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sky blue eye, and it was fixed on New England.
    An extreme hurricane is both the most spectacular show on earth and the deadliest. By comparison, the atom bomb is a firecracker on the Fourth of July. Scientists estimate its force variously as the equivalent of an H-bomb going off every sixty seconds or three ten-megaton bombs exploding every hour. The Great Hurricane of 1938 was just such an extreme storm. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it was one of the ten “storms of the century” and the most violent and destructive natural disaster in New England history.
    Most hurricanes attack with three weapons: swirling winds so strong that chickens are plucked clean of their feathers, rain so heavy that it turns tributaries into rampaging Mississippis, and waves so high that at first glance they may look like a fogbank rolling in. The Great Hurricane of 1938 had a fourth weapon: surprise.
    On that capricious Wednesday at the ragtag end of summer, a strange yellow light came off the ocean and an eerie siren filled the air like a wordless chantey. In the next instant, serene bays became swirling cauldrons, and everything moored and un-moored was picked up and whipped in — fishing tackle, teapots, corsets, porch gliders, picnic baskets, bathing caps, clamming rakes, washboards, front doors, barn doors, car doors, sand pails and shovels, sandpipers, sea horses, girls in summer dresses, men in flannel trousers, lovers on an empty beach, children in their innocence. Joseph Matoes and his three sisters on the Jamestown school bus, Geoffrey Moore and his three sisters in their Napatree beach house were scooped up and tossed into the maelstrom.
    Although the sea had been running high and small-craft warnings were in effect, as late as midafternoon there would be no alert that a killer storm was prowling the coast. Rampaging through seven states in seven hours, it would rip up the famous boardwalk in Atlantic City, flood the Connecticut River Valley, and turn downtown Providence into a seventeen-foot lake.
    At two o’clock the swath of coastline from Cape May to Maine was one of the wealthiest and most populous in the world. By evening, it would be desolate. The Great Hurricane of 1938 was more than a storm. It was the end of a world.

Chapter 2
    The Way It Was
    W illiam Stoughton, a judge at the Salem witch trials, once pronounced, “The Lord’s promise and expectation of great things have singled out New Englanders.” In 1938, even with the Depression dragging the region down like an undertow, few dyed-in-the-wool Yankees would have disputed the sentiment. Back then, New England was as much a cultural region as a geographic one. Independence and integrity were prized virtues, with modesty a close third. New Englanders rarely tooted their own horn. They felt no need to, because, to them, everyone else in the country was an upstart. They were confident in their superiority, certain that they had the highest principles, the richest culture, and the finest schools.
    In New England, where both coast and character were rock-ribbed, history was alive and fiercely guarded. New England was the cradle of liberty, birthplace of the Puritan work ethic, home of the Republican cloth coat, and source of the original lobster salad roll (in a toasted hot-dog bun with no celery and just enough mayonnaise). Unlike the prairie states that seem to go on and on, or the big skies of the West, the region is physically compact. This gave it cohesion, or the illusion of cohesion. In the thirties, the farmer-poet Robert Frost, a Californian by birth, was making a literary business out of personifying the authentic Yankee. The reality was somewhat different from the poetry. The stereotypical New Englander, a person of few words and fewer emotions, was only one side of the regional character. New England had produced rabble-rousing Sam Adams, who goaded the somewhat complacent colonies into rebellion, as well as the Puritan