Chapter Nine: Summer Storm
Dishwashing after the evening meal in my grandmother's summer shack was always problematic. First, we had no sink, and secondly, we had no running water.
My grandmother loved the old shack built back in the 1890s. My grandparents had honeymooned there when they married in 1915. The tiny two-story structure was a two-room affair sitting on wood pilings designed to keep it above high tides and the rising floodwaters of ocean storms.
First located far out on the marsh the old building served as a salt hay shanty. The building used to store equipment also provided shelter for the workers harvesting hay, which was in high demand for bedding and fodder for farm animals.
Marsh grass was also a significant source of income for many farmers and sold for $5 per ton at the turn of the last century. The difficulty in harvesting was a major factor in the price of salt hay.
The marshlands where the hay grew flooded during high tide and even at low tide; the ground was a slippery, sticky, muddy mess. Despite the drainage canals, crisscrossing the marsh billions of mosquitoes and biting flies made harvesting a hellish experience.
When the local market for salt hay collapsed in the 1920s, a team of oxen moved the shack about a half-mile inland.
The entire multi-purpose first floor measured only about 14 x 20 feet. One corner of the room served as a "kitchen" if one could call a small camping stove fueled by propane a kitchen. The little stove sat on top of a rustic wood hutch.
A large daybed on a rusty wire frame consumed the other corner of the shack's first floor.
On the first floor, pine planks partly covered most of the hut's interior walls. The paneling did a fair good job hiding the thousands of rusty nails punching through the exterior walls like a pincushion.
The "dining room" was an antique kitchen table surrounded by several spindle-back wooden chairs.
I was drawn to a tattered and torn Saturday Evening Post magazine cover hanging on the wall over the table, and I would stare at it for hours. The illustration by Norman Rockwell pictured an old fisherman carrying home a beautiful and nearly nude mermaid imprisoned in the old man's lobster trap.
In the early years of my childhood, the shack had no electricity and never had running water. A 50-pound ice block chilled our food in an old wooden ice chest crammed in next to the hutch.
Three windows downstairs and two small windows upstairs provided all the natural lighting for the shack. Kerosene lanterns provided illumination in the evening.
Access to the second-floor loft was via an open tread ladder-like set of stairs without railings.
I loved everything about the shack. It was my summer palace.
On this evening, my grandmother and I had finished the dishes and free of our chores we decided to enjoy the sunset. We went outside and sat on a huge log secured to the shack's pilings by a thick rope.
The log, with the ends sawed off, was a four-foot diameter section of an oak tree washed up by a winter's storm. Bleached by the sun and polished by years of sitting it made an ideal bench. The wall of the shack served as the backrest.
Our log bench afforded us a grand view of the miles of flat salt marshes stretching out toward the west. Sitting on the log, we watched towering thunderheads rise above the horizon. High banks of clouds began to steadily advance towards us. They looked like a mountain range on the march.
The day had been hot and humid with temperatures in the high 90s. The air was as still and felt as thick as molasses.
The setting sun was behind the cloud wall and highlighted the edges of the clouds with hundreds of silver linings. Anvil shaped cloud tops rose nearly ten miles into the sky.
Beneath the massive cloud wall, we could see wispy sheets of rain and bright flashes of lightning striking the ground. The still air around us vibrated and rumbled with the sounds of the approaching storm.
"Ayah! It’s a bad blow is a-comin'. It feels like hurricane weather," my grandmother proclaimed.
Myrtle Higgins was about as Yankee as they come. She spoke with a classic down east Maine accent. When she said hurricane she pronounced it 'hurry-cane.' Myrtle had a keen sense of the weather. If she said, a "bad blow" was on the way it was time to head for the storm shelter.
The problem was the only storm shelter we had was the old wooden shack we were leaning on.
Looking west, we could see a massive wall of towering clouds advancing across the marsh. Looking east the sky was a deep evening blue, and a copper-red moon rested on the horizon.
My grandmother called it an angry moon and said, "It looks like we're stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea."
The storm was still several miles away when we felt the first stirring of the wind. The sluggish air moved like a confused creature, first in one direction and then another as if searching for something unseen.
The trees on Cable Hill about 300 yards north of us were starting to bend and sway in the rising wind. The 150-foot mound of sand and glacial till had a name. Everyone called it Cable Hill. It was the point where on July 12, 1869, the first commercially successful transatlantic undersea telegraph cable had come ashore. The cable allowed the transmission of telegraph messages between North America and Europe.
On the marsh in front of us, we could see the grasses start to ripple in the current. The temperature was dropping so quickly we could feel the air changing.
The vintage Coca-Cola thermometer on the wall of the shack urging us to drink more coke had read 97 degrees a few minutes ago. Now it read 77 degrees.
The atmosphere filled with the steady rumble of thunder. Just a few miles away lightning bolts were striking the ground all along the storm's leading edge. Lighting displays high in the clouds were almost continuous.
The wind had picked up and was blowing at a steady 20 to 30 knots, and the marsh grass lay flat.
A few fat drops of rain kicked up little puffs of dust in the powder-dry earth. The drops quickly became a torrent as the floodgates of heaven opened in the sky above us.
Within moments, the storm was all around us, and we retreated into the safety of the shack.
The rain and storm clouds blotted out the last light of the setting sun and outside became as dark as an underworld cavern. Lightning flashes were followed a moment later by an ear-splitting CRACK-BOOM as one bolt of lightning after another smashed into trees on Cable Hill about 200 yards away.
The white hair on my grandmother's head stood out in all directions, and I could feel a prickling sensation as the fine hairs on my arm all stood straight up. My grandmother started to say, "Oh mercy" just as a brilliant bolt struck the ground just outside the shack's window.
The strike was deafening and left us with ringing ears and dazzled eyes. Everywhere I looked, I could see the bright blue-white after-image of the bolt.
The old shack started to creak and sway in the wind as the storm began to intensify. Outside and under the eaves, the wind howled and screamed like an enraged beast.
My grandmother put one arm around me and hugged me close. I looked up at Myrtle and in the flashes of light from the storm; I saw something I had never seen before. It was the look of fear as her lips moved in silent prayer.
At intervals, the storm seemed to abate; the storm seemed to use the lulls to gather strength for another onslaught of fury as lightning continued to shatter the darkness.
Finally, around midnight the last of the thunderheads passed over us on their march to the ocean.
The silence, which followed, was nearly as deafening as the thunder. We ventured outside the shack as the wind was dropping back to a gentle breeze. High overhead we could see stars and the arch of the Milky Way.
The tempest in the night was gone, and we were safe. Sleep came quickly as I lay down on the old army cot my grandfather's brother had brought back home from the First World War.
I awoke the next morning to the smell of cooking bacon and the sound of my grandmother downstairs fixing breakfast: two slices of bacon, one slice of golden brown buttered toast and a single egg sunny side up.
Even though the clock on the wall read 6:30, my grandmother said we were late. We needed to rush breakfast so we could go beach combing. Interesting stuff always washed up after a big storm.
Stepping out of the shack, we noticed that the air had the sharp biting tang of ozone left over from the intense electrical activity of last night's storm. On Cable Hill, we could see three or four trees still smoldering from lightning strikes.
Checking out the spot where lighting had hit the earth in front of the shack we found a small burn mark in the center of a spider web of brown lines reradiating out in all directions. The ground looked like a cracked dinner plate.
Myrtle told me the electricity in the bolt was so hot it had turned some of the sand into glass.
We walked to the opening in the seawall and froze in place.
Stretching out as far as we could in both directions along the shore a blanket of dead and dying squid covered the beach. They had washed up on the sand after last night's storm.
My grandmother's hypothesis was that the powerful lightning strikes had decimated a large school of squid feeding just offshore.
The sun had only been up for an hour, and already the stench was overpowering. The weather forecast was hot and clear for the next several days.
Over the next week, bulldozers and the tides removed the remains of the unfortunate squid.
I recall asking my grandmother if squids were good food. She answered my question by making a face of disgust while waving her hands at the piles of stinking squid, “Who wants to have that for dinner? Remember, we are what we eat.”