Essays of E. B. White

Hurricanes, as all of us know to our sorrow, are given names nowadays—girls' names—and, as though to bring things full circle, newborn girl babies are being named for hurricanes. At the height of the last storm, one of the most dispiriting crumbs of news that came to me as the trees thrashed about and the house trembled with the force of the wind, was that a baby girl had been born somewhere in the vicinity of Boston and had been named Edna. She is probably a nice little thing, but I took an instant dislike to her, and I would assume that thousands of other radio listeners did too. Hurricanes are the latest discovery of radio stations, and they are being taken up in a big way. To me nature is continuously absorbing—that is, she is a twenty-four-hour proposition fifty-two weeks of the year—but to radio people nature is an oddity tinged with malevolence and worthy of note only in her more violent moments. The radio either lets nature alone or gives her the full treatment, as it did at the approach of the hurricane called Edna. The idea, of course, is that the radio shall perform a public service by warning people of a storm that might prove fatal, and this the radio certainly does. But another effect of the radio is to work people up to an incredible state of alarm many hours in advance of the blow, while they are still being fanned by the mildest zephyrs. One of the victims of Hurricane Edna was a civil defense worker whose heart failed him long before the wind threatened him in the least. I heard about Edna during the morning of Friday, September 10, some thirty-six hours before Edna arrived, and my reaction was normal. I simply buttoned up the joint and sat down to wait. The wait proved interminable. The buttoning up was not difficult—merely a couple of hours of amusing work, none of it heavy. I first went to the shore, hauled my twelve-foot boat up above High Water Mark, and tied it to a stump. I closed and barricaded the boathouse doors. Then I came back up through the meadow, tolled the sheep into the barn, hooked the big doors on the north side, and drove nails in next to the hooks, so they couldn't pull out when the doors got slatting around. I let the geese in and fed them some apples—windfalls left over from Hurricane Carol. There was no good reason to shut the geese in, as they had roamed all over the place during Carol, enjoying the rough weather to the hilt and paying frequent visits to the pond at the height of the storm, but I shut them in from tidiness, and because the radio was insisting that everyone stay indoors. I got a couple of two-by-fours and some pegs and braced the cedar fence on the west side of the terrace. Anticipating power failure, I drew extra water for drinking and cooking, and also set a pail of water next to each toilet for a spare flush. My wife, who enters quickly into the spirit of disaster, dug up a kerosene lamp, and there was a lot of commotion about cleaning the globe and the chimney, until it was discovered that there was no wick. The pot at Fuchsia was moved indoors, and also the porch rocker, lest these objects be carried aloft by the wind and dashed against windows. The croquet set was brought in. I was extremely skeptical about the chance of croquet balls coming in through the window, but it presented a vivid picture to the imagination and was worth thinking about. The roof of the Pullet House had blown off during Carol, and the Pullets had developed a prejudice against hurricanes, so I shut them up early. I went to bed that night confident that all was in readiness. Next morning everything was in place, including the barometric pressure. The power was on, the telephone was working, the wind was moderate. Skies were grey, and there was a slight rain. I found my wife curled up in bed at ten of seven with her plug-in going, tuned to disaster. In the barn I received an ovation from the geese, and my failure to release them caused an immense amount of gossip. After breakfast the whole household, with the exception of our doxand, settled down to the radio, not in a solid family group, but each to his own set in his own system of tuning. No matter where one wandered, upstairs or down, back or front, a radio voice was to be heard bringing ominous news. As near as I could make out, the storm was still about a thousand miles away and moving north-northeast at about the speed of a medium-priced automobile. Deaths had been reported in New Jersey. A state of emergency had been declared in New London, Connecticut, and in Portland, Maine. Something had happened to the second shift of the Commercial Filters Corporation plant in Melrose, Massachusetts, but I never learned what. A man named Irving R. Levine wished me good news. The temperature in Providence, Rhode Island, was sixty-eight degrees.