Hurricanes in the Hamptons



Neighborhood: East Hampton, Uncategorized


I had heard that the land was so low it had flooded during the Great Hurricane of 1938. An old man who ran the local country store had told my mother and me how the water had surged and churned, whipped by 160-mile-per-hour winds. The furious surf washed over Old Montauk Highway, temporarily splitting Napeague and Montauk from the rest of the South Fork. The man and his neighbors were caught unawares, he said, partly because the storm had rushed up the coast from Florida so fast that the weather service could barely track it. That’s why the hurricane became known as the Long Island Express.

But there was another reason why they were not forewarned.

“Before it hit––before the worst––we were glued to our wireless, because they were reporting about Chamberlain and Hitler negotiating,” he had recalled, shaking his head and looking down at the worn shop counter. “Yep. And we were so darn scared of another world war, we tuned in only to that station. The storm warnings came in on the other channel. And them seas––they melted those sand hills just like you pour hot water on sugar.”

“The Sudetenland,” my mother had said as we drove home. “Such a betrayal. We were listening to that news, too in Krakow. We couldn’t believe it––that Chamberlain actually thought Hitler could be appeased.”


“Some. Some did. Not knew, but had a sense. Especially after speech Hitler made at Nazi rally in Nuremburg. That was few weeks earlier.” She was dropping more articles than usual, I thought, as she reached back to her early teens in Poland. “And yet…who could imagine…what would happen to us…”

My mother glanced away from the road for a moment toward the wetlands to the left, towards Louse Point, where the cliff our house was on sank towards an isthmus and the bay flowed into Accabonac Harbor. She was checking for a favorite osprey nest on one of the tall poles conservationists had placed in the marshes to help the endangered birds reproduce. She spotted the nest and returned her attention to the winding road, grasping the steering wheel hard.


“What, Ma?”


When I was growing up, my family quaked when Nor’easters slammed into the Hamptons at high tide. In the late 1960s, my parents had debated whether to buy a small house on the ocean, or build one on the bay. Ultimately, they constructed our house on an 80-foot bluff and added a bulkhead and jetty to safeguard our cliff from erosion and the sea.



My sisters and I reluctantly sold our parents’ dream house thirteen years ago, not long after our mother died. It took me many seasons to stop worrying about our house, Nor’easter or not.

But as Hurricane Sandy smashed through the Eastern Seaboard, it blew me back in time. A hurricane churning into a Nor’easter during a full moon––what would my parents have thought? Two days after the storm struck New York’s coast, I scoured the Web for photos of Gardiner’s Bay. I found a video of white caps off Atlantic Beach, and a shot of Louse Point swamped, muddied, devastated. But I will never know how our seawall fared. And as far as I can tell, this time Napeague was not severed from the mainland.


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