Chapters (20)
But after I had returned to California and really begun to work on meteorology, I realized that I had something more than that. A storm itself had most of the qualities of a living thing. A storm could be a character, even the protagonist. Deep in Sir Napier Shaw’s four-volume Manual of Meteorology I read that a certain meteorologist had even felt storms to be so personal that he had given them names.
By this time the book was really taking shape and assuming some of that quality which has led so many people to question me about its beginnings. In previous similar books the focus of interest was strongly upon the human characters, and the center about which they revolved was not much stressed in the writing, but in Storm the dominating character was to be Maria. More than any human character, as much perhaps as all of them put together, she was to be the center of attention. Her birth, growth, adventures, and final death were to be the main vortex of the story, with the various little human beings and their troubles and triumphs isolated here and there around the edges.
At this point I must apologize for not being able to go further. Since I did not keep a diary or date my notes, I cannot say just when I grasped this essential idea or just what was the background of reading or conversation or observation which made it spring into my mind suddenly, as such ideas do.
Once I had grasped what the plot was really to be, Storm was an interesting though strenuous book to work at. When a bad storm broke, I took to the road—up to the Pass, out with the Highway Patrol, through the flooded Sacramento Valley. I talked with the men, and saw what they were doing, and I was sometimes cold and wet and hungry along with them. Not the least among my later pleasures was to get comments and letters from men who might have stood for the originals of Rick or Johnny Martley, and to find that they knew the book to be genuine.
Re-reading the book now after some years, I find a number of things that I might say about it, but there is no need to try to put leading-strings on a reader. If you find the attitudes a little grim, however, you should remember that the text was largely written during those grim and terrible months of Dunkirk and the fall of France.
Another little point—although I don’t really care particularly, still I always thought of Maria and pronounced the name in the old-fashioned English and American way. The soft Spanish pronunciation is fine for some heroines, but our Maria here is too big for any man to embrace and much too boisterous. So put the accent on the second syllable, and pronounce it “rye.”
—George R. Stewart
1947