Storm by George R. Stewart

Surrounded almost entirely within the two arms of this polar outbreak, Maria was brought to a standstill off the coast. The J.M. looked at her with a fatherly feeling. First she had been an active little storm running her thousand miles a day, slipping through the air as a wave. She had matured, and with heightened winds had bodily carried the air along with her; she had broken a ship, and swept a man overboard. Then she had shrunk, and seemed to be declining. Now, caught between the two polar arms, she had become stationary, and again vast and vigorous, and in her nature more complicated than ever before.

George R. Stewart's novel Storm has many characters: weathermen and meteorologists, highway workers, farmers, managers in charge of railways, electric power plants, and spillways, cops, even an owl and a boar. But the main character is Maria, as the storm is named by a junior meteorologist when it forms off the eastern coast of Japan. Maria moves across the ocean, threatening to end a long drought that has gripped California, and when she arrives she unleashes torrents of heavy rain and, at higher elevations, snow. She's a large storm, and a costly one, though not exceptional. She lives for twelve days, and in her short life she touches the lives of thousands upon thousands of people living in California and beyond; the way those lives are touched--sometimes for the better, as with the farmers, sometimes for the worse--are the story of Storm.

What makes Storm worthwhile is that it reveals how shrunken our conception of weather, at least in literature, can be. A storm or powerful shower might provide the backdrop for the travails of a human being, but such a narrow focus obscures the way in which weather events connect the lives of thousands of human beings together in a way nothing else can. Storm operates on a truly huge scale: though it focuses on California, the story of Maria can only be told in the context of the great mass of polar wind that keeps the storm locked on the California coast, a wind that moves from the Canadian Arctic down through the American plains, becoming a powerful wet gust in Mexico and the tropics of Central America. The story of Maria is not just national, or international, but global.

The stories that Stewart chooses to tell are often focused on middle management. There's the junior meteorologist, or "J.M.," who first identifies her, but also several characters whose jobs are directly responsible for storm response. For the managers, the response can be as simple as rerouting power from one power station to another when one is knocked offline, or as complex as managing the snow plows trying desperately to keep Donner Pass open on I-40. Working class characters, like the plow drivers, end up out in the storm, and they don't always come back alive: one of the most shocking moments in the novel is the death of a lineman who falls from a line. Though a storm like Maria is a beautiful thing, Stewart is honest about the many dangers they bring, dangers which, while mitigated by the march of technical progress, have been part of human life for millennia. When Stewart introduces a pair of young lovers who must drive back to Reno through the storm and disappear, I expected them to have been holed up somewhere to wait out the storm--until, at the novel's end, the wreckage of their car is found.

Storm was written in the 1930's, and some of the storm response in it seems charmingly antiquated, as with the meteorologists whose principle task is to make a daily chart of hand-drawn isobars by collecting radioed-in information about air pressure throughout the northern hemisphere. There's no digital mapping and no radar. But the snowplows, the electric lines, the spillways, all these probably function more or less the same way today as described in Stewart's novel. Storm is a reminder that human beings have yet to conquer the world of weather, and are at its mercy in ways big and small every day. It's an especially fascinating and sobering novel for a world beginning to grapple with the ways our lives will be upended by climate change in the years to come.