Forest fires, tornadoes and earthquakes - 25 October 1996

Any morning during the past six months or so, on your way to the kitchen door to pick up what's sometimes called the "good, grey New York Times," you could pretty well guess the two main headlines. And what would they be? First, a new spasm of violence in the Middle East or a walkout in the seemingly hopeless Israeli Palestinian search for a stable peace. The only item likely to displace the Middle East would be the conviction of a terrorist or a raging flood in India. But the second main topic has been dependable: parallel reports from the road on the Clinton and Dole campaigns.

But last weekend, over three days, domestic electioneering and foreign disasters gave way to the coincidence of two natural disasters in the United States: raging forest fires over hundreds of thousands of acres along the coast of Southern California, and a huge north east storm that drenched and damaged the land and the cities of the whole northern Atlantic coast.

For once the loss of life on both coasts was miraculously slight, but the huge cost of the damage to homes, commercial buildings, power lines, forest farms reminded us of something we tend to forget when we're reporting the life, the politics and business of America, which is the precariousness of daily life in a large part of the country in the early fall. By then, California has normally gone four or five months without rain and, therefore, its whole landscape – a very lush, wooded landscape – offers a vast tinderbox to the accident of a dropped cigarette or a bolt of lightning.

So the wildfires were normal. And so in the late summer and on into the fall is the threat of hurricanes in the east. On this Eastern Seaboard, since the end of August, six hurricanes have threatened or hit the coastline from the Florida Keys up to northern New England, two thousand vulnerable miles.

But also chronic and to be expected at this time – in fact they've been busy for the past two or three months – are tornados. At least a score or more have done their swift, murderous damage at random spots in the south. One minute off on the horizon there appears a nasty, black spiral, like a whirling cone. People in its likely path duck into the storm cellars – if they're lucky – and wait. The dancing dervish takes about fifteen seconds to reduce a small town to rubble and then dances on.

Well this year, just to add to the autumn anxieties of about forty million people, a conference of a panel of seismologists, earthquake experts, has delivered a report on the likelihood of earthquakes in various parts of the country.

This report brought balm and blessing to my wife's oldest friend. Once a tall, handsome creature – as weren't we all – now a frail old lady, sensible and markedly un-neurotic except about one thing: a deadly daily fear of earthquakes. She lives on the California coast about ninety miles down the peninsular from San Francisco and, true, she lives close by one of the four faults that come in from the Pacific and meander south through about four, five hundred miles of the coastal shelf.

A few years ago, she was very near the epicentre of a quake that did a lot of material building damage. But this lady is so chronically aware of oncoming earthquakes that every evening she – I don't know how to put it – ties down, straps down, secures anyway the crockery and any other objects that might take off.

Well imagine the surge of pleasure I got from the end piece of that conference report. The report concluded that if the chances of a big California earthquake in the next ten years were, say, 25 to 1, the chances were about 10 to 1 that the true big one would hit – wait for it – southern New England on a line running from Massachusetts, through Connecticut, New York City and on into New Jersey.

I don't recall that any Eastern paper or television report picked this up. Otherwise, there would certainly have been in New York City noisy protest parades denouncing the experts and God Almighty, unfair to the Big Apple. My anxious friend living south of San Francisco was enchanted by this news. I don't know if she now leaves the cups and saucers unbound on the shelves.

The good news, one of the consolations of living through these autumnal hazards anywhere in the United States, is that the Weather Bureau and various special departments – the Hurricane Center in Miami, for instance - have become very skilled at predicting, if not the timing of earthquakes, certainly the path and intensity of oncoming hurricanes.

Just consider, in September 1938 on a quiet day, the 21st. The New York Times predicted clouds and some rain in the afternoon. By noon, the entire coast of New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut, then Massachusetts was being shredded apart by the worst hurricane known in a hundred years. Movie theatres on Long Island were lifted and deposited two miles out into the Atlantic. In our village, yachts lay in great trenches of the main street, trenches formed by the pull of the whirling wind on giant elms. Two thirds of the standing white birch throughout all of New England was destroyed. Six hundred and fifty people lost their lives.

As you can imagine, that totally unannounced disaster spurred a new era in weather prediction, and now the United States Weather Bureau behaves more like a hypochondriac, issuing, it sometimes seems, every hour on the hour, storm watches, high wind watches, thunderstorm watches at the drop of a shower.

Until last Saturday.

Friday evening, we – my wife and I – were alone in our little Bauhaus by the bay, perched a hundred feet up on the top of a bank, or, as an Englishman wrote in 1735, I think, a bank which they in barbarous English call a "bluff", perched there facing exactly north east. Benjamin Franklin, the founding father who invented the lightning rod, bifocal glasses and the Franklin stove, also identified the "nor'easter" as the characteristic storm wind, coming down off the northern New England coast and slamming on a south-westerly course naturally into Long Island and coastal Connecticut and New Jersey.

Well before we went to bed on Friday, we turned on the weather channel, which drones and draws all through the night and day. For Saturday, quite warm but rain all day, heavy at times, gusting winds. That was it. I woke on Saturday morning thinking I'd come out of a dream of myself strapped to the lookout on the Queen Elizabeth in a raging storm. We have four picture windows. We're now practically bending under the enormous flight of stair rods they call "heavy rain".

In the next sixteen hours, we had five inches of rain. Outside our howling living room, the birch and the locusts thrashed to shake, successfully, their leaves. Between the flailing stair rods, a seventy-five to eighty mile an hour wind. My wife and I sat there screaming at each other. I suppose like all happily married couples, we occasionally scream at each other, but we had to scream all the time to be heard saying simple, civil things like, could we have more towels to put against the leaking windows?

This little house, built, as Frank Lloyd Wright dictated, with the planes of its two roofs parallel with the ground beneath, it has through its fifty-five years survived four or five hurricanes, two of them historic ones. No measurable damage. It was a nor'easter thirteen years ago that lifted the porch and crashed it through the roof into the living room and produced a lapping sea three feet deep indoors.

This time, I sat in my chair and felt the floor tremble. I looked at a ceiling lamp swinging slightly over the dining table and I thought of Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald, dancing, so carefree, under that – whoops – suddenly swinging chandelier. Next morning, as always, a shining, beautiful day, not a leaf stirring on the trees that still possessed any leaves. Mr Weather Prophet, where were you?

So now, as usual, while Mr Clinton is whipping around everywhere telling us about the wonderful 21st century in store for us, the governors of California and the state of Maine are pressing him for federal disaster funds, to the tune of, I think, fifty, sixty million dollars. A trifle in any budget proposed either by Mr Dole or Mr Clinton. They are, as you know, still at it, and will be for only – thank God – another ten days or so. People ask, there's no question is there about the winner? Well on election morning in 1948, my paper in England printed a big piece of mine and entitled it: "Harry S. Truman: Portrait of a Failure." Twenty-four hours later, I had to explain, with great subtlety, how he won.

Talking of the headlines, as we were, that are bound to appear on your morning newspaper, a friend tells me that last Thursday morning every newspaper in Argentina, and many in the rest of South America, carried a headline that was no more than a paragraph in the Yankee North. It flared across the Argentine front pages, "Gabriela to retire".

For simpletons, may I say this is melancholy news indeed for anyone who loves tennis and loves to see a beautiful woman performing elegant strokes. But for the past four years, the strokes have been more elegant than winning. At twenty-six, there's no question that the stunning Gabriela Sabatini has gone way over her peak. However, don't cry for her Argentina. Long ago she had a rose named after her. For years, her perfume has outsold most others throughout South America. But need I say, for choosy fans who like their stars to be beautiful as well as brilliant, there was a time when it was so. Alas, it was five, six years ago.

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