Sudden Sea (14 page)

The last time the Atlantic had leapt from its bed was in the Great September Gale of 1815. In the intervening century, as the nation expanded and prospered, the lesson of history was forgotten. By 1938, the barrier beaches of Long Island and southern New England, with their panoramic views and dramatic dunes, had become popular summer resorts crowded with houses — all kinds of houses, from fishing shacks and modest bungalows to shingled cottages and beachfront mansions.

When the hurricane’s dangerous right semicircle reached these shores, the storm surge swept over the low-lying beaches and squeezed into the bays. On Buzzards Bay, it picked up an eight-room house and sent it somersaulting down the sand, with the family still inside. As the house turned over and over, father, mother, and children were tumbled like a load of clothes in a washing machine. They were bruised black and blue and battered to death.

In Connecticut, the storm surge menaced coastal towns lying in the seventy-mile stretch of shoreline beyond the shelter of Long Island. It inundated Fenwick, Mystic, and Stonington, where the wary Portuguese fishermen had stayed in port. Caution saved their lives but not their livelihood. The Stonington fishing fleet numbered fifty-two boats. Fifty were sunk or smashed beyond repair.

In Fenwick, Katharine Hepburn came out of the water after her afternoon swim to a hail of stinging sand. The wind was so strong that when she leaned against it, it held her up. The wild, whitecapped Sound was thrilling, and she had stayed in longer than usual, riding the tremendous breakers.

Although the Hepburns’ house was just steps from the water, by the time she reached it, the tide was rolling over the bulkhead and breaking across the lawn. The rain, which had been a fine mist when she was swimming, was coming down in torrents. In rapid succession, a car parked in the driveway flew though the air, two chimneys collapsed, and windows shattered, blown out on one side of the house, sucked in on the other. Water rushed through the first floor.

“After that second swim we began to realize that we were in for something special,” Hepburn would write in her autobiography. “The screens on the porch began to blow like a lady’s petticoat. Then there was a rip and a crash and the big laundry wing fell off the back of the house. By this time the wind seemed to have doubled its strength.”

In New London the
Bostonian
finally eased out of the station at about four o’clock and crawled toward Mystic at twenty miles an hour. A few miles east of the station it bumped against the fury of the storm and stopped in its tracks. Between Mystic and Stoning-ton the railway is laid out along a narrow causeway built on a bed of boulders and crushed gravel. The September rains had undermined the bed and weakened the trestle.

As the Shore Line Limited started across the causeway, breaking waves were rolling toward the tracks and debris was smashing against the cars. Engineer Harry Easton cut his speed “to the pace of a slug.” He was halfway across and proceeding “with extreme caution” when a red signal flashed from the control tower ahead. The
Bostonian
skidded to a halt. The middle of a narrow exposed trestle was the worst possible place to stop in a gale. The sea was rising on one side, and a normally placid salt pond was bubbling like a geyser on the other. Easton wanted permission to continue across.

He climbed down from the engine and walked along the track to the tower — just a short distance, maybe two city blocks. The water was licking the tracks when he set out. By the time he started back to the train, it was up to his ankles. A few more steps and it was up to his knees. “You can get some idea how fast that water came up from the fact that we started running and before we got to the engine, the water was up to our hips.” The Pullman cars, each weighing sixty-seven tons, were swaying like the top seats of a Ferris wheel. Wind and water rose higher and higher.

Sealed in the capsule of glass and metal, the passengers waited with varying degrees of impatience but no real sense of alarm, until the windows began to go. One after another on the seaward side, they cracked or popped out and shattered. Glass shards and water flew into the cars, and the coaches began to list toward the sea. Conductor Joe Richards went through, asking passengers to move to the inland side of the train to avoid injury. Caught on the exposed coastline between Mystic and Stonington, unable to help themselves, they waited in the teeth of the hurricane for what seemed an eternity.

The flying glass was frightening, but a much greater danger was unseen. Beneath the tracks, the railbed was disappearing. By 4:30
P.M.
, the posh parlor car Oriental was dangling over an abyss. Only its front wheels still held the track. There were no rails, no ties, and no bed left beneath it. Easton and Richards decided that their only chance was to crowd everyone into the front cars, cut off the others, and make a run for the station house in Stonington.

The conductor walked through the car again, ordering all passengers to move up to the front of the train. A few required firmer action. When some of the prep school boys clowned around, ignoring his orders, Richards ripped open an emergency case, pulled out the axe, and threatened them with it. One couple was in the middle of dinner. Although the dining car was tilting dangerously, the diners objected to having their meal interrupted. They had paid for it, and they insisted on finishing it.

To prevent panic, the stewards continued setting fresh tables, shaking out crisp cloths and laying the silverware as if nothing were wrong. The ruse failed. Instead of an orderly line advancing to the front of the train, frightened passengers and porters poured into the aisles. Some began to shove. Others deserted the train and tried to swim to safety. Still others, in their rush to reach the front cars, got off the train. Hugging the wheels of the cars, they slogged through the surging water.

Engineer Easton saw people “leaping in terror from windows, doors and platforms into the water.” The train crew yelled to them to get back inside and forced all the passengers forward. They squeezed as many women and children as possible into the engine car. The rest were packed into the front car or took their chances in the churning water.

Seventeen-year-old Elvine Richard and her mother threw their coats, hats, and pocketbooks into the whirlpool and jumped. A terrifying undertow dragged them down. Broken branches, broken houses, broken boats, swirled in the water. Many of those engulfed by the storm were beaten to death by the wreckage. When a tree branch slammed into Elvine, fracturing her leg, two boys pulled her through the water — Stephen Glidden, a sixteen-year-old prep school boy, and Edward Brown, an MIT student. A burly passenger took a three-year-old boy from his struggling mother’s arms and started to carry him through the waist-high water. “Biting spray lashed our faces and surging waves tugged at our legs,” she remembered. The man lost his footing and fell into the water with her baby. Easton saw him stumble and went to their rescue. A wave caught one of the Fessenden boys; Roderick Hagenbuckle hauled him back. Once they realized that the peril was real, the boys helped many to safety.

Ed Flanagan, the Democratic Party chairman from Providence, described the exodus: “We got as far as the trestle west of Stonington, where the water was hurling boats and houses up against the side of the train. The roof of a house crashed into the side of the dining car. As the water began to beat against the train, we were ordered off. We walked the trestle up to the locomotive but could get no farther because of the rush of water. Passengers clung to the cables and engine wheels. Some of them were finally swept away. I saw them go with my own eyes.”

Passengers squashed into the engine, hung on to the tender, crammed into the first car. Lawrence Burwell, the Brown University senior, was packed in with some 175 others. No one could move forward or back.

We waited breathlessly for the rapidly rising tide to engulf the coach completely. Waves ten feet and higher pounded through the windows. We could hear the locomotive attempting to struggle forward to higher ground, its whistle screeching as if in defiance to the maelstrom around us. Baggage could be seen floating in every direction. People were trying to climb into the baggage racks thinking that this would be the least vulnerable point. The tracks had now so completely given way that the cars shook and some, in falling, broke away from the only two left standing upright.

Through the shattered train window, Burwell saw a woman with two young children in the second story of a house. The house was floating on the water. One wall had been torn away, leaving the interior exposed like a dollhouse. Mother and children clung together. As Burwell watched, “a terrific blast ripped off the roof. The walls fell apart, the flooring gave way, and the woman and children plunged into the heaving sea of wreckage.” He said, “No experience, no matter how harrowing, could compare with the tragedy enacted before those of us who were forced to look on helpless.”

Two more Pullman cars were swept from the rails. It seemed just a matter of minutes before the
Bostonian
would be sucked in after them. The railbed was eroding rapidly. As if the situation were not precarious enough, a big timber hit the train’s air hose and the emergency brakes jammed. The
Bostonian
was locked in place with its empty cars hanging off the edge of the track. If they toppled, they would pull the entire train into the abyss of water.

Back in New London, the city they had just left, the lighthouse tender,
Tulip,
190 feet long and weighing more than ten thousand tons, was lifted out of the harbor and was carried across the railroad tracks. She sat in the center of town, straddling the eastbound tracks of the New Haven Railroad for seventeen days. Relaunching her would be an engineering feat — and that was the least of New London’s woes. Crackling power lines and furious winds turned the downtown district into an inferno. The city burned for the second time in its history. (The first fire was set by Benedict Arnold to halt the British advance.

Bernie Kenyon and his friends were catching a Wednesday matinee in downtown New London when the film sputtered and the screen went blank. Kenyon doesn’t recall the movie, but he remembers very well stepping out of the theater and being nabbed by the police. “Every ablebodied man in town was recruited to battle the blaze.” Hurricane winds fanned the fire. The flames shot from block to block through the downtown district. Burning cinders carried on the wind ignited random houses miles away. Power outages reduced the flow of water to a trickle. Water was everywhere except in the hoses, which were running dry. Fire engines from neighboring towns were blocked by forests of fallen trees. For six hours New London burned unchecked. “We thought the whole city was going,” Kenyon said. But the winds changed as the storm moved north, shifting from southeast to southwest, and the fire turned in on itself.

The
Bostonian
was an island, surrounded by churning, debrisfilled water more than five feet deep. Uncoupling the front cars seemed an almost impossible feat, but brakeman Bill Donoghue plunged into the water. First he had to turn off the air compressor so the train could build up enough pressure to start again, then he had to uncouple the engine, tender, and first car from the rest of the train. If he failed, the
Bostonian
was doomed. Lashed by the vicious wind, beaten by the flotsam that filled the water, Donoghue worked against the powerful undertow. After several futile attempts, he finally managed to shut off the compressor and pull the pin. By then, too exhausted to save himself, he floated bellyup; Joe Richards hung out of the train, grabbed him, and dragged him in.

Whistle blasting, the abbreviated
Bostonian
tried to make a getaway. Three times the wheels failed to grip the track. On the fourth try, Easton opened the throttle all the way. Like the little engine that could, Engine No. 14 bolted and groaned, then began to move slowly. With women and children “clustered like flies” on the engine and the desperate passengers cheering, Easton nudged aside a telephone pole, two fishing boats, and a house that had washed up onto the tracks. A light rowboat drifted across the rails. The
Bostonian
“cracked it like a shell.” Dragging telegraph wires and poles, it inched safely down the track and arrived at Stonington.

Easton described the final miles for
Railroad
magazine:

Crates, logs and small boats kept smashing against our locomotive. Just as I thought the worst might be over, something heavy thumped the front end. A full-sized sailboat, tilted to one side, was lodged on the track. Slowly our wheels ground forward. The boat was firmly wedged. My hand could feel the deep vibration as the engine’s power drove against the heavy barrier of wood. We were stopped now, maybe for the last time. Then something snapped. The craft revolved sickly, turned bottom up, and began bumping rapidly for shore. Roaring her triumph, the big engine nosed ashore. When I looked back I could see sparks streaming from the wheels but I kept right onto the crossing near the station before I stopped and thanked God we were safe.

When the
Bostonian
reached Stonington, passengers and crew were brought to the Catholic church, where they received food, dry clothes, and a place to sleep. They were bused to Providence and Boston the next day. Students arrived at Harvard and Brown dressed in dungarees and engineer caps, without a stitch of clothes except what they were wearing. The Ivy League colleges extended their registration period through the week. Many students formed volunteer corps and aided the relief workers.

There were only two
Bostonian
fatalities. Bertha Weinstein Markell of Hartford, a passenger who was described as “an elderly well-dressed woman,” jumped into the swelling water and disappeared. Chester A. Walker, a pantryman, was also killed. Whether he panicked and died trying to escape from the stranded cars or whether he was killed trying to save Bertha Markell is not known. According to the conductor, a piece of timber hit Walker in the back of the head. “He went down and never came up.” Sometime later, his body was found in the garden of a house in Stonington.