New by R. A. SCOTTI

At the tail end of the bleakest summer in memory, weeks as gray as weathered shingles and drenching downpours, September 21st arrived in Southern New England like a gift from the gods. The surf was spectacular, the best of the season—long breakers rolling in, crescendos of sparkling foam, the water temperature surprisingly warm, and no pesky seagulls to swoop off with lunch. Silky cirrus threaded across a pastel sky, and the tang of salt was on the hot air, the air itself motionless, as if time had paused to savor the moment. For vacationers lingering after Labor Day, this was the reprise they had hoped for—a last perfect beach day....

Most hurricanes attack with three weapons: swirling winds so strong that chickens are plucked clean of their feathers, rain so heavy it turns tributaries into rampaging Mississippis, and waves so high that at first glance they may look like a fog bank rolling in. The Great Hurricane of 1938 had a fourth weapon: surprise. Although the sea had been running high and small craft warning were in effect, as late as mid-afternoon there was no alert that a killer storm was prowling the eastern seaboard. As swift and sure as a Joe Louis punch, it 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.

On that capricious Wednesday at the ragtag end of summer, a strange yellow light came off the ocean and an eerie siren filled the air like a wordless chantey. In the next instant, serene bays became swirling cauldrons, and everything moored and unmoored was picked up and whipped in. Fishing tackle, teapots, corsets, porch gliders, the porch itself, picnic baskets, beach umbrellas, bathing caps, clamming rakes, washboards, front doors, barn doors, car doors, sand pails and shovels, sand pipers, sea horses, girls in summer dresses, men in flannel trousers, lovers on an empty beach, children in their innocence were scooped up and tossed into the maelstrom....

Town by town, the Northeast darkened and was silenced. The brilliant inventions of modern life were knocked out. Phones failed. Lights failed. Cars flooded. Busses 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 rude 12-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.

The surging water washed out bridges, eroded rail beds, 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, fell. Memories, landmarks, family treasures washed away, and still the tide rose.... 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 who had lived a lifetime in the Northeast had ever witnessed such a tumult or heard such an uproar. The noise was deafening—a cacophony of shorted trolley bells and car horns, the shriek of the wind, the din of a world being sundered....

At two o’clock, the swath of coastline from Cape May to Maine was one of the wealthiest and most populous in the world. By evening, it was desolate. Some ocean-side towns were reduced to mounds of wreckage ten and twelve feet high. Others were wiped away as cleanly as if swept by a broom. There was nothing left, except a few telephone poles, a couple of cement steps, a tub or toilet half-submerged in the sand.

”The greens and commons of New England will never be the same,” the Associated Press reported. “Picture postcard mementos of the oldest part of the U. S. are gone with the wind and flood. The day of ‘the biggest wind’ has just passed, and a great part of the most picturesque America, as old as the Pilgrims, has gone beyond recall or replacement.”

Six hundred eighty-two people died in seven states, more than four hundred in Rhode Island alone. “No one was untouched,” Arthur Raynor of Long Island said. “Everybody lost something; many someone”.... To those who lived to tell the tale, more than any other single event, the hurricane marked the beginning of modern times. What nature’s storm began, the storms of war would complete and a gracious, circumscribed way of life was lost forever. The Great Hurricane of 1938 was more than a storm. It was the end of a world.