Sudden Sea (8 page)

Dear Fred,

Never stopped raining since you left. Some beautiful ocean raging. Surf high coming over wall. Plenty of wind from southwest. It is not cold at all. We are getting along fine and I love to look at the ocean. Havila preparing to go home. Am packing.

Love, Jessie

Just out looking at water. High tide 6:30. Just turning and each wave comes almost on front porch. You could get plenty of fine planks if here. Fine steps just floated near our step.

A few houses away, Catherine Moore glanced out her bedroom window just in time to see her son, Geoffrey, flying down the bay. A southeast wind was whipping his sister Anne’s sailboat at a good clip out toward the end of Napatree Point, with Geoffrey in hot pursuit. Beyond the point lay the open Atlantic, not the safest place for a boy in a rowboat with a stiff breeze at his back. He would never be able to row back against the wind. Catherine called the Coast Guard.

She had hoped for an uneventful day. There was so much to do. The laundry had piled up and she wanted to get it on the line while the sun was shining. Geoffrey was going to prep school at the end of the week — she had to finish labeling and packing his clothes. Then there was the house — they would be closing it for the season, with all that entailed.

Catherine watched until she spotted a Coast Guard boat setting out. Feeling easier, she went down to the laundry room to help her cook, Loretta. Once the clothes were snapping on the line, doublepinned because a breeze was picking up, Catherine returned to the bedroom window with her husband Jeff’s binoculars and trained them on Little Narragansett Bay. The water, which on most days was as glassy as a skating rink, was choppy. She scanned the shoreline all the way to the tip.

There were a dozen or so swimmers on the bay side, and the boys out on the water, still scooting along, having too much fun to worry about getting back. The ocean side was almost deserted. She picked out two men — fishermen, probably, or clammers — and just beyond them a couple. She smiled to herself.
Frolicking
was an old-fashioned word. It sounded almost quaint in this day and age, when women smoked on the street and men kept their hats on in elevators. But it was the perfect word for the couple in her binoculars. Young lovers frolicking in the surf. Catherine turned away, not wanting to intrude. Margaret, four years old, was tugging at her skirt, wanting to look, too. The older girls, Anne and Cathy, ten and eight, were at school in Westerly, and Geoffrey … She began fretting. Geoffrey was at it again. He was just reaching the defiant adolescent stage, and he was determined to be independent.

An hour later the Coast Guard called. Both boats were missing. Retrieving the binoculars over Margaret’s protests, Catherine scanned the bay again. She picked out a speck on the horizon that could be Geoffrey and Andy. The Moores’ cabin cruiser was anchored at the Watch Hill Yacht Club. The
Mageanca,
a name made up of the first two letters of their children’s names: MArgaret, GEoffrey, ANne, and CAthy, was forty-two feet, and Catherine was petite, barely over five feet. It was too big for her to handle alone. She called her husband at the mill.

Westerly is roughly six miles west of Watch Hill. In ten minutes Jeff Moore was at the yacht club, taking the
Mageanca
out into Little Narragansett Bay. He headed for the point, motoring at full throttle, churning a high wake. The water was white-capped, as foamy as ale poured out too fast.

The
Mageanca
caught up with Geoffrey, Andy, and the runaway sailboat out at the clam flats at the end of the sandspit, where the water was shallow for some distance. Jeff turned the boat and backed into the flats, trying to maneuver close enough for the boys to wade out. The big cruiser ran aground, and they had to flag down another boat to tow them off. By the time they finally got home, the wind was whipping and the waves in the bay were two and three feet, higher than they had ever seen them.

At lunch Geoffrey began describing the wild chase to his mother. It was a sleigh ride out to the point, and Geoffrey enjoyed every minute of it. He never stopped to wonder how he would get back until he had snagged Anne’s sailboat and tried to turn around. He was rowing hard just to hold his position. Realizing that they could never make it back, he and Andy dragged the boats up on the sand. As they started walking home, Andy spotted the
Mageanca.

Geoffrey was in the middle of the story when his father suddenly turned an ashy white, clutched his chest, and slumped over the lunch table. Jeff Moore was much bigger than his wife or his son, and a good forty pounds heavier than Andy. Somehow, though, they managed to get him from the dining room, across the hall, into the living room, and onto the couch. Catherine gave him a shot of brandy to revive him and tried to take his pulse. It was so faint, she telephoned the doctor. As she dialed, she was thinking,
Could anything else go wrong today?

That same morning on the island of Jamestown, after the school bus had picked up his children, Joe Matoes ferried his truck across the bay to deliver his milk in Newport. Matoes made his rounds every other day, stopping at the downtown restaurants, then swinging by the mansions along Bellevue Avenue and around Ocean Drive, dropping off bottles at the few houses that were still open. He finished his milk route around two o’clock. Although the sun was bright, the wind was whipping and surf was breaking over the seawall on Ocean Drive.

Matoes caught the 2:30
P.M.
ferry home. It was a rough ride, much rougher than the morning run. The boat was more crowded than usual. Workers from Newport, concerned that a northeaster was coming, were trying to beat the storm home and the first rush of teenagers was returning from Rogers High in Newport. Jamestown didn’t have a high school of its own. Matoes watched them from a distance — his niece Marge Matoes, Bill Chellis from the lighthouse, and maybe a dozen more — noisy, boisterous, so different from his own children. The
Governor Carr
pitched and yawed in the heavy sea, but the teenagers were too busy raising their own ruckus to notice the one on the bay. The girls were laughing, trying to hold down their skirts without dropping their books, and the boys were cheering with each gust that thwarted their efforts.

If Matoes was thinking that his daughter Mary should have been one of those girls with an armful of books, dark ponytail flying in the stiffening wind, he kept it to himself. Joe ran the farm. His wife, Lily, ran the house, and she didn’t think a girl needed more schooling. He couldn’t argue that, and he needed an extra pair of hands on the farm. The work never ended, and there was so much of it, not just the heavy pasture work but the day-to-day chores: shoveling the coal, pumping the well water, chopping ice from the huge block with a pick.

Mary had loved school, though. She was at the top of her class every year. Maybe it would be different with Theresa and Dorothy, because Dotty was Lily’s girl. They were both good students like Mary, always on the honor roll. Not much chance Joseph would go to Rogers, or want to. Matoes couldn’t work the farm without his son — a good boy, gentle with his sisters, a hard worker, so tall now that Joe had to look up at him. Rose would be proud, he thought, if she could see their boy today.

Matoes was a simple man. His nature was practical, not poetic, and it was pure happenstance that he had married two women who were named for flowers. That was about all Rose and Lily had in common. Matoes turned into the wind. So many years had passed since Rose had died. Months would go by without a thought of her, then all at once, when he wasn’t watching, she would come back so clearly, she could be standing beside him. Now there was Lily. She wasn’t an easy woman, but she had never had an easy time, widowed when Dotty was a baby, then taking on somebody else’s children, three of them. Eunice had been good for them, good for all of them, made them more of a family. Still, there was a divide — Lily’s girls, Dotty and Eunice, and Rose’s kids, Mary and Joseph and Theresa. At least the three of them had one another.

Chapter 7

A Bright Young Man

T
he twenty-first of September was a gorgeous day in D.C., so gorgeous that it was hard to imagine foul weather could be lurking anywhere nearby. At the Washington Weather Bureau, bright young men, perched on tall stools at high wooden desks with slanted tops like architect’s tables, charted the day’s outlook. Two rows of identical desks faced each other, and at a glance, the men sitting behind them appeared identical, too. They were dressed in dark three-piece suits, white shirts with starched collars and cuffs, and sober ties knotted firmly. None of them rolled up their sleeves or loosened their ties, or even took off their jackets while they worked.

Charles Pierce was one of those bright young men. On this Wednesday morning he was plucked from their ranks to present the day’s weather maps at the noon forecast meeting. Pierce was filling in for a vacationing senior forecaster, and he was eager to make a good impression. He studied the morning charts closely. Conditions over the Northeast appeared strangely incoherent. Thunderstorms over New York. Long Island was a steam bath. There was danger of serious flooding in central Connecticut and western Massachusetts. But Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut were as sunny as Washington. A low-pressure system that stretched from New England to the Carolinas bore watching, and to the south the remains of the hurricane that had been threatening Florida for four days was prowling North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Jacksonville had sent a couple of overnight advisories, all pertaining to the aborted hurricane. As advisories went, they were fairly mild, indicating no cause for alarm. Still, Pierce read them closely:

10:30
P.M.
: Northeast storm warnings ordered from the Virginia Capes to Atlantic City, N.J., including lower Chesapeake Bay. Northeast winds becoming strong and reaching gale force (39–54 m.p.h.) in the Virginia Capes section Wednesday and southern New Jersey coast late Wednesday afternoon or Wednesday night.

4:00
A.M.
update: Indications are center of hurricane will pass near but slightly off Carolina Capes within next 12 hours attended by dangerous gales and high tides on coast and by hurricane winds ( 75 m.p.h. plus) a short distance off shore. Storm warnings displayed north of Wilmington, N.C., to Atlantic City, N.J. Caution advised ships in path of this severe storm.

When the D.C. forecasters began tracking the storm about five
A.M.
, it appeared to be slowing again. Like Norton and Dunn in Jacksonville, they believed it would follow the path of most North Atlantic hurricanes and curve out to sea. At 7:30
A.M.
, the system was some 140 miles east-northeast of Cape Hatteras, latitude 35° north, longtitude 73° west. The D.C. night crew downgraded the storm to a tropical disturbance. In their early-morning forecast, they noted only:
“A broad trough of low pressure extends from New England south-southwestward to the tropical disturbance. Pressure remains high from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and southward and southeastward over the ocean.”
They did not indicate a hurricane on the morning weather map that went out to regional newspapers and radio stations.

Following their lead, Charles Pierce issued an equally sanguine advisory about ten o’clock:

Hoist northeast storm warnings 10
A.M.
DST north of Atlantic City and south of Block Island, R.I., and hoist southeast storm warnings Block Island to Eastport, Me. Tropical storm approximately central about 75 miles east of Cape Hatteras moving rapidly north-northeast attended by shifting gales over wide area and by winds of hurricane force near center. Northeast or north gales backing to northwest south of Block Island to Hatteras today and southeast or east gales Block Island to Eastport becoming northwest tonight or Thursday morning. Small craft should remain in port until storm passes.

Through the morning, though, as he computed the statistical data and analyzed the surface charts, Pierce began to question the earlier assumptions. By his reckoning, the storm was east of Norfolk, Virginia, moving rapidly north again and still very much a hurricane. In the upper atmosphere above Washington, southerly winds of forty to fifty miles an hour were blowing. Since the storm was only about three hundred miles southeast, it was probably being pushed by similar winds. If his calculations were correct, the storm would blow on a straight track north from Hatteras. If it stayed on course without dissipating, the first landfall would be Long Island, six hundred miles away.

Looking back, Pierce would call the Great New England Hurricane “one of the most unusual, and from the viewpoint of the meteorologist, one of the most interesting storms in history. Because of the peculiar temperature and wind distribution in the upper atmosphere, instead of following its normal course, it moved straight northward over what, at that time, was the most densely populated area in the world.” But that was in hindsight. On September 21 he was a junior forecaster, green and unsure, working for an agency that in many ways was stalled in the nineteenth century.

When the United States established its first official Weather Bureau, the director, Willis L. Moore, complained to Congress that his forecasters were under such intense pressure that they had “the highest rate of insanity of any government agency.” The
Denver Republican
was one source of irritation. The newspaper routinely ran the official Weather Bureau forecast side by side with the predictions of ninety-year-old Oliver P. Wiggins. Wiggins would consult his bum left leg, wounded when he was scouting for Kit Carson, then issue his forecast. Wiggins’s bum leg beat the Bureau so consistently, the newspaper was asked to stop the practice.

In 1938 the Weather Bureau still resembled a seat-of-the-pants enterprise more than a scientific laboratory. In many ways it lagged behind its European counterparts. In wartime, weather is often a determining factor in victory or defeat. The lessons of history are numerous: the Spanish Armada was caught in a gale; the sun came out at Austerlitz for Napoleon; a snowstorm delayed air cover in the Battle of the Bulge. Not surprisingly, then, war is a major catalyst that pushes science to make sense of the weather. Spurred by World War I, European meteorologists, particularly in Norway, pioneered a new type of synoptic forecasting based on air mass analysis and the influence of weather fronts. The United States was slow to adopt the new science.