Hurricanes

It’s Sunday morning as I write this, two to three hours before Hurricane Irene is due to hit New York City. A Category 1 storm, it’s already knocked out electrical power for millions of residents along the Atlantic coast. A storm surge four feet above normal levels is expected about now, which may penetrate lower Manhattan’s underground system of electrical cables. The city has been in a state of suspended animation ever since the mayor closed the metropolitan transportation system yesterday at noon, the first preemptive closure in its history. The streets outside right now are deserted, except for a young man in a white shirt and black backpack running towards Borough Hall. Great sheets of wind fly past our windows.

The storm has already caused at least eight deaths, including that of a boy who was in bed when a tree crashed through his roof, but it's unlikely to create the devastation caused by the Great Hurricane of 1938. A Category 3 storm, it caused, according to Wikipedia, about 700 to 800 deaths, destroyed or damaged more than 55,000 homes, and resulted in property damage equivalent to about 41 billion dollars in today’s money. Brooklyn and Queens experienced winds of more than 100 mph, the East River flowed inland for three blocks into Manhattan, the wind is said to have caused the Empire State Building to sway, and the whole city lost electrical power. In Westhampton on Long Island, a cinema was blown two miles out to sea and all 20 people inside, including the projectionist, drowned.

Damaging as the storm was in New York, its greatest damage was in New England, which to this day has not experienced another storm as severe. My home then was in Brookline, a town surrounded on three sides by Boston. On September 21, 1938, a few months shy of my seventh birthday, I stood at my bedroom window in the late afternoon, looking at the great tree outside being lashed by the wind.

The tree swaying outside my bedroom remains a vivid memory. On September 21, 1938 my sister was a baby, my brother was a toddler, our parents and all our aunts and uncles were still alive, some of my cousins were as yet unborn, and I was still a child. What remains of that child besides the memory? My siblings and I are now grandparents, and we’ve replaced our own grandparents as the family elders. If the child is the father of the man, as Wordsworth famously asserted, what traits of personality or character, if any, in that six year old have persisted to this day?

Seventy-three years separates me from that child, who has traveled from Brookline to Brooklyn by way of Jerusalem, and to say that the two are the same person strikes me as absurd. It seems to me that the difference between the child and the man is as great as the difference between a butterfly and the caterpillar from which it emerged. The butterfly has no memory of the caterpillar, but I remember the child I once was, and I remember him looking out the window at a tree in a storm.

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