Dan's Papers - June 13, 2008 - Vicious Storm Crashes Into My House Sunday

On Sunday, my fiancée Chris and I went to a wonderful lunch for 12 at a private home in Mecox. After eating, around three, we got a tour of the house. In the living room, our host showed us an old black and white picture of the house in a frame.

"It's an old farmhouse," he said, "and we are restoring it carefully. But as you see, it doesn't have the big porch we have built. The farmer who sold us this property, he's about 90 now, came around the other day and had a look at what we were doing and said he hadn't built a porch because it was too cold outside on porches in the summer. Well, it isn't now. I guess that was before global warming."

"I think back then it was all open to the ocean, so there was quite a wind," one of the guests said. "Now there are all the hedges blocking the wind."

"Well, maybe that's it."

With lunch over, we headed back east, stopping at Bob's Country Market in Bridgehampton, and then farther to the east into the center of the wildest storm we'd experienced in several years. The sky went black, the lightning bolts crashed down and the rain became such a torrent, blowing sideways because of the wind, that we could barely see out the windshield. We slowed as we entered East Hampton. I worried about our dog. He hates thunder and lightning.

People in cars were driving wildly about, panic stricken. It was a frightening thing. We went slowly. As we came up Three Mile Harbor Road, it became apparent we were arriving just as the worst of it was bashing right across Three Mile Harbor and into the front of our house. The boats rocked furiously in their slips and with the tide unbelievably high, were trying to climb up onto the sidewalk. A power line was down where a tree had fallen onto the road just beyond our house.

In the middle of this, I actually got out of the car to clear a limb that had fallen across our driveway half-way up. Bolts of lightning and claps of thunder were everywhere. One was so close my hair stood up. I returned to the car, soaked and out of breath. Our car, as it came to a halt in the relative shelter of a giant windblock, which was our house, said it was 75 degrees out. It had been 95 degrees in Water Mill two hours earlier.

Thus began, for us, what it might have been like to live in our house in the early 19th century. The storm had lasted no more than a half hour, a nasty slash of a thing. It was over.

"It's going to be a stunning sunset," I said to Chris.

We took stock. We had no power. A large tree had fallen into the pool. We pulled a heavy planter up against the outside of two French doors that led out to the pool which would no longer close properly.

The TV wouldn't work. The refrigerator was off. The toilets had only enough water in the tanks for one flush. Nothing came out of the faucets. No lights were working. The air conditioning was off. The pool was still. Oddly, our cellphones would turn on, but the signal was weak and almost unusable. The regular phone was working. I guess you know the drill.

We found flashlights, candles and matches. It was now 6:30 pm. Darkness would come in two hours. And we were hungry. I thought of East Hampton Point and wondered if they had power. If they did, we could eat dinner and watch the same sunset we had at home. Then we'd return home and, hopefully, the power would be back on.

I called East Hampton Point, and indeed they were open, on generator power.

"Could we have dinner there for two?" I asked.

"We're only allowing people with reservations. Do you have reservations?"

"Well, sorry, then."

I hung up. I told Chris what had happened.

"Call back and make a reservation," she said.

"Okay. But they know my voice. So you do it."

We returned to the house two hours later by taking a detour around where the tree with the wires was still down. But the police had now blocked off half a mile of Three Mile Harbor Road so nobody could get through on the other side of us. There still was no power anywhere.

"Is this just about that tree?" I asked an officer. He nodded. "We live in there. You can see the house from here."

The sunset was indeed magnificent, not only where it went down in the west, but also, in the east, where the reflection of it turned some roiling cotton clouds orange and yellow.

And thus, we settled in. That the road remained blocked off was an ominous sign. Obviously the lighting company had not yet come.

Night came. There was not a single light anywhere around the harbor. There was nobody on the road. There was nobody at the boats in the harbor. The tide was retreating now. We lit the candles.

What to do? We had our laptops, which had battery power, but we could not get online. We had candlelight, but not lantern light. It was tough to read anything. What we did find was a portable radio. And so we sat in the living room on the sofa, and I put my arm around her, and we listened to WPKN-FM out of Norwalk, Connecticut, where a disc jockey, whispering conspiratorially into a microphone, was spinning classical music, folk music and occasional obscure songs from his personal collection. And we talked.

We talked about the most common things. It was getting stuffy. So we opened the sliders and windows and then met back at the sofa. A cool breeze wafted over us. What about the toilet?

"Get that big plastic fishing bucket you keep in the car," Chris said. "Dunk it in the pool. We can use that in the toilet tank."

Lucky for us we had a swimming pool, I thought. How had the early settlers gotten along without a swimming pool?

If this were 150 years ago, we'd have no need of pool water or harbor water. We'd have an outhouse. We'd have a stove that took firewood. We'd heat the house with what? Coal? No. A wood fire in a fireplace.

We'd have lanterns. So maybe, in the evenings, we'd read. No radio, no TV no video games. We'd get water up out of the ground from a well. Maybe we'd have a hand pump. We'd have no hot water. If we wanted hot water, for bathing, for instance, we'd heat it up over a wood fire in the yard. We'd heat a lot of it. Everybody would take turns taking a bath.

I thought of my two kids, both with their own cars. They'd been home when we got home from the luncheon. But they'd abandoned ship for higher ground and lights that work with a switch soon after we arrived.

Before they left, I said this to them. "Why don't you stay and watch TiVo? The TV doesn't work, but we've saved all these shows." They stood in silence for a moment, thinking about this. Then they were gone.

One called around 10 to ask if our power was back on. We said, "Not yet." He said, "Oh."

Chris wondered if we had drinking water. We did not. I thought maybe we had squirreled away a bottle of water from France or Fiji in the refrigerator, but realized we hadn't. Imagine, we have oceangoing tankers filled with bottles of water that we haul from over there to over here, or the other way around. Amazing that we would do this.

But we did have orange juice. And milk. That would do.

The settlers filled the walls with their homes with seaweed for insulation. They got through the cold winters. Nobody had cars. If they went anywhere it was by horses and then only a few miles. You know what? I kind of liked this.

"When the power comes on," I told Chris, "let's turn all the lights off, and just keep going with the candlelight and the portable radio.

At 11, still with no power, we moved the "Dan and Chris Show" up to the bedroom. Chris said it reminded her of Africa, it was so peaceful and quiet.

We enjoyed upstairs for awhile. Then I thought that if we had power in the morning, I should remember to call P. C. Richard to find out if they had the part in from South Korea for our new LG Dishwasher that had malfunctioned. It was still in warranty. We'd been washing dishes by hand for a week.

Stop thinking that, I thought.

At 11:30 I went back downstairs to use the telephone on my desk in the living room to call the Long Island Power Authority. Chris said, "Stop worrying, it will come on when it will come on."

I called anyway. I told a man there our address.

"We've got a truck up there right now," he said. "We expect to have power back up there within the hour."

As I put the phone back in the cradle, all the lights suddenly went back on.