Essays of E. B. White (6 page)

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.

A
LLEN
C
OVE
, J
UNE
14, 1956

The temperature this morning, here in the East, is 68 degrees. The
relative humidity is 64 percent. Barometer 30.02, rising. Carol Reed is nowhere in sight. A light easterly breeze ruffles the water of the cove, where a seine boat lies at anchor, her dories strung out behind like ducklings. Apple blossoms are showing, two weeks behind schedule, and the bees are at work—all six of them. (A bee is almost as rare a sight these days as a team of horses.) The goldfinch is on the dandelion, the goose is on the pond, the black fly is on the trout brook, the Northeast Airliner is on course for Rockland. As I write these notes, the raccoon is nursing one of her hangovers on the branch outside the hole where her kittens are.

My doctor has ordered me to put my head in traction for ten minutes twice a day. (Nobody can figure out what to do with my head, so now they are going to give it a good pull, like an exasperated mechanic who hauls off and gives his problem a smart jolt with the hammer.) I have rigged a delightful traction center in the barn, using a canvas halter, a length of clothesline, two galvanized pulleys, a twelve-pound boat anchor, a milking stool, and a barn swallow. I set everything up so I could work the swallow into the deal, because I knew he would enjoy it, and he does. While his bride sits on the eggs and I sit on the milking stool, he sits on a harness peg a few feet away, giggling at me throughout the ten-minute period and giving his mate a play-by-play account of man's fantastic battle with himself, which in my case must look like suicide by hanging.

I think this is the fourth spring the coon has occupied the big tree in front of the house, but I have lost count, so smoothly do the years run together. She is like a member of our family. She has her kittens in a hole in the tree about thirty-five feet above the ground, which places her bedchamber a few feet from my bedchamber but at a slightly greater elevation. It strikes me as odd (and quite satisfactory) that I should go to sleep every night so close to a litter of raccoons. The mother's comings and goings are as much a part of my life at this season of the year as my morning shave and my evening drink. Being a coon, she is, of course, a creature of the night; I am essentially a creature of the day, so we Cox and Box it very nicely. I have become so attuned to her habits—her departure as the light fades at quarter past eight, her return to the hungry kittens at about 3
A.M
., just before daylight, after the night's adventures—that I have taken to waking at three to watch her home-coming and admire her faint silhouette against the sky as she carefully sniffs the bark all around the hole to learn if anything has been along during her absence and if any child of hers has disobeyed the instructions about
not
venturing out of the hole.

My introduction to raccoons came when, as a child, I read in a book by the late Dr. William J. Long a chapter called “A Little Brother to the Bear.” I read all the books of William J. Long with a passionate interest, and learned the Milicete Indian names for the animals. (Dr. Long always called a bear Mooween; he always called a chickadee Ch'geegee-lokh-sis. This device stimulated me greatly, but if I remember right, it annoyed Theodore Roosevelt, who was also interested in nature.) I must have read the raccoon story twenty times. In those days, my imagination was immensely stirred by the thought of wildlife, of which I knew absolutely nothing but for which I felt a kind of awe. Today, after a good many years of tame life, I find myself in the incredibly rich situation of living in a steam-heated, electrically lit dwelling on a tarred highway with a raccoon dozing in her penthouse while my power lawn mower circles and growls noisily below. At last I am in a position to roll out the green carpet for a little sister to the bear. (I have even encountered Dr. Long's daughter Lois in my travels, but it was not among raccoons that we met, and she seemed to have no mark of the Milicete Indian about her whatsoever, and never in my presence has she referred to a great horned owl as Kookooskoos, which saddens me.)