Chapter 9: Summer Storm

Dishwashing after the evening meal in my grandmother’s summer shack was always problematic. First, we had no sink and secondly, we had no running water.

My grandmother loved the old shack built back in the 1890s. My grandparents had honeymooned there when they married in 1915. First located far out on the marsh the old building served as a salt hay shanty. The building used to store equipment also provided shelter for the workers harvesting hay, which was in high demand for bedding and fodder for farm animals.

Marsh grass was also a significant source of income for many farmers and sold for five dollars per ton at the turn of the last century. The difficulty in harvesting was a major factor in the price of salt hay.

The marshlands where the hay grew flooded during high tide and even at low tide; the ground was a slippery, sticky, muddy mess. Despite the drainage canals, crisscrossing the marsh billions of mosquitoes and biting flies made harvesting a hellish experience.

The entire multi-purpose first floor measured only about 14 x 20 feet. One corner of the room served as a “kitchen,” if one could call a small camping stove fueled by propane a kitchen. The little stove sat on top of a rustic wood hutch. A large daybed on a rusty wire frame consumed the other corner of the shack’s first floor.

On the first floor, pine planks partly covered most of the hut’s interior walls. The paneling did a fair good job hiding the thousands of rusty nails punching through the exterior walls like a pincushion. The “dining room” was an antique kitchen table surrounded by several spindle-back wooden chairs.

I was drawn to a tattered and torn Saturday Evening Post magazine cover hanging on the wall over the table and I would stare at it for hours. The illustration by Norman Rockwell pictured an old fisherman carrying home a beautiful and nearly nude mermaid imprisoned in the old man’s lobster trap.

Three windows downstairs and two small windows upstairs provided all the natural lighting for the shack while kerosene lanterns illuminated the evening.

Access to the second-floor loft was via an open tread ladder-like set of stairs without railings.

I loved everything about the shack. It was my summer palace.

One evening, my grandmother and I finished the dishes and free of our chores, we decided to enjoy the sunset. We went outside and sat on a huge log secured to the shack’s pilings by a thick rope.

The log, with the ends sawed off, was a four foot diameter section of an oak tree washed up by a winter’s storm. Bleached by the sun and polished by years of sitting on it made an ideal bench. The wall of the shack served as the backrest.

Our log bench afforded us a grand view of the miles of flat salt marshes stretching out toward the west. Sitting on the log, we watched towering thunderheads rise above the horizon. High banks of clouds began to steadily advance toward us. They looked like a mountain range on the march.

The day had been hot and humid with temperatures in the high nineties. The air was as still and felt as thick as molasses. The setting sun was behind the cloud wall and highlighted the edges of the clouds with hundreds of silver linings. Anvil shaped cloud tops rose nearly ten miles into the sky.

Beneath the massive cloud wall, we could see wispy sheets of rain and bright flashes of lightning striking the ground. The still air around us vibrated and rumbled with the sounds of the approaching storm.

“Ayah! It’s a bad blow is a comin’. It feels like hurricane weather,” my grandmother proclaimed.

Myrtle Higgins was about as Yankee as they come. She spoke with a classic down east Maine accent. When she said hurricane she pronounced it “hurry-cane.” Myrtle had a keen sense of the weather. If she said a “bad blow” was on the way, it was time to head for the storm shelter. The problem was the only storm shelter we had was the old wooden shack we were leaning on.

Looking west, we could see a massive wall of towering clouds advancing across the marsh. Looking east, the sky was a deep evening blue and a copper-red moon rested on the horizon. My grandmother called it an angry moon and said, “It looks like we’re stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

The storm was still several miles away when we felt the first stirring of the wind. The sluggish air moved like a confused creature, first in one direction and then another, as if searching for something unseen.

The trees on the hill about three hundred yards north of us were starting to bend and sway in the rising wind. The one hundred and fifty foot mound of sand and glacial till had a name. Everyone called it Cable Hill. It was the point where on July 12, 1869, the first commercially successful transatlantic undersea telegraph cable had come ashore. The cable allowed the transmission of telegraph messages between North America and Europe.