Blowing Away
Oct 25th, 2005 at 10:04 am by Susie
Every time I see those dumb reporters leaning into a hurricane’s wind, it reminds me of my own hurricane story - Hurricane Donna, 1960.
That was a Category 5 storm, although I’m not sure how powerful it was by the time it hit the East Coast. All I know is, we still had to go back to school that afternoon. (Back in the old days, we walked home for lunch and then back to school.)
I was in the first grade. For some reason or other, the Catholic school I attended didn’t decide to cancel afternoon class until we were already back there. So I remember walking the five blocks home, one skinny little first grader, alone against the wind.
The force of that wind is something I won’t forget.
That was the first hurricane I remember as well. I grew up in a split level(remember those?) on the south shore of Long Island, and we had a creek behind our house, which grew and grew until it flooded the downstairs. It was the implacable nature of the water rising that still brings me chills.
Suzie, I truly hope that someday you will have the ability to devote yourself to writing. Short stories are one thing; this is one stinking paragraph and I have chills.
Yep, Susie is one helluva writer, no doubt about it.
My first hurricane was an anticlimax. I was five years old, and my mother picked me up at daycare at the usual time, but with an animated urgency. She said “we have to go home fast, hurricane is coming!” (East European birth, thus no article before the noun.)
I had no idea what the word meant, but since she seemed so excited, I thought it must have been a good thing, like some interesting friend coming to visit from out of town — for all I knew, it was someone called Kane, as in “hurry, Kane is coming.”
We rushed home — about five blocks, just like Susie. As it happened, hurry, Kane wasn’t an exotic guest, and it really wasn’t much of a storm either. Just a little bit of wind, nothing special.
Do you remember that your mother walked up Chester Ave. looking for you-she found you sitting under a tree, reading some pages from a book you had found.
Donna was my first hurricane too, and I happened to be on my second airplane flight at the time. Coming back from Europe on University charter plane with my mum. It was a good old propellor plane in those days, and the London-Boston flight was supposed to take nine hours. The plane fought Donna-generated headwinds for a whole day, twenty-four hours. Luckily, in those days, planes carried more than an extra half hour of fuel. On the twenty-fifth hour, we managed to reach St. Johns in Newfoundland. I was young enough to think the whole thing was a great adventure (and small enough to use the airplane seat as a bed).