I Am Walking

For three days, we watched the news reports of the hurricane sweeping up the coast. My sister, my father and I huddled around the television set in disbelief. It rampaged across Florida first, I remember laughing at the weather reporter in his blue windbreaker screaming into a microphone through sheets of rain. "The governor has called for an evacuation of the entire greater Miami metro area," he shouted. "Get inside!" we shouted back.

Next the hurricane hit the Carolinas, then Virginia and Maryland. We caught a train out of the city to my aunt's house at the top of a hill in a little town in Westchester. The red and blue swirl on the television screen wasn't getting any smaller. We wondered, could a hurricane really hit New York? A day later it did.

It was as if someone grabbed the whole island of Manhattan by its roots and pulled it three feet down into the Atlantic. The streets were flooded chest-deep. Taxis were turned over against bowing lamp posts. School desks floated single file out of classroom doors, down the halls and out to the playground where they bumped against the top of the monkey bars and tipped arithmetic books into the murky water.

The rain that drenched the little town in Westchester seemed to start at the top of the hill where my aunt's house sat. I remember the day after the storm moved on, causing a small downpour in New Hampshire and southern Maine, my sister and I went walking down the hill into the damp town. The sun was out, and there were birds everywhere. Sparrows, crows, ducks, nuthatches, bluebirds, warblers, woodpeckers, and my sister swore she saw a bald eagle swooping around the church spire. The birds were gathering up sticks and small branches, rebuilding their nests. I thought, "That is what we will do, though not as quickly." I pictured our living room flooded up to my chest. We will need to get a new TV, so we can know when the next hurricane is coming.