Sudden Sea (10 page)
When the shift in the weather came, it was swift and dramatic. About noon the day began to feel heavy, as if it had changed from lawn cotton into wool, and the wind stole in. At first, it was a nuisance — slamming doors, knocking a jar of zinnias off a window ledge. If you put anything down, it disappeared. By mid-afternoon the Atlantic turned a sulky gray. The sky took on a jaundiced cast, and wind gusted out of the southeast in strong bursts that sent the cirrus threads scudding. It ripped out wisteria vines and toppled fences. All along the Northeast coast, riled by the wind, the sea became magnificent and mad.
In inland towns and cities, where the weather did not dictate the day’s activities, radios were tuned into CBS Studio Nine. Correspondent William Shirer was reporting from Berlin that Hitler had just won his first slice of Czechoslovakia. At eleven o’clock, under intense pressure from Britain and France to concede or fight alone, the Czechs had capitulated. Was it “peace in our time,” or a “base betrayal”? CBS correspondent Ed Murrow was standing by in London for a live broadcast with Anthony Eden.
No weather advisories interrupted the program.
Battening the Hatches
A
t two o’clock, the
Bostonian
reached New Haven. A misty rain was falling. The awning on the newspaper stand was snapping, and a porter’s red cap was skipping down the platform. Disembarking passengers disappeared in billows of steam. Because New Haven was a main switching station, there was always an extended delay there. Two or three cars were decoupled to go on to Hartford while the main train continued to Boston. The switch took about twenty minutes. By the time the
Bostonian
pulled out of the station, at approximately 2:20
P.M.
, engineer Harry Easton was sure something big was brewing.
In the best of weather, the ocean is just yards from the railbed that runs through southern Connecticut between New Haven and Westerly, Rhode Island. After so many days and nights of rain, washouts were a danger, and now gusting winds and rain increased the hazard, forcing Easton to reduce speed. The
Bostonian
reached New London half an hour late. As the train idled in the station, waiting for a lull in the wind, a gray veil seemed to drop over the harbor. Beneath the whitecapped surface, the water appeared pewter-colored and oddly menacing. Passengers sitting on the seaward side of the train could see small skiffs and dories capsizing. Yachts were rocking furiously, like cradles pushed by crazed nannies, and trawlers strained at their moorings. The water was breaking over the road and inching closer to the tracks.
All along the scenic Northeast coast, the weather worsened by the moment. Gale force winds and driving rain in New York. Flooding throughout Connecticut. Although it was still sunny and 75° in Rhode Island, winds were gusting in Providence and the seas in Narragansett Bay were big and choppy. To New Englanders who had lived all their lives on the coast, the Atlantic was their front yard. They knew its moods and the weather it brought. As the afternoon turned threatening, most of them assumed it was weather as usual. They mistook the approaching gale for the familiar line storms that come every September, the signal that, thousands of miles away, the sun is dipping below the equator. The fall equinox marked the change from summer to autumn as clearly as the removal of summer slipcovers or the first day of school.
Old salts eyed the chameleon day and tightened mooring lines. Neighbors gathered on the beaches to enjoy the spectacle — to marvel at the odd mustardy sky and the magnificent rolling breakers. When the wind started banging on their beach house windows and the first rain oozed under sills and doorjambs, they “snugged up” and battened the hatches with the high spirits they usually displayed when preparing a clambake. They rolled up the rugs and got out the mops. They shut all the windows, stuffed them with Turkish towels, and shored up the doors with whatever heavy object was handy.
In the school yard in Jamestown, Joseph Matoes looked through the window of the school bus at the wind rippling the water in the puddles. The puddle water was moving so fast that it looked as if some unseen hand were stirring it. In the open pastures of Fox Hill Farm, the wind would be undoing all the work of the early morning. Joseph looked out at the clusters of concerned parents waiting to pick up their children, wondering if he would get home in time to help his father finish the haying before the storm started.
The school yard was unusually crowded. Children who always walked home found their mothers or fathers waiting outside for them. Fred Clarke, who was in the sixth grade with Joseph Matoes and Clayton Chellis, remembers that his father picked him up and drove him down to the bay to pull his rowboat out of the water. “It looked like a good northeaster was coming, nothing we hadn’t seen before, though. I dragged the boat across the street from the yacht club and tied it to a gate, thinking it would be perfectly safe there. Around five o’clock, when things really started to pop, we drove back to check on the boat. All that was left was the rope.” Patty Miller’s mother picked her up early from kindergarten and they drove to Beavertail to collect their friend Ernest Chapman, a landscape painter who had gone out to the lighthouse to paint the wild sea. The Millers’ car would be the last one to make it back safely from Beavertail. Billy Ordiner’s mother picked him up at school, too, and they drove out to the lighthouse to see the surf. Billy was in the seventh grade. He and his mother would start back after the Millers and get as far as Mackerel Cove.
Like so many Jamestown parents, Joe Matoes was worried by the ominous weather. When the 2:30
P.M.
ferry from Newport docked, he drove the three or four short blocks to the school. Matoes just missed his children. Joseph, Theresa, Dotty, and Eunice had left on the school bus a few minutes earlier.
Out on Fort Road, Napatree, Dr. Fernald Fitts was completing a house call. He was standing on the Moores’ porch, holding on to his hat. Bracing himself against the wind, he told Catherine Moore that her husband, Jeff, had suffered a mild heart attack and needed three days of complete bed rest. “No excitement,” he said. “No exertion.”
When Dr. Fitts left, Catherine went upstairs to Jeff, still trying to absorb the shock. What a day! First the runaway sailboat and the mad chase to the end of the bay, then the
Mageanca
beached and towed, and now Jeff. A heart attack at thirty-eight. Jeff was an extrovert, a consummate salesman, and always a keen competitor. He’d been an athlete when they met. A star fullback and captain of the football team at Westerly High, he had gone on to play semi-pro football with the Providence Steamrollers, under coach Jimmy Crowley, one of the famous Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. Jeff’s three great loves were his family, football, and boats.
Glancing out their bedroom window, Catherine saw their Herreshoff break away from its mooring. Dragging anchor, the sailboat moved slowly but steadily down the bay. A light rain was falling. Before the boat reached the fort, the rain was a solid sheet across the water. Catherine went to check the other upstairs windows. Water was blowing in under the sills and dripping down from the window tops. She ran for towels and bath mats. As she worked frantically to keep up with the water, Jeff called from his sickbed, “There goes Cy’s boat.”
When the two older Moore girls got home from school a few minutes later, there was a chair from the beach club in their front yard, the downstairs rugs were rolled up, and Geoffrey’s steamer trunk with his new school clothes was sitting on top of his bed. Anne and Cathy raced into the house, talking a mile a minute about their ride home from school. They almost didn’t make it. They had to dodge fallen trees and telegraph poles, and the wind gusts were so strong that the car almost blew off the road.
A One-Hundred-Year Storm
B
ack at his desk in the Washington Weather Bureau with the rest of the bright young forecasters, a chastened Charlie Pierce was keeping an anxious watch over the speeding storm. He was the only one. In the 2:00
P.M.
advisory from Washington, forecasting chief Charles Mitchell, not a man to be second-guessed, deleted the word
hurricane
from the weather update. The edited forecast read only:
Northerly winds along the New Jersey, Maryland and southern Delaware coast will likely increase to whole gale force this afternoon and back to northwest and diminish tonight.
The advisory was sent out to weather posts, newspaper offices, and radio stations in the Northeast at two o’clock. Half an hour later, at approximately 2:30
P.M.
, against odds of a hundred to one and confounding all conventional wisdom, the Great Hurricane of 1938 came ashore.
A one-hundred-year storm is one of the most misunderstood terms in meterology. It refers to a hurricane that in a given year has a 1 percent probability of striking a particular stretch of land. Although this may sound unlikely, the Great Hurricane of 1938 was such a storm. It was the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history — worse than the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire, or any Mississippi flood.
As swift and sure as a Joe Louis punch, the hurricane darted up the Atlantic coast at fifty, sixty, and seventy miles an hour, faster than most cars could travel in 1938. No hurricane had ever raced as fast. It arrived unannounced. It struck without warning, and it showed no mercy. Entire beach communities that seemed secure at lunchtime were wiped off the map by supper. At 3:30
P.M.
on Napatree, the Moores were battening the hatches and marveling at the spectacle of the rolling breakers. Fifteen minutes later, at 3:45
P.M.
, vertical walls of water, two and three stories high, were plowing through the cement seawall as if it were transparent. “All I could see outside the second-floor bedroom windows was the spume and froth on the underneath part of the waves,” Geoffrey Moore’s aunt Harriet remembered. “The waves were breaking over the top of the house and we were under them.”
Viewed from the serenity of space, a hurricane looks like a swirl of marshmallow frosting on a cupcake. Observed from within, it is “dazzling sunlight and bright blue sky.” Meteorolo-gist Robert Simpson, one of the first to fly through the eye of a hurricane, described it vividly:
The plane flew through bursts of torrential rain and several turbulent bumps. Then, suddenly, we were in dazzling sunlight and bright blue sky. Around us was an awesome display. The eye was a clear space 40 miles in diameter surrounded by a coliseum of clouds whose walls on one side rose vertically and on the other were banked like the galleries in a great opera house. The upper rim, about 35,000 feet high, was rounded off smoothly against a background of blue sky. Below us was a floor of low clouds rising to a dome 8,000 feet above sea level in the center. There were breaks in it that gave us glimpses of the surface of the ocean. In the vortex of the eye, the sea was a scene of unimaginably violent, churning water.
Experienced from below, an extreme hurricane is a sudden explosion of wind and water. It is Nature flaunting its supremacy and cutting us down to size, reducing our finest creations to rubble, knocking us back centuries.
Town by town, the Northeast darkened and was silenced. The brilliant inventions of modern life were knocked out. Phones failed. Lights failed. Cars flooded. Buses and trolleys stalled. Trains derailed. Long Island could not alert Connecticut. Connecticut could not warn Rhode Island. Each community stood alone, isolated against the onslaught. What had been assumed permanent was lost, and the familiar was made strange.
Houses went to sea, boats came ashore, and ordinary objects were recast. A safe harbor became a cemetery; the family car, a tomb. Rooftops were rafts. A shingle became a deadly projectile. A pier, wrenched from its pilings, became a battering ram. A rough-hewn twelve-foot-square cabin glowed like a palace. Salvation and destruction, redemption and death were as random as the flip of a coin, and the air was so thick with salt and murky spray that day was as blind as night.
Ponds turned into white-ruffled seas. Waves appeared sky-high. Geography, topography, the lay of the land, became critical factors. The surging water washed out bridges, eroded railbeds, and buckled highways. It rolled cars like drunks in a dark alley, sank them in tidal ponds, carried them out to sea, and flooded them in city streets. The ancient elms that canopied Main Streets, the white church steeples that had defined the landscape of New England since colonial days, all fell. Memories, landmarks, family treasures, washed away — and still the tide rose.
Trains and tankers were tossed aside like Tinkertoys. Waves as high as fifty feet swept homes and families into the sea. Mothers strapped their babies onto mattresses, launched them on the rampaging sea, and prayed. Sea spray was flung like fusillade, and windowpanes in Montpelier, Vermont, 120 miles from the sea, were coated with salt.
Wealthy families in oceanfront mansions and fishermen’s families in tar-paper shacks, prep school boys and college coeds returning to school for the new year were caught in the storm. Even when they were trapped in the surge of wind and water, many never realized what was happening to them — and those who did could not believe it. No one in the Northeast had ever witnessed such a tumult or heard such an uproar. The noise was deafening — a cacophony of short-circuited trolley bells and car horns, the shriek of the wind, the din of a world being sundered. Decades later the most vivid memories remained those of color and sound.
Howard Smith, a ten-year-old paperboy in 1938, remembered “a unique and strangely tinted day.” His father, an artist, was intrigued by the layers of color on the afternoon:
The sky changed to a rich greenish yellow. The green appeared murky, and the yellow transparent. All seemed glazed over with a very light and delicate golden red. Though it was still calm, we could hear a weird hollow noise coming from some indefinable distant place. Deep and steady and musical, but also eerie and impossible to locate, the sound was frightening. Haunting and disorienting, it seemed to be everywhere and nowhere in particular. For all I knew, the sound could have been coming from the earth or myself or the sky. As time went on, the sound grew louder, more hollow, carrying greater reverberations.