A Howling Good Tale

AUGUST 9, 1976--the second anniversary of the Great Fall--brought with it Nixon's Revenge. That was when a positively inconsiderate little hurricane named Belle came boiling up out of the Caribbean, hung a sharp left at Cape Hatteras, and barged up the East coast, cancelling countless resignation parties with her homicidal winds and warm monsoon rains. But for those who sat smack in the storm's path, Belle set the stage for a very different sort of party.

Out on Fire Island--a 32-mile stretch of sandy New York resort towns, whose main purpose is to keep the Atlantic Ocean off of the front lawns of all those nice mainlanders on nearby Long Island--my neighbors and I huddled together on the pleasantly rickety old ferry dock, waiting for the Coast Guard to make good on its early-morning evacuation order. Earlier, a few of my closer and more foolhardy friends had announced their plan to defy the local honchos and ride out the storm, and for a while I had entertained hopes of joining their struggle against the elements. But my father, taking seriously the warning that his little beach cottage was about to become part of the 12-mile fishing limit, wasted little time in disabusing me of any pretensions towards heroism. So, popping open a 10 a.m. beer with the local priest and a couple of the town aldermen, I reluctantly boarded the reconverted, Prohibition era rum-runner the local ferry monopoly had provided to shuttle us off to safety for a mere $1.75 apiece. My friends I left to their uncertain fate.

Destiny, however, proved my friends right and my father wrong. Belle zigged where the Weather Bureau thought she was going to zag, and the storm blew into supposedly safe New York City instead of hurtling Fire Island into the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau. I spent the night pumping raw sewage out of our flooded City basement, while my weather-wise buddies drank themselves into a coma to the pleasant accompaniment of a noisy but relatively subdued gale. The revelry wore on late into the night: one well-prepared inebriate fell asleep in a corner wearing flippers, a snorkel and a life preserver, while his brother wandered outside singing Hindu praises to the 60 mile-an-hour gusts still whipping through the town. Most were still snoring peacefully when I returned the next afternoon, cursing every weatherman who had ever picked up a satellite photograph.

BUT HURRICANE SEASON wasn't always a party time on Fire Island. The village old-timers--whose words rang loud in the ears of everyone who stepped on the ferry that Monday morning, and even louder in the ears of those who stayed--still speak reverently of 1938. For it was on September 21 of that year that the worst natural disaster in American history sprang suddenly out of the South Atlantic, howled up the Eastern seaboard, and mercilessly devoured half our town in its churning 40-foot waves. Most who stayed for the party that time died. It wasn't until after World War II that the town slapped itself sober and began to rebuild.

Memories of '38 live on in the horror stories of those who lived through those few hours of hell--and Everett Allen has made an effort to ensure that those stories don't die with their aging heroes. A Wind to Shake the World is Allen's homage to the Big Wind, a meticulously documented diary of the storm's progress as it hacked its swath of destruction across a defenseless New York-New England coastline. It is the story of how swift death burst onto a country that didn't yet know enough about hurricanes even to bother naming them, and how people worn out by nine years of depression struggled, quite literally, to keep their heads above water.

A Wind to Shake the World is neither great literature nor incisive social commentary. Allen is a journalist, not a novelist, and his style makes this obvious. His prose moves fitfully at best, is downright turgid at worst, and is obviously better suited to the front page of a New England town newspaper than the inside of a classy $10 hard-back. Always the reporter, he is long on detail and short on interpretation. An endless stream of names, places, death tolls and other gruesome details flashes past, making the book itself a hurricane of facts that often leaves the reader bewildered. There is no real weight, no meaning attached to the cyclone of detail--and when Allen attempts an occasional bit of philosophy, the effort just seems awkward and out of place.

But, for all that, the book succeeds. What it lacks in depth and style, it makes up in sheer power. The seemingly endless flood of names and numbers, the innumerable tales of heroism and cowardice, the continuous demonstrations of the storm's savagery, all add up to a compelling narrative, a hymn to the brute force of nature. The scenes of hundreds swimming through storm waves in downtown Providence, of thousands fighting back flood waters in New London, Conn., of train crews outracing deadly tidal waves and of desperate sailors straining to keep their 1000-ton vessel from from running aground on inland railroad tracks--while perhaps not elegantly presented--are still awesome. To look for some deep meaning in a book like this seems absurd; what it presents is not a search for truth, but a portrayal of the more basic pursuit of survival.

To say this of course opens the book up to charges of being mere trivial adventurism, an historical Deliverance with all white water and no significance. And, to an extent, perhaps the charges are true. Allen, a native of that fine old whaling town, New Bedford, is plainly obsessed with all things nautical and often seems more to mourn the founderings of classic yachts than the deaths of those who went down with them. A Wind to Shake the World is thus more a showcase for the battle of man against nature than a display of how people react to each other in times of crisis. The heroism, of which there is plenty, seems yanked from a John Wayne movie script; we see lots of heroes, but precious few human beings.

Yet in the end it doesn't seem to matter. Trivial or not, the book is gripping. It is the ultimate disaster flick, on paper instead of in cinemascope, and the entertainment becomes all the more horribly satisfying with the realization that the actors in this script didn't get up and walk away when the camera clicked off. If one is prone to tears or cheers, he will succumb more readily with a reading of Allen's book than a hundred screenings of Earthquake.

OF COURSE, this is probably not a book that will reach a mass audience. Even back on Fire Island, where people usually take their hurricanes seriously, few people have read it. When I was quite a bit younger, "Thirty-eight" was a constant source of fascination for almost everyone in town. If you were among the younger set, your personal stock rose with your ability to tell hair-raising stories about what the Big Wind had done to your family's house. (I always came off the winner in contests like these, after repeating the probably apocryphal tale of how the storm wave lifted up our cottage and left it sitting right on top of second base in the local softball field.) And even now, many townspeople are perversely proud of the fact that the hurricane wrought more damage in our town than any other on Fire Island. Yet Allen's book is far from a best-seller there--for as one hard-bitten, hard-drinking old-timer told me recently, "He just doesn't say enough about us."

If Allen's five-page description of the effects of the Big Wind on Fire Island won't satisfy even the most avid storm-lovers, then it's doubtful that his book will do much for a general audience. Not many Americans know how to appreciate a good hurricane, and they aren't likely to take time out to read about even the biggest one of all. Which is, of course, their loss. A Wind to Shake the World is a fine book, a wonderful source of stories to sit around and tell when livid storm clouds come steaming across the horizon and force the conversation indoors. For those who give it a try, the Big Wind will provide more than a few hours of powerful entertainment.