Hurricanes 1992 - 28 August 1992

While we were wondering whether they'll be another war in the Gulf and whether they'll soon be any war to fight in Bosnia, I found myself thinking back to the third week of September 1938. After a sparkling holiday in England, disturbed at the end by the oncoming rumble of Munich, we were sailing back to New York on the pride of the French line, the huge sleek and elegant Normandy.

After days days at sea, we had good reason to congratulate ourselves as you'll see on our choice of ship and by the same token to feel sorry for westbound passengers on the smaller nine-nights-an-10-day ships. For we woke up one morning or were more or less shaken, hurled, up to find the ocean sloshing above the portholes leaving the immediate impression that we were already five fathoms down with all hands. Another enormous lurch and the sound of the decks cracking and now there was through the portholes nothing but a leaden sky.

I seem to remember we'd awakened to press the stewards button and he came tottering and wheeling in a creditable impersonation of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, he was sorry but it was impossible to serve any food or drink till things calmed down. Understood. What's going on we asked. Ah, he said, c'est l' équinoxe. He was right, it was early morning 21 September but, we thought, some equinox!

Well, I won't go on to describe the indescribable except to say that through the day things got much worse, the great ship came spinning out of the water like a dolphin, shuddered in mid-air and crashed down into the deeps. I learned later that five people out of a passenger list of something like 1,500 went hand over hand on ropes to get down to dinner. It was easing off by nightfall, the great ship merely bouncing up and booming down. We woke to a brilliant morning, the ocean a slow heaving glistening pond, under our door as usual was the ship's newspaper. Ships' newspapers on any line consisted of four maybe six pages of very bare information, quick, short summaries of the wire services supplemented by jolly pieces by way of what we called human interest and funny stories. There were that morning as I recall no funny stories; the front page had a nonsensical headline "hurricane à New hyphen York". Not surprising coming from the French who wouldn't know that hurricanes do not blow into or near New York.

However, we read the accompanying story and revised our judgement about the French when sticking out from the sombre prose – French is especially well suited to catastrophe – were names that we weren't merely familiar with, they were the places where we lived and had our being. Southold, Green Port, Peconic, West Hampton, Southampton, they form a cluster of small towns at the Eastern end of Long Island through which the hurricane had screamed its way and done outrageous damage on and across Long Island's sound, flooding the coastal cities New London, Rhode Island, Providence and then up through New England killing over 600 people and destroying 100,000 houses and stores and churches and stripping the state of New Hampshire of two thirds of its stand of white birch before the monster petered out in Canada.

We later discovered that this 1938 hurricane was the first to hit the north-eastern United States in about 80 years, but since then since the 1950s anyway we seemed to be the preferred glide path so to speak of about one big blow in three. I have been in the thick, the thick grey howling nothingness of three or four hurricanes since then, but the memory of them, the visual memory of their damage has faded far more than that of 1938. What with the fallen trees and crumpled roadway and broken bridges, it took us about a week to be able to drive the five miles from our village Southhold east to the fishing port of Greenport. The high winds –that means the whirling counter-clockwise winds that blow at a height of about 20 feet – they are the murderous agent that with a vicious whisking motion, unscrewed trees and plucked buildings out of the ground.

Until 1938, the characteristic tree of New England was the feather duster elm, so called, a tall slender tree that curves out in a frozen fountain of foliage. It doesn't exist today. The main street of Southold was lined with these elms, but the '38 hurricane uprooted them all, pulling the sidewalk and the pavement along with them, so that you had to climb through a street-long broken trench to get anywhere.

Two years after the hurricane, the Dutch elm disease came creeping east from, I believe, Ohio, the Middle West anyway and in the next 20 years just about ravaged that noble tree.

Greenport, the fishing town once a whaling port, was the town nearest to us with a movie house. The day after the hurricane – always a beautiful day after the hurricane – the cinema had been neatly dislodged uplifted and deposited two miles out in Peconic Bay. To balance this false distribution of objects, half a dozen sizeable yachts, which had been at anchor offshore were lifted and blown into town and were on display right way up, upside down on Greenport's main street.

On the south shore across the bay from us lies the ocean-side town of Westhampton, cheek by jowl with the colonial village of Remsenburg where PG Woodhouse lived and would subsequently say he was sorry to have been away then and missed what I imagine they call a humdinger. There were it was reported 27 people attending a matinée in the Westhampton cinema that afternoon. The next morning all that was left of it and them was a ragged hole in the ground. Theatre audience, projectionist were far out to sea. The power, the power of the wind that's always so difficult to credit is its ability not just to blow things over with a deafening sound and rip off roofs, but to get inside structures and do the sort of ingenious damage you'd only expect from a dexterous madman. You know that New Orleans lies nine feet below sea level, you cannot bury people underground because only a few feet from the surface is marsh, so the cemeteries have piled up the dead in tombs above ground, long streets of what look like lockers – so they are.

Well, in the 1957 hurricane that fell on New Orleans, not only did the wind whip the coffins from their tombs, but ripped bodies out of the coffins. The most palpable sign of the wind's accurate power can be seen on any wooden house, which before the storm was painted. In New England as you know most houses, certainly most old houses are made of wood and painted white. We have an old New England salt box house up the point from us and two hours after a 1954 hurricane that came right through our house, we went up the point to see how our neighbours were doing, we thought we'd taken a wrong turn their shining white house was stripped, shaved rather down to the bare wood not one dab or grain of paint and everywhere instead of dense foliage not a leaf on any tree.

So now the first hurricane of the 1992 season, they always start brewing in the Caribbean at the end of August beginning of September, in the northern hemisphere that is, and the first was also one of the worst to hit southern Florida in 30 years. In anticipation of it, they managed to evacuate and move inland further up the peninsula over one million people – that's a boggling figure. I don't remember anything like it, but the aerial pictures of 40 miles of bumper to bumper motorcars and vans all sliding north made it believable. You'll have seen the far-ranging helicopter shots of the appalling devastation of the coastal town south of Miami. One's immediate response is to marvel that so far not more than a score of people have died. The great difference between the casualty count in the old hurricanes and the new is quite simply the existence of a federal hurricane centre, which in turn was made possible by the development after the early space flights of whether satellite photography.

I remember only a few years ago being with a 10-year-old grandson and smothering a feeling of irritation at him for sitting there and yawning while we watched one of the miracles of our age, a satellite picture of the whole of north America with the weather systems moving in full view. No such warnings existed 50 years ago in 1938, for example, on the fateful 21 September.

The New York Times that morning had the weather forecast as usual in the upper right hand corner of the front page, it said "seasonably cool, high temperature around 70, rain likely later". Within six hours the hurricane of the century was roaring across Long Island. I recall a farmer who lived near us, he woke-up that morning and found in his mailbox a new barometer he'd ordered, he opened it up and the needle was way over, it said "hurricane" what rubbish he thought. He wrapped it up again and walked off the two miles into town to return it with a complaint to the post office; he didn't make it back home for two days, staying after the first 100mph gust, bivouacked in the post office basement.

Nowadays, we spot the hurricanes when they are struggling to be born and plot their perilous life mile by mile and project their likely landfall, which is why one million were safely trundled away from the Florida coast and hundreds of thousands from the coast of Louisiana. But the plight of maybe two million people without light or power and three-quarters of a million without homes is grievous. In both states by midweek, hundreds of thousands of men and women and children defying a a curfew were roaming the city's nearest to their shattered homes searching for tinned foods, batteries, petrol, water, charcoal for BBQ grills. A young woman in a trashed suburb bearing the euphonious name of Pine Lakes said, "They're saying on the radio to boil all your water". She had waited two hours to buy a one-litre bottle. "What," she asked, "am I supposed to boil water on? At this point, I don't have a home."

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