84

 

EARLY NOVEMBER

The leaves had fallen from the trees, save for a few shrunken stragglers. They lay like decaying corpses in the fields, in the valleys, blowing into streams engorged from the recent storms. The trees were bare and seemingly barren. For many, it would be their last summer. When the earth had turned another year’s rotation, there would be no visible traces of many thousands of them.

Around two and a half kilometers up in the sky, the Pineapple Express roared northward. The super-Niño in Peru had increased the evaporation of water at the equator, raising humidity levels, feeding the atmospheric river, which tapped into the water with a ruthless efficiency. This river in the skies, a band of moisture over 900 kilometers wide and 2000 kilometers long, was carrying more water than forty Mississippis. And it was racing through the skies toward the west coast of the United States at close to eighty kilometers per hour.

The storm system that traveled with it ate up the miles of sea that kept it from the shore. It almost seemed hungry to make landfall. It was accelerating; slowly, but determinedly, it was getting faster. Its circumference sucked up the warmth of the sea and just kept getting bigger. It wasn’t huge, not like Hurricane Floyd, which was bigger than the entire state of Florida, or Ivan, which at its peak was bigger than Texas, but it was big enough. It registered on the satellites that monitored the world’s weather. They could see it coming, but they had no idea how long it would last. A lashing of one day was very different to a biblical storm of forty days. The meteorologists were not shamans or seers. They could not say if the storm would make landfall at this stage. They could just say that a storm was heading their way: a big one.

And banked up behind the first storm system, separated by days, by a few thousand kilometers, there followed another storm, with its arsenal of winds and waves whipped up by a swirling low pressure. The sea raged and boiled, half fighting the winds that lashed it, half driving them on, until sea and wind merged in a mass of towering waves. They had done this before, here on this ocean, but not like this, at least not for a long, long time, before the record keepers began recording the power of the elements that surrounded them. It had been too long.

Since then, too many buildings had been built in ignorance; the architect-designed houses of wood that the wind, like the three wolves, would huff and puff and blow down, their beautiful plate glass windows gazing out at the ocean, mockingly, tauntingly, fatally inviting; all those grand houses on Seventeen Mile Drive, with their fine art; all the power and the glory that money could buy—all standing in storm tracks that had been long forgotten, long forsaken, until everything came together, possibly with this storm, possibly with the next one—the winds, the currents, the pressure differentials between the poles, the humidity in the skies, the myriad seemingly invisible factors that make up the weather—to create the perfect storm.