The Year of Hurricanes
by Colette Merrill
Hurricane season 1954
Nothing was as memorable to me as the hurricane seasons of 1954-1955, which we waited out in the basement of that house. The sounds of the raging winds and debris hitting our home will be forever etched in the corners of my mind. I will never forget hurricanes Carol, Edna, Hazel, Connie, and Diane.
On August 31, 1954, Hurricane Carol hit the shores of New England. We watched the trees sway in the wind, but it wasn’t long before our mother herded us into the basement. We listened with childlike excitement, mixed with fear, each of us imagining what was happening outside. The walls themselves seemed to shudder as if chilled to the bone each time the wind gusts reached 130 mph.
I felt safe until the winds screamed at the height of their fury. It was so loud that our small human voices could barely be heard over them. Each gust of wind would pick up a piece of plywood from our neighbor's yard and hurl it against the house. The walls would shake as each piece hit them, and suddenly, the excitement I felt turned to fear. I felt my eyes widening with each deafening slam of that wood. To my four-year-old ears and imagination, it was the big bad wolf trying to blow our house down, and he was winning. This wasn't fun anymore; it was terrifying.
Terror turned to dread as the sound of shattering glass and wood being torn apart drained the blood from my face. Along with that, the winds were now blowing louder and with a penetrating, shrill tone. We didn’t even know that the porch was in pieces, and there was a hole in the wall that a large limb of the acorn tree had come down on top of the porch, also breaking the window in the other room, until the storm was over.
Edna came on September 11th, and we also waited out in the basement. This time, the storm raged without any serious incident. Hazel followed on the 15th of October. Since this storm was not as severe as Carol and nothing happened during Edna, we were allowed upstairs on the main floor for a while. Even though the general winds were not as strong as Carol's were, the wind gusts were well over 100 mph. Somehow, the winds sounded louder on the main floor than in the basement. I couldn’t quite understand the concept of that. We knew when the kerosene lamps came out, we went to the basement
.
We had been playing in my bedroom, which was next to the kitchen, and on the same side as the wind was blowing. My mother decided to move us to the other side of the house, out of harm’s way. As she closed the two doors between the rooms, that horrible sound of shattering glass and deafening winds again filled the house. Glass blew everywhere, even blowing under the door of the room we were in. This time it was worse; my fright turned to horror, because I knew that my father was in that room when the glass broke. The wind was howling so loudly that nothing else could be heard above it. My screams of concern for my father were drowned out by the powerful winds that were now whipping through the rooms and rattling the doors with a terrifying insistence.
I know my parents were screaming just to be heard by the other, but their voices were still lost in the wind. I remember feeling that familiar panic setting in, and the wait seemed like an eternity. A child's imagination can run wild. I could see my parents being sucked out the window, cut to shreds by the broken glass, and helplessly bleeding to death. There was indescribable relief when my mother came in after they got the hole boarded up, and announced that my father had only received a small cut on his finger, and only needed a Band-Aid. Again, the winds had ripped off another large part of the very old, and very large, acorn tree that stood in the neighbor's yard. For the rest of the storm, we sat downstairs. There were two more hurricanes in August of 1955. Connie came first, and Diane came a week later. Their winds weren’t too bad, and they were both mostly rain.
I always thought of that year with fond memories, but as I read my own story, a small girl inside shivers at the thought of hurricanes. Why shouldn't she? That whole year seemed as if her world was going to end with each hurricane.
