In his excitement and his desire to be doing something, he even threw a few shovelfuls. Then he stopped, feeling foolish and almost embarrassed. He got back into the car, and sat there.

The Superintendent was thinking back some years to the time when he had been in high school. One teacher had made him read a lot of poetry, and he had always had a sneaking liking for the stuff, although he would never have confessed to it to the other boys. The trouble was that things people did in poems were so often silly, even though the words were fine.

There was one poem he remembered now, while he sat in his car waiting for a rotary to come up. It was about a man who went through a lot of terrifying experiences and finally came to some place where he saw a tower, and just then he was going to be overwhelmed by some great mysterious power, far too big to fight against. Then the man got out a little horn, and blew defiance against the great mysterious power. The teacher had called it a magnificent gesture, and said something about the dignity of man, but the Superintendent remembered that he had always thought it pretty undignified to go blasting into a horn in a situation like that.

Take the way it was now. If this was a poem, he probably should get out and start shoveling snow. Would that be a magnificent gesture, or just ridiculous—in the face of a storm that covered all California? Only machines could clear that road, and he might as well settle himself and keep calm and wait for them.

He leaned back comfortably. Stolidly he lighted a cigarette. He had a fleeting suspicion that perhaps the cigarette itself was a gesture. “Well, anyway,” he said to himself, “it’s time I was having a smoke.”

But as he pulled in on the cigarette that feeling of deep depression came over him again. He had lost the road! The storm had been too much. It had worn down the men, and beaten even the machines.

7

Once the water had begun to spill over the weirs, the gauge-readings rose more slowly; but still they rose. People going out after breakfast to stand on Colusa Bridge saw the brown swirling water just a hair above twenty-one. At noon they looked, and said, “Twenty-one-point-six.” By three o’clock the water was just below twenty-two. But the levees stood up high and firm on either side; the river would have to rise seven feet more, and touch twenty-nine to reach the danger-point, and even beyond that the levees, with luck, might stand a foot or two.