Sudden Sea (26 page)

On a perfect September afternoon, Napatree is empty except for the birds, the fisherman, and his dog. The smell of the sea is pungent. The ocean laps, deep green and docile. In the high, cerulean sky, made bluer by plump cumulus mattresses, the sun is a silver ball, and at the horizon, slivers of light reach down, touching the single sail that sits off the point and the buoy that marks the bay entrance.

It has become an annual September ritual to make the trek from Watch Hill to the old fort, to walk this barrier beach. It was an idyll, once, until a capricious Wednesday, at the ragtag end of summer, when a strange yellow light came off the ocean, an eerie, restless siren filled the air, and a world broke apart. A paradise was lost.

Fort Road is beach scrub now. On the ruined parapet of the old fort, details of the gun turrets, caserns, and bunkers are obscured by bayberry bushes and beach roses gone to autumn berries. Today there is no sign that Napatree was ever inhabited. Nothing to mark the spot where neighbors, friends, and families were lost and bodies were laid shoulder to shoulder. Napatree of 1938 has vanished without a trace.

On the walk back to Watch Hill, along the scythe of beach, it could be a different day. The sky is still blue to the west, but directly above, it is low and gunmetal gray, as if an awning has been drawn over the day. The ocean changes to green-black marble. The light on the Watch Hill Coast Guard Station flashes, suddenly ominous. The quick change in the weather is dramatic and unexpected — nature, like an accommodating host, offering a suggestion of what occurred here on September 21, 1938.

In her poem “We Have Seen the Wind: New England Hurricane, 1938,” May Sarton wrote:

Do not speak to us any more of the carnage of the trees
,

Lest the heart remember other dead than these —

Lest the heart split like a tree from root to crown
,

And bearing all its springs, like a feather go down.

In this part of the country, where the past is always present, all that was lost may have gone without the sudden sea of September 1938. Or maybe not.

The main house and barns of Fox Hill Farm

Three of the Matoes children: Theresa, Joseph Jr., and Dorothy
Courtesy of Patricia M. Vandal

The Chellises’ Beavertail Lighthouse home

Clayton Chellis

Marion Chellis

The Moore children in
1935
or
1936:
Anne, Cathy, Margaret, and Geoffrey Jr.

The Moores’ Fort Road beach house, taken from their dock on Little Narragansett Bay. The Nestors’ house is to the right.

Jeff and Catherine Moore

Andy Pupillo, who worked for the Moores

Ocean spumes shot up like geysers, creating a wall of water as high as fifty feet along New England’s southern coast.
NOAA Photo Library

Satellite View: Seen from space, a hurricane looks like a swirl of marshmallow frosting. The dot in the center is the eye of the storm.
NOAA Photo Library