with a 500-mile beam. Recurving to seek the greater marine pastures of the North Atlantic – for it usually starves and dies on land – it may swell to three times that breadth. But if it does it loses its force and becomes fat and lazy, frequently dying a natural death somewhere in the cold seas between Greenland and Norway. But not always.
    Sometimes the feeding is poor. Walls of high pressure may hem it into a narrow channel. Then it becomes ravenous, and, howling like a cosmic wolf, it doubles and trebles its progressive movement in search of food and escape. From a leisurely forward pace of five to ten miles an hour, it may jump to thirty, to forty, even to fifty miles an hour. To this speed, add a 100-mile-per-hour rotary movement that may greatly increase under certain circumstances, and you have a horror whose speed cannot be measured by any known instrument, and whose force can destroy cities of stone. To quote Sir George Rodney, writing from St. Lucia after one of the 1780 hurricanes: “The strongest buildings and the whole of the houses, most of which were of stone, and remarkable for their solidity, gave way to the fury of the wind, and were torn up from their foundations. . . . Had I not been an eye-witness, nothing on earth could have induced me to believe it.” Such an occurrence is unusual, though a great deal of stone masonry has been uprooted in the islands since then.
    The great New England breeze is a good example of what can happen in a restricted track. With a rotary movement of only minor intensity, it moved so fast between its squeezing high-pressure walls that weather observers had to scramble to keep up with it. Even then no one could quite believe it would actually hit where it did. Gulf Coast dwellers, long experienced in such matters, like to tell the story of the New Englander with a beach cottage who thought it would be nice to own a barometer. He bought one, but the day he hung it in the cottage, the fool thing registered a hurricane low. Wrathfully he started back to the city with it to demand a refund – and that was when the cottage blew away.
    The barometer, though, cannot always be relied upon to foretell approaching trouble. It may register high within an hour of the wind’s appearance. Nature generally sends her own warnings ahead, so that the monster’s probable course can often be guessed a day or two in advance. Not always, but often, there is the excessive heat and humidity, and an unusually high tide; and there is the ominous roaring of the surf in the still air – surf from advancing swells that travel as fast as forty-five miles an hour ahead of the wind; then there are the beautiful but unholy sunsets reflected from the vast oncoming hurricane cloud, and frequently the high-flying mares’ tails pointing toward the vortex. When these unmistakable signs are followed by a sudden indescribable electric something in the air, Gulf Coasters know the thing is close. They jump to board up doors and store windows, to batten shutters and to take their boats far up to safe havens in the bayous and swamps. And then the wise ones go home and sit tight till it is all over, for long experience has taught them that the safest place is between their own four walls. Wooden walls preferred – for old frame dwellings, well braced and anchored, have withstood winds that completely demolished houses of brick or concrete-block construction.

    Big-Wind Forecasting
    But even though all the hurricane signs are present, it is not infallible proof that the monster will strike at that spot. I have known my own town to remain boarded up for days, waiting while the wind boxed the compass and the hurricane played tag all over the Gulf. That one never did hit us.
    Such antics cause weathermen concern. With a big wind on the way, the forecaster’s responsibility becomes that of a general on the eve of battle. Thousands of lives may depend upon the accuracy of his predictions. Since a hurricane follows the path of least resistance – the constantly shifting valleys of low pressure between the mountains of heavier air – keeping tabs is often difficult, even with the aid of shipping and a far-flung line of observation posts that encircle the Caribbean and the Gulf. How, then, can anyone say with accuracy where one will strike?
    Dr. Isaac M. Cline, the great weather expert of New Orleans, has done more than any other man to make hurricane forecasting a science. Repeatedly he has proved by tide reports alone that he could stick a pin in the exact spot on the Gulf Coast where a storm would strike.
    Yet, there remains the anomaly that a sizable reward is still offered for a satisfactory formula by which the paths of hurricanes may be accurately predicted for a day in advance. A hurricane docs not always behave according to pattern; it may get out of hand, like the New England wind; it may strike twice in the same places, like the famous loop hurricane of 1910 that twice swept over Key West and Havana; or it may double on itself, like one in 1934 and another in 1935.
    Wind is bad enough, but a hurricane is not composed of wind alone. Its worst weapon, actually, is water.
    And now we are approaching something truly remarkable. Just how remarkable can be better understood with the aid of a hurricane top something that every dweller on our lower coasts should have, since he can then do a good deal of predicting of his own when a hurricane threatens. One is easily made with a three-inch circle of cardboard, with wind arrows around the edge and a pencil thrust through the center. Celluloid is better, since maps can be read through it. Be sure to point the wind arrows to the left, and curve them slightly toward the center.
    With this simple instrument it is fairly easy to guess one’s position in relation to the hurricane’s center, and to tell from the wind shifts what may be expected next. It will also help one to understand what happened at Galveston in 1900, and what may have happened in Japan in 1923.
    Spread out a map of the Gulf and the Caribbean and place the top to the east of Martinique. Twirling it to the left, begin moving it slowly in the direction of Galveston. And as you move it, imagine that you have under your thumb a combination whirlwind and suction cup.
    There is our hurricane – a monstrous suction cup. The low air pressure and the whirling, curving wind are pulling in water from all directions, causing the sea to rise far above the level of the surrounding ocean. It rises highest in the vortex marked by your pencil, for here it is as nearly a vacuum as nature is able to produce in a diameter of ten to thirty miles. Within this center, or eye, there is a dead wind calm. Here barometers drop dizzily, people go a little bit crazy, and the sea is entirely mad.
    Notice, too, how the right half of your spinning top, because of its forward movement, is actually traveling faster than the left half. So, while the hurricane is carrying a mountain of water within itself, the right half – the half so feared by mariners – is hurling immense swells ahead of it – swells that will travel 1000 miles a day in advance of the wind and send tides rising to abnormal heights.
    Now, can you picture what happens when this inexorable moss of wind and water, sweeping across a long expanse of sea and often growing with each progressive mile, strikes some low-lying coastal city? That is what happened at Galveston.

    A Hurricane’s Bad Companions
    You will have heard it said that the Galveston “flood” was caused by a “tidal wave” – one of those things that roll in from the sea sometimes. “One of those things” happened at Indianola, at Port Leon, at old St. Joseph, and at a dozen other forgotten towns on the Gulf Coast. Nothing remains of any of them, and in each case the destruction was the work of a hurricane with its accompanying storm tide that swept everything before it. The true tidal wave is rare in our part of the world; it is the result of a subterranean disturbance and has nothing whatever to do with hurricanes.
    On the other hand, it is believed by some scientists that hurricanes may have something to do with subterranean disturbances. Here is their argument;
    When the barometer drops two inches, it means that a load of 2,000,-000 tons of air pressure is removed from every square mile of land in the area. Think of the differential pressure, often occurring within a few hours, when a great hurricane or typhoon suddenly brings its extra load of ten to twelve million tona of water per square mile over the same area. If the earth’s crust happens to be weak at that point it seems likely that something must give under the strain.
    A typhoon, as a hurricane is called in the North Pacific, was in progress off Yokohama at the time of the 1923 earthquake, and it struck the city immediately after. If this were the only case of its kind on record, it could be charged to coincidence. But it is pointed out that it is a fairly common occurrence where hurricane belts cross known geological faults.
    Rain is another of the monster’s weapons. A hurricane thrives on vapor; it becomes literally black with moisture, and the air for hundreds of miles around is often so saturated that rain may fall for days. It follows no sure rule, but the heaviest fall is generally ahead of it and to the right of the center; after the real wind arrives, it doesn’t just pour; it comes in blinding squalls of such fury and violence that the water is driven through the tightest shingles and through weather-boarding and brick walls. But more of this later. The greatest rainfalls on record have occurred during hurricanes, often over great areas hardly touched by the wind. At such times rain can be measured, not by inches but by the foot. Eight feet of it fell on one part of Jamaica during a four-day hurricane rain. The all-time record for a single day – three feet, ten inches – was during a typhoon rain in the Philippines.
    Here is a puzzle: In the United States, hurricanes sweeping inland have a great effect on the amount of rain that falls throughout the interior. Now, during wet years, usually a great many hurricanes are hatched, even though few may touch our shores. Yet, curiously – and remember hurricanes are sea-bred – dry years have produced few hurricanes. The years of severe droughts arc remarkable in that the number of recorded hurricanes is well below the average, while even fewer are recorded for years following droughts. One hardly knows whether to put the climate or the hurricane in the fore – or is some other factor responsible?
    Let me tell you what happens in a Gulf Coast town when the hurricane eggs are hatching.
    The Gulf is like no other sea, nor are its people like other people. It is a lazy, dreamy sea, given to sudden fits of violence. Gulf people are born to the tune of it, and it colors their every mood. Never afraid of the Gulf, they have a mighty respect for it, and a fatalistic acceptance of all that it brings.

    September on the Gulf
    So you rarely find a Gulf Coaster losing his head in a breeze, either literally or figuratively. All summer he keeps a weather eye open, and as August and September ripen, and the Gulf becomes more deceptively calm, he becomes more deceptively quiet and watchful. Though he may wait till the last minute to do bis jumping, he is nevertheless ready when the wind hits. If he is driven to the top of a pine tree and has to hang there for a day or two – like more than one I know – well, he hangs there. Possibly he could have retreated beforehand, but retreat isn’t in his make-up. He wouldn’t live inland or on any other coast, and when the water goes down he digs for his hammer and builds anew.
    All this does not mean that he accepts the sea’s violence with equanimity. To the most tremendous of the sea’s offerings, there is bound to be a tremendous human reaction.
    On the Gulf Coast, September is beautiful and often terrible. It is a lotus land with a one-eyed Cyclops ever in the offing. As long as barometers hang near a happy thirty, life continues its normal lazy course. But when barometers begin to fall, something happens.
    Jokingly one day, 1 asked my local sheriff, “How’s business?”
    ” Quiet,” he said. “But wait till September comes.”
    “Why September?”
    “Something in the air. Everything seems to break out all at once – shootings, stubbings, assaults. It keeps me moving day and night sometimes. In all the years I’ve held office. I’ve never known it to fail. September isn’t like any other month.”
    Criminologists, long noting the cosmic factors in crimes against the person, are generally agreed that July and August are the leading violence months. For me, September suddenly had another significance. When court convenes in the fall, hurricanes have generally had their workout along the coast; so I began searching through the criminal records, listing the new cases of violence tried during fall terms over a fifteen-year period. Then, from a weather chart, I picked four years in which bad hurricanes had struck my own section, and four years totally free of them. Checking these with the criminal records, I found that the violence total for the hurricane years was exactly double that of the nonhurricane years.
    Medical men have long known that approaching storms have a decided effect on human nature, causing tempers to flare. Doctor Clarence A. Mills, of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Medicine, attributes this to a disturbance in the water balance of body tissues. Low pressures cause tissues to absorb water and swell in the same manner as a sponge. Under major weather changes, he noticed, some persons changed several pounds in weight.
    A certain scientist has tried for twenty years to form a speaking acquaintance with a hurricane. He has traveled thousands of miles trying to place himself in the path of one, and each time the fickle and unaccommodating monster roared off in some other direction. He has my sympathy, not only for having failed to realize a lifelong ambition, but for having missed what is probably the greatest spectacle on earth.
    Any description becomes prosaic and futile beside the actuality of a hurricane. One first has the contrast of the preceding stillness, the terrible oppressiveness. And like a man tied to a time bomb, you ultimately welcome the final violence, since it means an end to suspense.
    A strange thing happens with the first thrust of wind. Depression vanishes, and in its place comes an overwhelming excitement. You become incredibly energized and you want to rush out and see it all, and you think of a hundred things to do you’d forgotten earlier. People shout, laugh, make wild predictions on the wind’s course and the rising water; hard liquor begins to flow freely and your world goes crazy. It is the beginning of a big and terrible holiday that ends in a deadening hang-over.

    Weatherman in a Madhouse
    This excitement is supposed to be caused by static electricity generated by the tremendous friction of the wind. The air becomes so intensely supercharged that some people get literally drunk on it.
    The weatherman works in a madhouse. All day and all night, and sometimes all the next day and night, he and his assistants must be on hand to make observations, send out reports and warnings, shout replies into phones that are never still, and answer the questions of the curious and anxious that pour unceasingly through his door. Blessed is the wind that wipes out communications, for only then does he get any rest.
    But the fisherman – the lucky one ashore – enjoys it. The minute he knows the wind is coming his way, he casts off and heads for the swamps, and in thirty minutes the water front is a dead place. Jammed deck to deck in the narrow jungle creeks, you’ll see sleek private craft and slatternly oystermen, shrimp trawlers and spongers, tugs and husky snapper schooners in from the banks. Let it blow, let it rain, let hell and bedlam roar outside – it’s snug below.
    A picnic for fishermen, hut back on the coast it’s another matter. In the right semicircle, it’s blowing. The sound of it curdles something inside of you, and you have only awe that such a thing can be. You are back home and boarded in now – or you should be – and outside the trees are sweeping the ground or crashing, and objects arc hitting the house, though you can’t hear them. All you can hear is the wind. It’s not like any other sound on earth. An ear-splitting medley riven with the scream of tearing Bilk, and punctuated with roaring, bunging explosions that seem to shake the earth. Hour after hour, louder and louder, come the banging roars of those mighty gusts. The why of those gusts has never been adequately explained; they are said to be on the order of tornadoes, and at times are believed to develop into them. Storms within storms that have been known to wrench great trees apart.

    Intermission
    And with each thrust comes a blinding torrent of horizontal rain. If you are caught in that driving rain, you may be black and blue for days. You can’t keep it out of the house; it pours through walls, gushes in around the tightest doors and windows, streams through the roof to come cascading down the stairs, and erupts in a black flood from every fireplace. Brick walls mean nothing to that rain; it finds a way through the mortar if it doesn’t batter down the wall.
    Outside, over all, is the darkness of the thing, often alive with little darts of lightning like the rapidly forking tongues of snakes. It never leaves a mark, never seems to strike; yet something about it – possibly the tremendous amount of static – often kills every tree in large stretches of forest.
    Then, when you think you’ll go mad from the sound and the fury, there is the miracle. Sudden, absolute calm. Silence. The sun comes out. There are no leaves left on the mangled trees, only midribs; these hang down without the least motion. You are in the hollow center now, and if you’ve forgotten to keep a lee window open, all the windows may explode. The barometer has hit rock bottom.
    Five minutes of this calm, and you are praying for the wind again. It doesn’t come, and now you know you’ll go mad. That calm is like death. If you are a tourist, you may make the mistake of leaving shelter and going places, thinking it is all over. May heaven help you if you don’t get somewhere in a hurry.
    Twenty minutes, thirty, forty or more if it’s a big one, and abruptly the thing is on you again; only now it is from the opposite direction. You have it all to endure again. There is no sleep, no rest; you cannot read or even think. The power lines are down, and from dark to dawn you pace the house, trying to keep lanterns lit while you wait. When bedlam docs finally depart, you are lucky indeed if the roof is intact and the sun appears. But it may go on raining for days.
    The only happy creatures are the frogs. With the first dash of rain they appear miraculously by the million. Their screaming never stops. Rising with the wind, it reaches such a mad pitch and crescendo that you can hear it vibrating between the banging of the gusts. Only frogs love a hurricane.

    1941
    (Saturday Evening Post, vol. 214, issue 10, September 6)

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