Sudden Sea (11 page)
Floreann Martin, twenty-four, was vacationing in Hyannis with her husband:
In the morning it was beautiful. The sun was out with very high winds because I remember I had a wide skirt on and I had a time with it. Then it got very, very calm suddenly, as though somebody had turned the switch off and then it got overcast. The rains came, and the winds kept picking up and picking up. Of course, we had no idea it was a hurricane. No warnings — nothing. And the wires — I must tell you about the wires. Edgar Allan Poe could have described it so well. They were screaming like a woman in the night — a high, high pitch. The wind was catching the wires and it was the eeriest sound. If Poe weren’t my favorite author, I think I would have had chills up to here listening to the scream of those wires. We had the accelerator right to the floor, and we were doing fifteen miles an hour because the wind was pushing us back.
Wind is simply air in motion. The notion conjures refreshing images — a sail billowing on a summer day, the rustle of autumn leaves, the free, fresh wind in your hair — until you bump up against air that’s moving at hurricane speed. A wind of 155 miles an hour feels as if you have collided with fifty bull elephants. It packs the force of three hundred tons. No one will ever know the strength of the winds in the Great Hurricane of 1938, because they destroyed every instrument designed to measure them. Before it blew, the anemometer at the Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, Massachusetts, some seventy miles from the eye of the storm, recorded gusts of 186 miles per hour and a sustained wind of 121 miles per hour. It was the second-highest rate ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere.
On Long Island, the wind sandblasted every bit of paint off one side of Bill Crapser’s brand-new 1938 Chevrolet coupe and left the other side pristine. In Ledyard, Connecticut, it picked up fourteen-year-old Vivian Avery Williams when she came out of the one-room schoolhouse and sent her somersaulting down the road. Strong men, if they could walk at all, were bent perpendicular, their noses almost touching the sidewalk. Oliver Stedman, an electrical contractor, crawled up Sugar Loaf Hill in Wakefield, Rhode Island, on his hands and knees. It was the only way he could get home. “I had to crawl,” he said, “the wind was blowing so hard. I would have been blown right over into the woods.”
At the peak of the hurricane, the world became wind and the wind, the world. It surrounded you, owned you. It hummed, whistled, whined, keened, screeched. Everyone who heard it was struck deaf and mute. Its voice was incessant, exhausting, encompassing. It was impossible to think above its clamor, to hear or be heard. Immovable objects met its irresistible force and surrendered. It caused rain to slash and sea spray to bite; it took your breath away, then choked you with rain and spindrift. Breathing in was like swallowing shrapnel.
The Great Hurricane of 1938 made landfall at Patchogue, Long Island, striking with such force that it set off seismographs in Alaska.
How Do You Lose a Hurricane?
A
s the crow flies, the distance from Cape Hatteras to Long Island is 425 miles, and the Hurricane of 1938 covered it in seven hours. Speeding up the coast with such velocity that New Yorkers nicknamed it the “Long Island Express,” the hurricane sideswiped New Jersey. By two o’clock, sea spray was flying over the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. Huge combers washed over the beaches of Wildwood, Manasquan, and Point Pleasant and tore up miles of famous boardwalks along the Jersey Shore. On the truck farms of South Jersey, gale-force winds beat the last beefsteak tomatoes of the season to pulp; sucked the sweet corn dry, leaving fields of brown husks as brittle as old paper; and picked the apple orchards clean. The smell of applesauce hung in the air for weeks, attracting droves of yellow jackets.
The western edge of the storm skirted New York City — a degree or two of difference in longitude and Manhattan would have been devastated. The glancing blow pelted the city with rain and wind. Heavy morning thunderstorms turned to monsoons by afternoon. Gusts as high as 120 miles an hour screamed from the top of the Empire State Building and thirty-miles-per-hour winds swirled down the avenues. Street signs swung. Billboards toppled. Garbage cans tipped and rolled, clanging down the streets. The afternoon commute became a nightmare. Subways flooded. Trolleys stalled. The Empire State Building swayed four inches.
At the southern tip of Manhattan, the flag on the U.S. Weather Bureau office shredded like ticker tape, and the station’s barometer nose-dived. By 3:50
P.M.
it read 28.72, a record low for September. Harbor waters were sloshing over the Battery by the time the Staten Island ferry
Knickerbocker
cut her engine and began backing slowly into her slip. Severe winds and a quick succession of waves broadsided the heavy vessel and slammed her up against the pilings. The overhanging deck snagged on the top of the piles, and the ferry tipped like a seesaw. There were 220 passengers aboard and more waiting on the Battery dock, most of them screaming in terror. Tilting at a precarious 30° angle, the big boat shifted and thrashed in the rough waters. Her distress horn blared across the harbor. Two Standard Oil Company tugs answered the alarm, followed by a Coast Guard cutter, fireboats, and police launches. A garbled report that a ferry had capsized reached police headquarters, and scores of New York’s finest swarmed downtown.
In midtown, the Cunard Line’s opulent
Queen Mary,
scheduled to sail for Southampton at 4:30
P.M.
, never left her mooring. Most passengers and their guests stayed on board. Corks popped, champagne spurted like sea spray, and bonvoyage revelers partied through the night. On the Great White Way, the curtain was going up on the first new show of the season. Aptly titled
You Never Know,
the Cole Porter musical opened to a handful of dazed and sodden first-nighters. When the morning papers hit the newsstands, the composer probably wished the critics had not braved the elements. Over at Radio City Music Hall, it was the last night for
You Can’t Take It with You.
The new Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical
Carefree
was opening Thursday.
Blackouts pitched areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx into darkness. In Queens, downed trees forced drivers to swerve onto sidewalks and across front lawns. Flooding was so severe that rowboats from the Central Park Boat Basin and dories from the Fulton Street Fish Market were rushed to the borough for emergency rescue duty. At the U.S. Tennis Open in Forest Hills, rain halted the semifinals match for the fifth time, frustrating the hopes of Don Budge for another day. Budge, a twenty-three-year-old redheaded giant from California, was trying to become the first player to win all four major tennis titles in the same year.
Another California champ was in town for the deluge. Just the day before, Seabiscuit, the never-say-die thoroughbred, had lost his first New York race of the year, the $6,050 Belmont Handicap, on the sloppy course. Conditions at Belmont Park were impossible now, but the horses were still running as scheduled. The track was a mud bath, and the course worsened with each race. By the final meet, the featured Westchester Claiming Stakes, the stands were empty. The rain was so thick, the timer could not see the flag drop at the starting gate. The horses ran untimed. The PA system was dead and the announcer was “shouting himself blue in the face” trying to call the race. Silks were dripping, the numbers unreadable, and all the horses — roans, grays, and chestnuts — were a uniform mud brown. Trainers and touts called it “the worst day ever anywhere,” and the
New York Herald Tribune
reported that the jockeys “not only had mud and driving rain to contend with, but at times the wind seemed strong enough to blow the little fellows right off their saddles.”
When the long shot At Play finally splashed across the finish line, knee-deep in slop, the Hurricane of 1938 was slamming into the Hamptons.
Should the Washington Weather Bureau have called the hurricane of 1938?
In 1627, Francis Bacon in his utopian fable
The New Atlantis
imagined a not-too-distant future when man would be master of the weather. Today, despite the best efforts to tame it through study and science, weather remains inscrutable. It seems that the more scientists learn about it, the more there is to discover, and the mystery deepens when it comes to predicting the behavior of a hurricane.
Even with today’s supercomputers and mathematical models, it is impossible to re-create the conditions that caused a hurricane or to keep up with one in progress. Using data collected from satellites, scientists have tried to figure out how a hurricane develops. They have re-created the exact conditions of recent cyclones and then essentially pressed the rewind button, working backward from step C to B to A. Each time, as they retraced the steps from hurricane to tropical storm, to tropical depression, dangerous disturbance, and sinister cloud cluster, they eventually ended up with a set of atmospheric conditions indistinguishable from dozens of others.
Ernest Zebrowski Jr. defines the problem in his book
Perils of a Restless Planet:
What is it that whips some of these minor atmospheric fluctuations into full-blown hurricanes, while others disperse after causing no more annoyance than blowing off someone’s hat in Africa? It’s impossible to say for sure. All we know is that this fundamental agent must be very small, because all of our expensive and sophisticated instrumentation can’t detect it. We can see only so much detail, we can measure only to limited precision, and we can compute only to finite accuracy.
The answer to why hurricanes change speed and direction is equally elusive. “Experiments with computer simulations suggest that the future of a storm is always extremely sensitive to tiny fluctuations in what goes on within it,” Zebrowski writes. Variations too minuscule to measure may seriously affect its course. Why one hurricane develops into a killer storm while another sputters out may depend on how the sun strikes the earth, the shift of the continents 10 million years ago, or that ill wind blowing across the Sahara. A day, a degree, even a thousandth of a degree, may make a dramatic difference.
Although it appears to be a random phenomenon — chaos loosed upon an unsuspecting land — even the fiercest cyclonic whirlwind is part of a weather machine so immense and intricate that some scientists believe we shall never achieve 100 percent accurate forecasts. We have split the atom, orbited the earth, touched down on the moon, and cracked the genetic code, yet after decades of study and with all the technological tools of the trade — radar, radiosonde, aerial reconnaissance, weather satellites, and mathematical computer models — we still cannot predict a hurricane more than twenty-four hours in advance.
In 1938 forecasters faced far greater odds. Jacksonville saw the storm coming. Tracked it closely. Issued three and four advisories each day. The southern states were on high alert. Relief groups and governmental agencies had emergency plans in place. But forecasters had only six basic tools: three relatively recent inventions — the radio, telephone, and telegraph — and three seventeenth-century instruments — the thermometer, barometer, and hygrometer to measure humidity levels. They relied almost entirely on surface observations.
As long as the storm was in the Caribbean, the Bureau received frequent updates from weather posts on the islands. Once the hurricane reached the clear coastal waters of the Atlantic, though, the only reliable reports came from ships at sea. On the twenty-first, heeding the warnings from Jacksonville, most ships either stayed in port or went far out to sea; and unnoticed by all except Charlie Pierce, the hurricane found the low-pressure trough and was lured north.
The trough worked like a fishing line cast from New England to Cape Hatteras. An angry, murderous leviathan was hooked off Diamond Shoal. As the great beast was reeled in, its thrashing tail thumped the Jersey Shore and a fin slapped at New York. Diving over Fire Island, it beached on Long Island’s South Shore, then it bounded over the island and crossed the Sound to New England.
The Long Island Express
A
ridge forms the spine of Long Island, west to east. The North Shore harbors the wealthy enclaves — Oyster Bay, Teddy Roosevelt’s home, and the mythic Gatsby country. The South Shore, good for potato farming, is flat and sandy all the way from Fire Island and the Hamptons to Montauk at the tip.
As late as the 1920s, the region still belonged to fishermen and farmers, some old-money types needing to breathe free, and the last of the Old Dutch. But change was evident even then. P. T. Barnum had built the first hotel in the Hamptons in 1868, and the railroad came a few years later. The easy commute attracted the newer rich, who spilled out of Pullman cars in ever increasing numbers each summer.
By 1938, they had made the Hamptons their summer stomping grounds, snapping up the old farms and crowding vacation homes onto the sixty-mile stretch of barrier beach from Fire Island eastward to Southampton. Gerald and Sara Murphy, legendary expatriates (he the millionaire heir to Mark Cross leather goods, she the unnamed model for Picasso’s white lady), were back in their East Hampton home after a European trip with John Dos Passes and his wife, Katy. Thanks to the miserable hothouse weather, their garden was a showcase. Gerald Murphy described it in a letter to Alexander Woollcott, the critic, actor, and wit:
We had to Easthampton returned to find it glowing with tuberoses, bamboo, elephant ear, white heliotrope, nicotiana — and Sara’s brocades inside the house. She left it that Wednesday [September 21] having arranged her linen and lace chest and placed what we had dragged from abroad to perfect effect.
For the most part, though, the Hamptons were gray, deserted shore towns on Wednesday morning. At Westhampton Beach, the population had shrunk from a summer high of three thousand to about eight hundred — mostly the locals and the “colored help” left behind to close up the estates.
Tot and Norvin Greene summered at Westhampton Beach with their children, Gretchen and Gair. Their house was the last one on the bay side of Dune Road, about four miles west of the nearest bridge. Norvin, an investment banker, would take the train out after work on Wednesday and stay through Sunday. The Greenes planned to close their home that weekend. Gretchen and Gair were counting the days. This was the first summer that they were eager to get back to the city. Tot was ready to return, too. The season had been a disappointment — day after day of pouring rain or sweltering heat, and not much in between.