LIVING THE STORM
Narration: SunJewel

It is a sound you feel
vibrate through your body
before it hits your ears.
Then it is all-encompassing.
You feel it and you hear it.
There is no escaping it
if the wind is high enough.
When the water rises
and adds to that sound,
you live with the hurricane.
There is nothing else.
You might hear the trees snap.
You might hear one hit your house.
But the sound of the wind and rain
is everything.
When that sound is alive,
you don't care about everything
you know you are losing.
Not the pictures, not the food,
not the shelter.
Not yet.
That is how I remember it.
More than a century separates my storms
from the one that struck Sabine Pass
in August of 1915.
I can't tell you exactly
what the men inside that lighthouse heard,
but when I read that the tower was vibrating,
I have to stop for a minute.
The tower shook so hard
that the machinery turning its light
stopped working,
and two men had to deal with that.
Their names were William B. Thompson
and Charles C. Sapp.
Thompson was the keeper.
Sapp was his assistant.
They kept the Sabine Pass lighthouse
on the Louisiana side of the Sabine River,
across from Sabine Pass, Texas.
That river is the border,
and that border is my backyard.
I live less than 15 minutes from it
as the crow flies.
On August 16th and 17th,
a hurricane tore through that coast.
That October, the damage at the light station
was recorded in the Lighthouse Service Bulletin.
The wharf was carried away.
So was the walk to the house.
The outbuildings were gone.
Nearby, the lights marking the entrance,
the jetties, and the channel were lost.
Think about that walk for a moment.
On an ordinary day,
it was just the way from one place to another,
something you used without a thought.
After the storm, it belonged on a list
of things that were missing.
That is one of the ways
a hurricane changes a place.
The things that let you go about your day
become the things you have to find,
clear, repair, or learn to live without.
At Sabine Pass,
the work inside the tower had changed too.
The vibration had put the clockwork
out of order.
Here's why that mattered.
Every lighthouse has its own pattern of light.
That's how a sailor knows
which light they're looking at.
They call it the light's characteristic.
Lose the pattern,
and a sailor might mistake it for another light.
At Sabine Pass,
the clockwork kept that pattern moving.
Now, it couldn't.
So Thompson and Sapp kept the pattern
going themselves.
The report from that time says
they maintained the characteristic
of the light by hand.
There it is, in a few words,
the part of this story I keep coming back to:
by hand.
Remember what else that storm took.
The lights that marked the entrance
and the channel were gone.
Theirs still had its pattern,
because two men were keeping it.
We don't have their words,
or how long it lasted,
or exactly where they put their hands.
What we have is the record that they did it.
I think about the attention
that work would have asked of them.
That kind of work takes all of you.
You stay with the thing in front of you
while so much is happening around you.
I know what a hurricane does to your attention.
Wind and rain fill up your whole world.
The next sound might be something breaking.
You can know you're losing things
without having room yet to think about
what those losses will mean.
And here were these two men
with a job that still needed doing.
Other people depended on lights like theirs
to find their way.
We don't know who saw their light that night.
The Secretary of Commerce
commended Thompson and Sapp
for what they did during the storm.
Those pages record so much that was lost.
They also record two names,
written down for what they kept.
I'm glad they were.
That gives us a way to remember
the people inside the building.
William B. Thompson.
Charles C. Sapp.
Two men responsible for a light
when the machinery failed during a hurricane.
When I look at pictures taken after a storm,
I see all the work waiting.
A tree across the fence.
A roof that needs attention.
A meal made with whatever is on hand.
Ordinary life has to be put back together,
piece by piece.
Those are memories from my own time.
They helped me understand how much
a short damage report leaves unsaid.
At Sabine Pass in 1915,
the report leaves us this much:
the storm shook the tower.
The clockwork failed.
And the keepers kept the light's characteristic
in the middle of it all,
by hand.
I want us to sit with that for a moment.
William B. Thompson and Charles C. Sapp
kept the signal—the light going—
by hand.

Caption transcript edited from automatic transcription; final listening confirmation pending.