In 1938, my father had two sons, was twenty-four years old, and probably in the best shape of his life.  He’d rowed crew for his prep school, and was working for Berkshire Hathaway in New Bedford.  He was happy, I’m told, back then, and he had many friends down at the Yacht Club in Padanaram, and he loved to sail and fish and the sea in general.  This may have been an assumed love, because his grandfather was a whaling captain - one of the very last - in what had been, in the 1830’s, the richest town in the United States per capita.  

 

Grandfather Layton, for whom I was named, was then forty years in the distant past.  He’d died pretty much broke, working as a night watchman when he couldn’t go to sea anymore.  New Bedford had tried various things since, textiles mostly, but labor went South and nothing came close to the riches of the whale.

 

In any event, I assumed I had seawater in my veins when I married a woman whose parents lived on a Trimaran in the Caribbean, and before that, in Costa Rica.  They eventually bought a new boat and sailed around the world, just the two of them, in 1974 and 75.  In any case, I discovered to my horror and theirs that I got violently seasick on the open ocean.  I did duty as a cleat for a few days, and I fed the gulls, and I have yet to be as miserable as I was on the few long voyages I took with them. 

 

My inability to drink to their level hampered things.  I could not, under the best of circumstances, drink warm Bloody Mary’s at dawn and the things that sent the in-laws, my wife and her sister in bouts of hysteria – the engine’s dead!  The refrigerator died!  The right hull isn’t connected! – sent me into deep nausea. 

 

In any case, I got that from somewhere, and it apparently was from Grandfather Layton, who according to his log stayed Ahab-like in the cabin of his ships for the first few weeks until he got his sea legs.  Supposedly, things got better from there.  But boiling whale blubber and all the joys of guts and rotting stuff on deck makes me ill in theory.  I doubt I could have done it.   So, I’m suspicious that this clear pathology bypassed my father.   Although, he did run a rescue boat in the Pacific during WWII.  

 

In September of 1938, a category 3 hurricane five hundred miles across (the eye was fifty miles across at one point) ran straight up across Long Island into Connecticut; for all intents it was a storm the size of New England and New York combined.  It happened on the day Munich was signed by Chamberlain for ‘peace in our time’so it didn’t get much coverage outside of New England and the Middle Atlantic states.  What national media there was traveled by telegraph in short gasps, the utterly unreliable telephone system, or the periodicals.

 

Among the many stories that didn’t make it into the news that day was that of my father and a few of his buddies who got caught on the old Padanaram bridge.  They had employed themselves trying to save the boats slamming into the rocks around the bridge, but the water got really high, and the wind was too much and they realized they were on the section of bridge that rose somewhat higher and the causeway to land on either side was now under water.  I recall that Dad said, at one point, they shook hands goodbye, and that waves swept fifty foot yawls and the like across the bridge.

I don’t recall how they made it off the bridge, though clearly they did.  It must have been pretty damned scary.  Long Island and Providence entertained a storm surge twenty feet above normal plus the waves, and in fact downtown Providence actually was ten to twenty feet under the bounding main, so Dad could not have recalled hurricanes fondly or with much sense of adventure.

 

My take on hurricanes later in the mid 1950’s was totally different.  What I knew and cared about was no school and I could watch television, black and white cartoons, and listen to the wind howl.   That was about it, since we lived high off the water in the center of town, and the trees around us were strong and I don’t recall a single shingle flying off, although Hurricanes Carol and Edna, which hit about a week apart, were not weak storms.  But…..they didn’t hold a candle to the Hurricane of 38.

 

Every hurricane I see on television and Newsweek the crappy buildings that look like the first little piggy built them in an off moment all along the seacoast, mostly in Florida.  Hurricane Andrew was a horror, a large tornado, but the swath of houses it leveled probably had a hundred nail-gunned adhesives between them.  The wooden boards and two by fours are often intact in the wreckage: that means the connections failed, the wood didn’t break.  And failed early and often.  Except for those buildings on the coast, most of New England survived in good shape its hurricanes.  That was then.

 

The Hurricane of 38 not only retraced the coastlines of Long Island and New England, it devastated the great deciduous forests of the Old North.  I remember friends of my parents, and my mother as well, sobbing at the thought of all the trees that simply fell over or were ripped from the ground.  The outlines of entire generations of childhoods vanished in a day.  Coal and oil sales dropped for years as people burned all that dead wood for a decade.   

 

In fact, only two other storms can be mentioned in the same breath.  The huge storm surge and hurricane that hit Galveston in 1901 (the Mighty Wind and Day of folk music fame….), which utterly destroyed it, and the absolute worst:Hurricane Camille in 1969.  Don’t doubt it.  Camille had sustained winds of well over 200 mph, and no real way to measure the gusts back then, with a storm surge to match, and covered a wide area to boot.  Nothing comes close to that horror.  Hurricane Andrew, a small but just as violent a storm, did nowhere near the damage years later in a far more popular area than Camille did to the poorer areas on the Gulf coast of Mississippi and Alabama.   Category 5’s.

 

Hurricane Isabel has winds just above one hundred miles an hour, and it’s a large storm.  The sandy islands off the Carolinas and the Chesapeake will be reconfigured, and the generally lousy construction of beach domiciles will litter the coast.  And it will still be considered a mediocre storm.  I’ve endured far worse myself, and my father found himself on an open bridge in one of the worst ever.