Two hurricanes have visited me recently, and except for a few rather hasty observations of my own (which somehow seem presumptuous), all I know about these storms is what I’ve heard on the radio. I live on the Maine coast, to the east of Penobscot Bay. Formerly, this coast was not in the path of hurricanes, or if it was we didn’t seem to know it, but times change and we must change with them. My house is equipped with three small, old-fashioned radios, two of them battery sets, one a tiny plug-in bedside model on which my wife sometimes manages to get the Giants after I have turned in. We do not have television, and because of this curious omission we are looked upon as eccentrics, possibly radicals.
Hurricanes, as all of us know to our sorrow, are given names nowadays—girls’ names. And, as though to bring things full circle, newborn girl babies are being named for hurricanes. At the height of the last storm, one of the most dispiriting crumbs of news that came to me as the trees thrashed about and the house trembled with the force of the wind was that a baby girl had been born somewhere in the vicinity of Boston and had been named Edna. She is probably a nice little thing, but I took an instant dislike to her, and I would assume that thousands of other radio listeners did, too. Hurricanes are the latest discovery of radio stations and they are being taken up in a big way. To me, Nature is continuously absorbing—that is, she is a twenty-four-hour proposition, fifty-two weeks of the year—but to radio people, Nature is an oddity tinged with malevolence and worthy of note only in her more violent moments. The radio either lets Nature alone or gives her the full treatment, as it did at the approach of the hurricane called Edna. The idea, of course, is that the radio shall perform a public service by warning people of a storm that might prove fatal; and this the radio certainly does. But another effect of the radio is to work people up to an incredible state of alarm many hours in advance of the blow, while they are still fanned by the mildest zephyrs. One of the victims of Hurricane Edna was a civil-defense worker whose heart failed him long before the wind threatened him in the least.
I heard about Edna during the morning of Friday, September 10, some thirty-six hours before Edna arrived, and my reaction was normal. I simply buttoned up the joint and sat down to wait. The wait proved interminable. The buttoning-up was not difficult—merely a couple of hours of amusing work, none of it heavy. I first went to the shore, hauled my twelve-foot boat up above high-water mark, and tied it to a stump. I closed and barricaded the boathouse doors. Then I came back up through the meadow, tolled the sheep into the barn, hooked the big doors on the north side, and drove nails in next to the hooks, so they couldn’t pull out when the doors got slatting around. I let the geese in and fed them some apples—windfalls left over from Hurricane Carol. There was no good reason to shut the geese in, as they had roamed all over the place during Carol, enjoying the rough weather to the hilt and paying frequent visits to the pond at the height of the storm, but I shut them in from tidiness, and because the radio was insisting that everyone stay indoors. I got a couple of two-by-fours and some pegs, and braced the cedar fence on the west side of the terrace. Anticipating power failure, I drew extra water for drinking and cooking, and also set a pail of water next to each toilet, for a spare flush. My wife, who enters quickly into the spirit of disaster, dug up a kerosene lamp, and there was a lot of commotion about cleaning the globe and the chimney—until it was discovered that there was no wick. The potted fuchsia was moved indoors, and also the porch rocker, lest these objects be carried aloft by the wind and dashed against windows. The croquet set was brought in. (I was extremely skeptical about the chance of croquet balls coming in through the window, but it presented a vivid picture to the imagination and was worth thinking about.) The roof of the pullet house had blown off during Carol, and the pullets had developed a prejudice against hurricanes, so I shut them up early. I went to bed that night confident that all was in readiness.
Next morning, everything was in place, including the barometric pressure. The power was on, the telephone was working, the wind was moderate. Skies were gray and there was a slight rain. I found my wife curled up in bed at ten of seven with her plug-in going, tuned to disaster. In the barn, I received an ovation from the geese, and my failure to release them caused an immense amount of gossip. After breakfast, the whole household, with the exception of our dachshund, settled down to the radio, not in a solid family group but each to his own set and his own system of tuning. No matter where one wandered, upstairs or down, back or front, a radio voice was to be heard, bringing ominous news. As near as I could make out, the storm was still about a thousand miles away and moving north-northeast at about the speed of a medium-priced automobile. Deaths had been reported in New Jersey. A state of emergency had been declared in New London, Connecticut, and in Portland, Maine. Something had happened to the second shift at the Commercial Filters Corporation plant in Melrose, Massachusetts, but I never learned what. A man named Irving R. Levine wished me “good news.” The temperature in Providence, Rhode Island, was sixty-eight degrees.
It became evident to me after a few fast rounds with the radio that the broadcasters had opened up on Edna awfully far in advance, before she had come out of her corner, and were spending themselves at a reckless rate. During the morning hours, they were having a tough time keeping Edna going at the velocity demanded of emergency broadcasting. I heard one fellow from, I think, Riverhead, Long Island, interviewing his out-of-doors man, who had been sent abroad in a car to look over conditions on the eastern end of the island.
“How would you say the roads were?” asked the tense voice.
“They were wet,” replied the reporter, who seemed to be in a sulk.
“Would you say the spray from the puddles was dashing up around the mudguards?” inquired the desperate radioman.
“Yeah,” replied the reporter.
It was one of those confused moments, emotionally, when the listener could not be quite sure what position radio was takings—for hurricanes or against them.
A few minutes later, I heard another baffling snatch of dialogue on the air, from another sector—I think it was Martha’s Vineyard.
“Is it raining hard there?” asked an eager voice.
‘‘Yes, it is.”
“Fine!” exclaimed the first voice, well pleased at having got a correct response.
At twenty-one and a half seconds past eleven o’clock, a New England prophet named Weatherbee, the WBZ weatherman, reported that the storm was moving north-northeast at fifty miles an hour and said that New England as a whole would not get the sustained force of the wind. This prediction was followed by a burst of inspirational music, and I wandered away and into the kitchen, where I found Mrs. Freethy mixing up a spongecake. “Heard from Edna?” she asked with wry amusement as she guided the electric mixer on its powerful way through the batter. Mrs. Freethy takes her hurricanes where she finds them.
When I returned to the radio, a man was repeating the advice I had heard many times. Fill the car with gas before the pumps lose their power. Get an old-fashioned clock that is independent of electricity. Set the refrigerator adjustment to a lower temperature. I weighed all these bits of advice carefully. The car had already been fueled. The clocks in my house have never been contaminated by so much as a single jolt of electric current. And I decided against monkeying with the refrigerator, on the ground that the control knob was probably buried behind about eighteen small, hard-to-handle items of food left over from previous meals and saved against a rainy day like this one.
I switched to Rockland, 1450 on my dial. The town manager of Camden was speaking. He said preparations had been made for mass feeding, and that you could get fed at either the Grange Hall or the Congregational Parish House, and you were invited to bring your own food. A bulletin said the core of the storm would pass to the east of Rhode Island. From Bangor, the news was that the Gene Autry show would continue as planned. The Boston Fire Commissioner advised me to keep calm and follow instructions, and I thought again about my obstinacy in the matter of the refrigerator. In Nantucket, winds were seventy-seven miles per hour.
At noon, I took a short vacation from the radio and looked out at the familiar scene, which, because it bore so little relation to the radio scene, assumed a sort of unreality. It was thirty hours or more since I’d slipped into a hurricane mood, and I could feel the telling effects of such sustained emotional living. I went outdoors. A light breeze was blowing from the southeast. Rain fell in a drizzle. The pasture pond was unruffled but had the prickly surface caused by raindrops, and it seemed bereft without geese. The sky was a gloomy gray. Two rosebushes bowed courteously to each other on the terrace. I got a berry basket and walked out to the pullet yard, where I collected a few damp eggs. The pullets stood about in beachcombing attitudes, their feathers in disorder. As I walked back to the house, I measured with my eye the point on the roof where the biggest balm-of-Gilead tree would strike when it toppled over. I made a mental note to evacuate my people from front rooms if the wind should shift into the west, but was doubtful as to my chances of evacuating my wife from any room whatsoever, as she doesn’t readily abandon well-loved posts, especially if they are furnished with traditional objects that she admires and approves of, and she is inclined to adopt a stiff-backed attitude about any change of location based on my calculations. Furthermore, she can present an overwhelming array of evidence in support of her position.
Back indoors, the storm, from which I had enjoyed momentary relief by taking a stroll in it, was on me again in full force—wild murmurings of advance information, almost impossible to make head or tail of. Edna’s eye was at sea, and so was I. The eye was in New Jersey. No, it was in Long Island. No, it was not going to hit western Long Island or central Massachusetts. It was going to follow a path between Buzzards Bay and Nantucket. (This called for an atlas, which I produced.) All of New England will get the weaker part of the storm, but the Maine coast, “down Bar Harbor way,” can be hit hard by Edna late this afternoon. I bridled at being described as “down Bar Harbor way.”
Not only were the movements of the storm hard to follow but the voices were beginning to show the punchy condition of the poor, overworked fellows who had been blowing into their microphones at seventy miles per hour for so many hours. “Everything,” cried one fellow, “is pretty well battered down in Westerly.” I presumed he meant “battened down,” but there was no real way of knowing. Another man, in an exhausted state, told how, in the previous hurricane, the streets of Providence had been “unindated.” I started thinking in terms of unindated streets, of cities pretty well battered down. The wind now began to strengthen. The barometer on my dining-room wall was falling. From Rockland I got the “Top of the Farm News”: 850,000 bales of cotton for August; a new variety of alfalfa that will stand up to stem nematode and bacterial wilt; a new tomato powder—mix it with water and you get tomato juice, only it’s not on the market yet. Low tide will be at 4:23 this afternoon. The barometer now reads 29.88 and falling. A chicken shoot is canceled for tomorrow—the first chicken shoot I had ever heard of. All Rockland stores will close at three o’clock, one of them a store carrying suits with the new novelty weave and novel button and pocket trim. If this thing gets worse, I thought, I’ll have to go outdoors again, even though they tell you not to. I can’t take it in here. At 1:55 P.M., I learned that visiting hours at the Portsmouth Hospital, two hundred miles to the southwest of me, had been canceled, and, having no friend there, I did not know whether to be glad about this or sorry.
The time is now two o’clock. Barometer 29.50, falling. Wind ESE, rising. It seems like a sensible moment to do the afternoon chores—get them over with while the going is good. So I leave the radio for a spell and visit the barn, my peaceable kingdom, where not a nematode stirs.
When I resumed my vigil, I discovered to my great surprise that Rockland, which is quite nearby, had dropped Edna for the time being and taken up American League baseball. A Red Sox-Indians game was on, with the outfield (I never learned which outfield) playing it straight-away. My wife, who despises the American League, was listening on her set, and dialing erratically. I heard a myna bird being introduced, but the bird failed to respond to the introduction. Then someone gave the rules of a limerick contest. I was to supply the missing line for the following limerick:
I knew a young lady named Joan
Who wanted a car of her own.
She was a sharp kid
So here’s what she did
. . . . . . . . .
The line came to me quickly enough: She ordered a Chevy by phone. I was to send this to Box 401 on a postcard, but I didn’t know what city and I wasn’t at all sure that it was a General Motors program—could have been a competitor. The whole thing made no sense anyway, as cars were at that moment being ordered off the roads—even Joan’s car.
At 2:30, it was announced that school buildings in the town of Newton were open for people who wanted to go to them “for greater personal security or comfort.” Ted Williams, who had been in a slump, singled. WBZ said the Boston police had lost touch with Nantucket, electric power had failed in South Natick, Portland was going to be hit at five o’clock, Wells Beach had been evacuated, a Republican rally for tonight in Augusta had been canceled, the eye of Edna was five miles north of Nantucket, a girl baby had been born, Katharine Cornell had been evacuated by police from her home on Martha’s Vineyard, and all letter carriers had been called back to their stations in Boston on the old sleet-snow-wind theory of mail delivery. I made a trip to the barometer for a routine reading: 29.41, falling.
“The rain,” said the Mayor of Boston in a hearty voice, “is coming down in sheets.”
“That gigantic whirlpool of air known as Hurricane Edna,” said Weatherbee, from his South Shore observation point, “is over the town hall of Chatham.” Weatherbee also dropped the news that the eastern end of the Maine coast would probably get winds of hurricane velocity about six hours from now.
“Weatherbee,” said a proud voice from the WBZ Communications Center, “is still batting a thousand.” (At this juncture I would have settled for Ted Williams, who wasn’t doing nearly so well.)
The rest of the afternoon, and the evening, was a strange nightmare of rising tempest and diminishing returns. The storm grew steadily in force, but in our neck of the woods a characteristic of hurricanes is that they arrive from the southwest, which is where most radio lives, and radio loses interest in Nature just as soon as Nature passes in front of the window and goes off toward the northeast. Weatherbee was right. The storm did strike here about six hours later, with winds up to ninety miles an hour, but when the barometer reached its lowest point and the wind shifted into the NW and began to tear everything to pieces, what we got on the radio was a man doing a whistling act and somebody playing the glockenspiel. All the livelong day we had had our mild weather to the sound of doom, and then at evening, when the power failed and the telephone failed and the tide flooded and the gale exploded, we heard the glockenspiel. Governor Cross, a Republican, who also lives to the westward, had already announced that the worst of the storm was over and that, except for a few benighted areas along the coast, everything was hunky-dory. I notice he got voted out of office a couple of days later, probably by an enormous outpouring of Republican turncoats from the coastal towns to the east of him, whose trees were being uprooted at the time he was speaking.
My own evening was an odd one. As Edna moved toward me across the Gulf of Maine, I watched the trees and the rain with increasing interest, albeit with no radio support except from the glockenspiel. At half past six, I evacuated my wife from a front room, without police action, and mixed us both a drink in a back room. At 6:55, she leaned forward in her chair and began neatening the books in a low bookshelf, pulling the volumes forward one by one and lining them up with the leading edge of the shelf, soldiers being dressed by their sergeant. By half past seven the wind had slacked off to give Edna’s eye a good peep at us, the glass was steadying, and ten minutes later, watching the vane on the barn, I saw the wind starting to back into the north, fitfully. The rain eased up and we let the dachshund out, taking advantage of the lull. (Unlike the geese, she had no use for rough weather, and she had obeyed the radio faithfully all day—stayed put under the stove.)
At 7:45, the Governor of New Hampshire thanked everyone for his cooperation, and Logan International Airport announced the resumption of flights. At eight o’clock, my barometer reached bottom—28.65. The Governor of Massachusetts came on to thank his people, and somebody announced that the Supreme Market in Dorchester would be open for business in the morning (Sunday). Another voice promised that at eleven o’clock there would be a wrap-up on Hurricane Edna.
At this point, I decided to take a stroll. The night was agreeable—moon showing through gray clouds, light rain, hurricane still to come. My stroll turned out to be a strange one. I started for the shore, thinking I’d look over things down there, but when I got to the plank bridge over the brook I found the bridge under water. This caused me to wonder whether my spring, which supplies the house and which is located in the low-lying woods across the road, was being unindated. So, instead of proceeding to the shore, I crossed the road and entered the woods. I had rubber boots on and was carrying a flashlight. The path to the spring is pretty well grown over and I had difficulty finding it. In fact, I’m not sure that I ever did find it. I waded about in the swampy woods for ten or fifteen minutes, most of the time in water halfway up to my knees. It was pleasant in there, but I was annoyed that I was unable to find the spring. Failing in this, I returned to the house, kicked off my boots, and sank back into radioland. The Bangor station predicted ninety-mile winds within half an hour, and I discovered a scrap of paper on which my wife had scribbled “Bangor 9437, 7173, and 2313”—emergency numbers taken down just as though we were really in telephone communication with the outside world. (The phone had been gone for a long time.)
At 8:44, the power failed, the house went dark, and it was a whole lot easier to see Edna. In almost no time the storm grew to its greatest height: the wind (NW by this time) chased black clouds across the ailing moon. The woods to the south of us bent low, as though the trees prayed for salvation. Several went over. The house tuned up, roaring with the thunder of a westerly wind. For a little while, we were both battened down and battered down.
There are always two stages of any disturbance in the country—the stage when the lights and the phone are still going, the stage when these are lost. We were in the second stage. In front of the house, a large branch of the biggest balm-of-Gilead tree snapped and crashed down across the driveway, closing it off. On the north side, an apple tree split clean up the middle. And for half an hour or so Edna held us in her full embrace.
It did not seem long. Compared to the endless hours of the radio vigil, it seemed like nothing at all. By ten o’clock, the wind was moderating. We lighted the dog up to her bed by holding a flashlight along the stairs, so she could see where to leap. When we looked out of a north bedroom, there in the beautiful sky was a rainbow lit by the moon.
It was Taylor Grant, earlier in the evening, who pretty well summed things up for radio. “The weather bureau estimates that almost forty-six million persons along the east coast have felt some degree of concern over the movement of the storm,” said Mr. Grant. “Never before has a hurricane had that large an audience.” As one member of this vast audience, I myself felt a twinge of belated concern the next morning when I went over to the spring to fetch a pail of water. There in the woods, its great trunk square across the path, its roots in the air, lay a big hackmatack.
I never did get to hear the wrap-up.