Sudden Sea (25 page)
Westhampton Beach lost 153 houses, and most of those remaining were ruined. On Fire Island three hundred houses were swept away at Ocean Beach, one hundred at Fair Harbor, and one hundred at Saltaire. At Montauk one hundred houses were battered, and dozens of homeless families found shelter in the Montauk Manor, a summer hotel that was closed for the off-season.
In Massachusetts the shore of Buzzards Bay was little more than wreckage. One complete house was still standing in ritzy Westport Harbor. At Mattapoisett’s Crescent Beach, of 107 cottages, a dozen remained. Horseneck Beach, Fairhaven, and Woods Hole were swept clean.
In South County the destruction was absolute. Ninety-nine percent of shoreline property from Quonochontaug to Charles-town, a distance of seven miles, was demolished. Some four hundred cottages at Misquamicut and almost two hundred on Charlestown Beach washed away. Charlestown Pond and Charles-town by the Sea lost another hundred homes, and Napatree was wiped off the map.
The value of beachfront property plummeted. The day after the hurricane, you could have bought a piece of land for ten cents, one old-timer said. In some places, property simply disappeared. Great Gull Island, the army’s coastal artillery post between Long Island and Fisher’s Island, shrank from eighteen acres to twelve in an afternoon. Three Rhode Island sisters who owned fifty shorefront acres on the twenty-first of September owned two acres on the twenty-second. According to the
Geographic Review
, erosion in a fierce hurricane can exceed the effects of a century of ordinary wave work.
Along the beaches, the handsome pavilions that had defined the shoreline with their gracious style and impeccable service were never rebuilt. “The pavilions were lovely things,” a Rhode Island woman remembered. “It isn’t what it used to be. We lost the pretty little shops like the very nice linen shops and things like that. What came in their place were pizza parlors and slot machine places, and nothing that was very attractive.”
The economic decline that began in the Depression deepened. Mill towns that had been struggling never recovered. The very rivers that had powered them rose up and tore them down. Factories crumbled, and many of those still standing never reopened. What was left of New England’s textile industry moved south, and once confident colonial towns became forlorn, little more than ghost towns.
Farmers lost more than 1,600 head of livestock and 750,000 chickens. Connecticut’s tobacco production dropped from 15,000 acres to five. Trees that had stood in Revolutionary days were uprooted. Most of the Northeast’s apple crop, three-quarters of Vermont’s sugar maple trees, and half of New Hampshire’s white pines were lost. The timber blown down was the equivalent of ten years’ normal cut for that state. In Rhode Island, where white pines were the state’s richest natural resource, a belt of lofty trees had stretched the length of the state, north to south. In three hours they were gone, and with them the state’s entire lumber industry. The U.S. Forest Service estimated that there was enough hurricane timber to build 200,000 five-room houses — so much that sawing and salvaging it would take five years.
The fishing industry was also devastated. Maritime losses of all kinds were huge. Block Island lost thirty-six of its fifty-six fishing boats, and the rest were badly damaged. In Montauk, Long Island, more than eighty fishing boats were unsalvageable. In Stonington, fifty-three of the fifty-five-boat fleet were beyond repair. The
Gloria
, which was being overhauled in Bridgeport when the storm blew in, was the only smack working after the storm. In the afternoons fishing families would go down to the Stonington wharf when
Gloria
came in, and her captain would distribute the day’s catch for free.
Besides their boats, fishermen lost equipment, miles of nets, and thousands of lobster pots. In Jerusalem and Galilee, Rhode Island, pots as deep as 125 feet below the ocean surface and twenty-five miles out to sea were splintered. In one of the worst marine tolls, eighteen fishermen drowned when a pair of scallop-fishing boats out of Brooklyn, New York, sank off the coast of Nantucket.
Ferryboats took a beating, too. From Bridgehampton to Port Jefferson is a short hop — just twelve miles between the two Long Island towns. Ray Dickerson, captain of the passenger ferry
Park City
, had made the trip hundreds of times. He set out from Bridgehampton at two o’clock Wednesday afternoon with his usual nine-man crew and five passengers. The youngest was a two-month-old baby. The day was overcast and the wind strong, but the weather did not appear dangerous. Five miles out, in the middle of Long Island Sound, the wind began to howl and the sea boomed. The 150-foot steamer was heavy and powerful, but it might as well have been a cork. Captain Dickerson tried to turn back; the wind was too strong. He dropped anchor, thinking to ride out the storm; the anchor dragged. Torrents of water were flung across the decks and reached into the holds, dousing the boilers’ fire and knocking out the generators. Before he could radio a distress signal, power, lights, and all communication were lost. The
Park City
floundered in the angry Sound. The next day a Coast Guard cutter spotted the ferry, battered but still afloat. All aboard were shaken but unharmed, including the baby, who, it was said, never cried. But Captain Ray Dickerson was haunted by the trip. He died the following year at the age of sixty-one.
The
Catskill
, another Long Island ferry, steamed out of Orient Point at 1:30
P.M
. Wednesday afternoon, carrying a light, off-season load — just three cars and eight passengers. Captain Charles Sherman expected to cross the Sound and reach New London at 3:15
P.M
. An hour out of port, high seas and hurricane winds began speeding the ferry toward Connecticut. The
Catskill
was on the last lap of its sixteen-mile trip when the captain realized that he would never be able to maneuver into New London harbor in such wild weather. The
Catskill
turned around and rode out the hurricane without ever losing power. Sometime in the night, when the winds and water calmed, the ferry resumed its trip. It reached New London at 10:30
P.M
. By then, the city was in cinders and there was no longer a ferry dock.
In Jamestown the old
Beavertail
, the last of the wooden paddleboat ferries, had sailed her final voyage. She couldn’t be salvaged from the rocks. The other Jamestown-to-Newport ferry, the
Governor Carr
, was sitting pretty on the front lawn of Webster Wetherill’s house half a mile north of the ferry landing. Ladders were rigged to rescue the passengers (among them an admiral from the Newport Naval College and his wife). Once the water receded, there was a sizable expanse of dry land between the bay and the boat. Jamestown was in a quandary. Although the
Governor Carr
was unharmed, there was no way to get her back in the water. Eventually, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers solved the dilemma by off-loading the cars that were still on board, then blasting a channel from the lawn through the rocks to the deep water of the bay. By New Year’s, the
Governor Carr
was once again making the trip between the sister islands. She served Jamestown for nearly five decades. In the 1960s she was decommissioned and sold for scrap metal, and her hull was converted to a coal barge, an inglorious end to the era of Jamestown ferries.
The human and economic toll was measurable. The deepest impact of the hurricane was not. The swiftness and totality of the disaster were so stunning as to defy reason, logic, credulity. Social change evolves. Dunes and beaches and shorelines are shaped over a century of wind and wave. Lives and landscape require years of patient building, grain upon grain. They cannot be redrawn in two or three hours. On September 21, 1938, what couldn’t happen did, and even for those who had been cushioned from the ravages of the Depression, life seemed suddenly fragile.
The vagaries of nature shook the status quo and weakened its underpinnings. On that rough September afternoon, wealth, social position, and property provided no buffer from the fury of wind and water. The comfort zone they had ensured would never seem quite as insular again. The hurricane has been called “a savage leveler.” Chaos blew in, and in some ways it stayed on after the hurricane left town. The well-ordered life with distinct rules and classes came to an end, replaced by a world with new rules, new liberties, new equalities, and a new tempo. “Some line had been crossed,” as Lee Davis put it, “and nothing would ever be quite the same again.”
Although few, if any, realized it at the time, 1938 would be the last of the old New England summers. The Yankee establishment had been giving way slowly, so slowly that at first it wasn’t recognized. A sea of newness was washing over it — a new deal, a square deal, a new social compact. The political and social changing of the guard. Rock-solid Republican states would become Democratic. As the changes begun with the New Deal accelerated, the pace of life began to quicken. Air travel, the only operable means of transportation, boomed. The week after the hurricane was the busiest ever in airline travel in the United States. With train service cut off, buses running sporadically, and roads obstructed, thousands took to the skies for the first time in their lives. American Airlines, which held exclusive rights to the New York–to–Boston corridor, could not meet the volume of traffic. Demand soared from two hundred passengers a day to one thousand. American had to invite TWA, United, and Eastern Airlines to join the route.
In the eight days following the storm, airlines carried 8,000 passengers and 37,000 pounds of mail. Some 60 percent of the passengers were first-time flyers who had been leery of leaving the ground. Once they got over their initial reluctance, flying became a favored mode of transportation. The surge in air travel that would continue for the rest of the century began with the hurricane.
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.
In an area always resistant to change, culture, identity, and history were disrupted in a flash, and before New England could recover from the shock of the hurricane, there came a second terrible surprise: Pearl Harbor. Bad luck always comes in threes, they say. The Great Hurricane or 1938 was sandwiched between two national catastrophes. It came on the heels of the Great Depression and was followed by World War II. Almost to the day a year later, the storm troopers of the Third Reich marched into Poland.
Boys who survived the storm went off to war. Jim Nestor and Bill Chellis joined the navy. Clayton Chellis signed up, too, as soon as he was old enough, and when Geoffrey Moore finished prep school, he enlisted in the Marines. All four served in the Pacific. Jim was on the USS
Hornet
in 1942 when the aircraft carrier went down. He dove off the burning ship just in time. Geoffrey served with the Third Fleet. He was aboard the USS
Bonhomme Richard
that secured Tokyo Bay when General Douglas MacArthur received the Japanese surrender. When the war was over, Geoffrey enrolled in Harvard and, after graduation, went to work for his uncles at George C. Moore Co. Five years later he lit out on his own. Still athletic and vigorous today, he lives quietly in rural Pennsylvania with two massive mastiffs for company. His only child — a married daughter, Christine — lives in Germany.
Clayton served aboard the USS
Tarawa.
When the carrier was scheduled to return to the States, the sailors had a party on the beach at Saipan to celebrate. There was plenty to drink, probably too much. Clayton dove into the water. Eight years after he escaped death on the Jamestown school bus, he swam out past the reefs and was caught in an undertow. It was 1946 and he was nineteen.
T
he island of Jamestown was altered irrevocably. From its founding, Jamestown could only be reached by boat. After the hurricane, the islanders’ sense of isolation was so acute that within the year, a bridge was built connecting Jamestown to the mainland. The easier access altered the island’s character, turning it from a self-contained rural community to a suburban development. Today, broad suspension bridges leapfrog Narragansett Bay, connecting Jamestown to the Rhode Island mainland on the one side and to Newport on the other. Even Beavertail, which hadn’t changed much in three hundred years, became a different place. Before the hurricane it was open fields with sweeping sea views in every direction. The saline rains burned the grasslands that had attracted the founders to the island, and strange seeds borne on the winds changed the treeless beauty into a jungle of thick scrub that now shuts out the ocean views.
But at Fox Hill Farm, cows still graze in the pastures that slope down to the water. Children still learn to swim at Mackerel Cove, where the surf is gentle, and cross the narrow causeway to dig for clams at Sheffield Cove. There is no memorial of the school bus tragedy there, no memory at all of the lost children.
Sixty-five years make a difference.
Out on Napatree at the edge of the ocean, a pair of sandpipers race the tide, darting after the ebbing water, then sprinting back before the ripple of waves can catch them. The birds are fast and small, so fast their black stick legs blur like ink lines, so light their feet leave only scratch marks on the sand. A third piper scurries down the beach, and the newly formed threesome skitters in and out with swift, dainty steps, like the three little maids from school in double time, triple time. Every movement is precise.
The beach is bare of shells, but there are stones, smooth and glistening, and a line of froth, like briny champagne bubbles, that the sea has left behind. The wet sand is marked with deep imprints from a fisherman’s boots, and up where it is drier and softer, a black Lab sniffs at the ribbons of seaweed, once rubbery and slick, now brittle and dried into dullness. A tree trunk, forty or more feet long, lies sea-bleached and beached in the high sand. Beyond, where the beach crests, dune grass sways in an easy breeze.
