Love in a hurricane
New novel revisits the Great Storm of 1900 in Galveston
The impact of the Great Storm of 1900 has, perhaps inevitably, faded over time. By most estimates, between 6,000 and 8,000 souls were lost after a hurricane caught Galveston unawares, still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Nowadays, catastrophic weather events dominate the nightly news, so the scale of destruction seems nigh inconceivable.
Texas author Anna J. Walner can testify to that firsthand. The otherwise complimentary Publisher’s Weekly review of her new novel, “Saltwater and Driftwood,” hedges ever so slightly, labeling the storm “one of America’s worst natural disasters.” Many people now believe Hurricane Katrina has surpassed the 1900 storm (which hit long before hurricanes were given names), Walner explains, but that’s not the case.
“We know so much about (Katrina), and we don’t know that much — as much as we should — about the Great Storm of 1900,” she says. “That’s really what I’m hoping that the book will do, is to inspire people to go and do that research and say, ‘Was it really that bad? Are you kidding me? How did I not know this?’ ”
In the novel, set at the height of the Gilded Age, the Gladys family is on the verge of entering the top tier of Galveston society. Mr. Gladys is a burgeoning cotton kingpin; his wife a keen-eyed social climber ever alert for the slightest indiscretion or faux pas. The eldest daughter’s recent decision to join a troupe of traveling dancers scandalizes the family, placing Walner’s 17-year-old surrogate, Clara, and her more dutiful younger sister, Lydia, under even more intense scrutiny. (The book is targeted to young adults, but Walner says she hopes grown-ups will read it as well.)
Clara, feisty and progressive, and her mother elevate getting a rise out of one another to an art form.
“I wanted a strong female character, and I wanted to make that clear from the get-go by introducing that spark of defiance that she has, and that inner strength that she has to defy her mother’s wishes and to make her own decisions,” says Walner. “I think that really carries through and helps her to overcome the things that she has, and to ultimately move on with her life and live it to the fullest.”
In the first half or so of “Saltwater and Driftwood,” Walner lingers on the scenery and rituals that earned turn-of-the-century Galveston the nickname “Queen City of the Gulf ” — the Victorian mansions and fragrant oleanders, high teas and Sunday suppers. Clara and Lydia shop for dresses in elegant Strand shops and attend brunch at the ritzy Tremont House hotel; Clara and her mother clash over a debutante ball looming the following spring.
“I wanted to paint what life would have been like, how they were so hopeful and had these high aspirations for the future of Galveston, and really build that up as kind of a protection. They really, truly believed that the island was safe,” says Walner, who will sign copies of “Saltwater and Driftwood” on Sept. 8 (the anniversary of the storm) at the Tremont House.
Released through Walner’s own Silver Dawn Publishing, the novel periodically cuts away from Clara to look in on the sisters running the St. Mary’s orphanage, foreshadowing one of the storm’s most tragic episodes (90 children and 10 nuns all perished); and Isaac and Joseph Cline, climatologist brothers in charge of Galveston’s weather station. No one saw the storm coming, least of all the brothers.
“It was that sort of overconfidence that they had in the construction of their home and the abilities to withstand Mother Nature, that their house was only four blocks from the coastline,” says Walner. “I don’t think anyone was truly prepared for the storm.”
When the storm hits, Clara’s family and their neighbors gather inside their house, drink whiskey and pray until the elements take over. As the wind and rain lash the island, residents swept out into the streets grab for anything that might float — pianos, couches, trunks, tables. Some manage to hold on; many others don’t. Clara’s comfortable bourgeois life is utterly shattered in a matter of hours.
“She looks around at the devastation and she realizes in that moment that everything they had worked for had been for nothing,” Walner says. “All of her mother’s aspirations were wiped away in a single night.”
The novel’s most tragic element is its love story: Clara is sweet on Grant, a young shipping clerk from New York. Despite his humble station, Grant’s ambition and hustle impresses Clara’s father; her mother is more skeptical. Grant fights through the storm long enough to give Clara a ring, but Mother Nature is not known for her kindness. Walner built “Saltwater and Driftwood” as a frame story — at the beginning, Clara’s granddaughter Andrea finds her grandmother’s journal, which Clara kept in part to preserve the memory of her first love.
“She wants people to know her secrets in the end,” Walner says. “The things that she’s tried to bury, and she’s been so strong to sort of suppress, she wants them, in some way, to be known at some point in time.”
Walner traces her own interest in the story to fishing trips with her father, in which he told her about the storm as they walked along the seawall. She also turned to footage from local news stations and the Weather Channel’s “When Weather Changed History” docuseries, as well as her own experiences withstanding more recent weather events: Allison, Rita, Ike, Harvey. She hopes “Saltwater and Driftwood” underscores the survivors’ determination to rebuild as much as it revisits the devastation wreaked upon the island.
“I think it’s a shame, a travesty, that something like this has slipped from people’s memories, and I want to bring that back,” Walner says. “I want to bring it into focus and have this book be a catalyst for people to do more research and to learn about it.”