Four: The Storm (1938-September)
I have been sitting with this entry for several weeks, which is longer than I have sat with any of the others, and I think I understand why. The others were history. Events that happened and were survived and could be set down with the distance that survival provides. This one is different. This one I have been carrying in a specific part of my chest since September of 1938 and I am not entirely certain that writing it down will put it somewhere outside of me or simply give it a larger room to move around in.
We will find out together.
The hurricane arrived on a Wednesday.
The twenty-first of September 1938, which was a day that began as an ordinary late summer day in Providence, the kind of day that has the particular quality of the season turning, still warm enough to be summer but with something in the air that knows it will not be summer much longer. The forecasters had tracked a storm up the Atlantic coast but had significantly underestimated both its speed and its intensity, and the result was that when the hurricane arrived it arrived without adequate warning, which is the worst way for something that large to arrive at anything.
I felt it coming before the forecasters knew what they had missed.
Hours before, in the early morning of that Wednesday, the current changed. Not gradually, not with the building unease of a nor’easter that gives you days of warning in the quality of the water, but with a sudden and total shift, the way a room changes when someone very large walks into it. The pressure from the south was unlike anything I had felt in ten years in Narragansett Bay, and I had felt a great deal in ten years in Narragansett Bay. I surfaced briefly before dawn and looked south and saw nothing except the ordinary grey of an overcast September morning, which told me nothing useful, and went back under and held onto the riverbed and waited.
I have mentioned that overcaution is my dominant characteristic.
I want to note, for the record, that on the twenty-first of September 1938, overcaution was entirely appropriate.
The surge came up the river at approximately four in the afternoon, which is when the storm made its closest approach to the coast and the tide, already running high, had nowhere to go but inland. Thirteen feet of water above the normal high tide line in some parts of the city. Fifteen in others. By some measurements, in some locations, closer to twenty. The numbers are almost meaningless in the abstract. What they meant in practice was that the Providence River ceased to be a river and became, for several extraordinary hours, a continuation of the Atlantic Ocean, and the streets of the city ceased to be streets and became, for those same hours, the floor of something that had decided it had been patient long enough.
The water went everywhere.
Westminster Street. Weybosset Street. The heart of the downtown shopping district that had been slowly recovering from the Depression, all of it underwater, the storefronts that had survived a decade of economic catastrophe now receiving the Atlantic Ocean through their front windows without having been consulted about it. The Union Station. The financial district. The hotels and the office buildings and the churches and the clubs and everything that the city had built on the premise that the water would stay where it had been put.
The water made demands that the city conceded.
I moved through the surge as it came in, which is not an experience I recommend to anyone who is not specifically built for it, and even for someone specifically built for it it was not comfortable. The force of that much water moving that fast in that direction is not something you reason with or navigate around. You go with it or you go under it and I went with it, moving through the flooded streets in the general direction the water wanted to go, which was everywhere, and I watched from below the surface as Providence discovered that it had been built in a place the sea had never entirely relinquished its claim to.
The ships in the streets were the strangest part.
There is something that resists description about seeing a vessel of significant tonnage sitting in the middle of Westminster Street, attended by the debris of everything that had been on Westminster Street before the water arrived. Awnings and automobiles and the contents of shops and the accumulated material of a city’s ordinary Wednesday, all of it rearranged by the surge into a new and entirely unreasonable geography. The humans who came out after the water receded and found these things in their streets had the particular expression of people whose understanding of what is possible has been permanently and unwillingly revised.
I understood that expression. I had worn it myself, in slightly different circumstances, in February of 1928.
I will admit something here that I have not admitted to anyone in eighty-seven years and am admitting now only because this document is supposed to be honest and I have run out of reasons to be selectively honest at this late stage of the writing.
When the surge came through and the river became the streets and the streets became the ocean, I felt, underneath the genuine horror of what was happening to the city and the people in it, something that I am not proud of and that I have spent a very long time trying to name accurately.
Relief is not the right word. Satisfaction is not quite right either. What I felt was something closer to recognition. The water going where it had always known it could go. The river expressing a nature that the city had been politely ignoring for three hundred years, pressing down on it with roads and buildings and the accumulated weight of human habitation, and the waters finally, briefly, in the most dramatic way available to it, saying: I am still here. I have always been here. You built on top of me but you did not replace me.
I felt it the way you feel it when something true has been demonstrated after a long period of being doubted.
This was not Dagon’s doing. I want to be absolutely clear about this because I know how it sounds and I know what it would mean if it were true and it was not true. This was weather. This was the convergence of a powerful storm and an unfortunate tide and a city built in a place the sea has never entirely relinquished. Dagon is patient. The patient do not need to send hurricanes. Dagon works through currents and time and the slow accumulation of his presence in waters tended faithfully over decades. Not through the blunt instrument of a catastrophic storm surge.
But I will not pretend I felt nothing when the water came through.
I have been pretending that for eighty-seven years and I am tired of it and I have local squid ink and pages enough to tell the truth, so there it is.
The community on Wickenden Street came through better than most of the waterfront neighbourhood, which was not a coincidence.
We knew the water was coming before anyone above the waterline did, by several hours, and we moved accordingly. The transformation that makes us inconvenient neighbours in calm weather makes us considerably more useful in a catastrophe. There are families in Fox Point whose grandparents were pulled from second floor windows in the hours of the surge by hands that were not quite the right shape for human hands, and who were told afterwards, when they asked, that it must have been a neighbour, and who accepted this explanation because the alternative required a category of thinking they were not prepared to do on the day in question.
We did not advertise what we did. We are not a people who advertise.
I will set it down here, in this document, for the community that reads it, because it should be known. In the hours of the 1938 hurricane, when Providence was underwater and the humans above the waterline were doing what humans do in catastrophes, which is to say some of them were helping and some of them were not and most of them were simply trying to survive, the people of the waterfront community went into the water and they helped. Not because anyone asked. Not because there was anything to be gained from it. Because the city had taken us in without knowing it was taking us in and that is a debt that accumulates interest and September of 1938 was a moment when some of that interest could be paid.
The unnamed woman from the Marsh family organised it. Of course she did. I assisted. We all assisted. And when the water receded and the city began its long accounting of what had been lost and what had been saved, the Wickenden Street community was simply not mentioned, because we were never mentioned, because that is how we survive, and the people whose grandparents were pulled from windows told the story for the rest of their lives as a mystery and a mercy and left it at that.
It was enough. It was, I think, one of the better things we have done in this city.
The city recovered, as cities do, slowly and with the particular stubbornness of a place that has been here since before the Revolution and intends to be here considerably after. The waterfront was rebuilt. The ships were removed from the streets. The Insurance maps were redrawn. The downtown that had been underwater in September was open for business by winter, not entirely and not without difficulty, but open, which is what Providence does when something tries to close it.
The water settled back into its channels and its banks and its established understanding with the city above it.
Or appeared to.
I need to tell you what came with the storm.
Not in it. Not as part of it, not as any expression of its energy or its violence. Behind it. In its wake. Moving through the changed and disturbed water of the aftermath the way a predator moves through the disruption left by something larger than itself, using the cover of the disturbance, taking advantage of the fact that everything in the water had been displaced and rearranged and was still finding its way back to where it belonged.
Something followed the hurricane into Narragansett Bay.
I felt it first in late October of 1938, perhaps five or six weeks after the storm, when the surge debris had settled and the fish were beginning to return to their usual channels and the general quality of the water was approaching something like normal. I was in the lower bay, further south than I usually went in those years, checking the state of the underwater geography after the surge had rearranged it, when the current changed in a way that had nothing to do with the tide or the season or any of the ordinary forces that change currents.
It had direction. That was the first thing I noticed. Not the diffuse, ambient quality of a current shaped by geography and weather, but a direction, a purposefulness, the quality of something moving rather than something moved. And underneath the direction, a pressure. Not the pressure of depth, which I am entirely accustomed to and which has no particular quality beyond the physical. A different kind of pressure. The kind that is not about water at all.
I went still in the way that things go still when they become aware of something considerably larger than themselves in the same water.
The something passed to the south of me, perhaps a quarter mile, perhaps less. It did not surface. It left no visible trace in the water above it. But the fish left the lower bay entirely within twenty-four hours of its passage, which is the clearest possible statement the natural world can make about the quality of something’s company, and I trusted the fish’s assessment considerably more than my own.
Lord Dagon’s waters run deep, and not everything in the deep is Dagon’s.
I said the old prayers that week, every day, with the particular urgency of someone who is not certain the prayers will be sufficient but has nothing better to hand. I felt them heard in the way I always feel such things, distantly and without the comfort of certainty. I tended the current. I kept Dagon’s presence in the river as strong as I could manage, which is what you do when something that is not Dagon’s is in the water nearby. You remind the water what it is and whose it is and you hope that is enough.
It appeared, eventually, to be enough.
The thing moved on. Or settled somewhere below the range of my awareness. Or decided, for reasons I cannot know and did not ask, that the upper bay and the river were not what it had followed the hurricane to find. By December of 1938 the fish were back in the lower bay and the quality of the current had returned to something approaching normal and I allowed myself, cautiously and with reservations I have maintained ever since, to conclude that the immediate situation had resolved.
I have been less certain about the long term situation for eighty-seven years.
I have been thinking about that autumn more than usual recently. The current has had a quality to it since last autumn that I last felt in the weeks after the hurricane, when the water was still wrong and the thing was still moving through it, and I find I do not enjoy the comparison.
Something came up from the deep that was not one of us.
I do not know what it was. I am not certain it had a category.
Whatever it was, it moved on, or appeared to. I have told myself for eighty-seven years that it was passing through. That it found nothing here worth staying for. That Dagon’s presence in the river was sufficient to discourage whatever interest it had in these waters.
I am less certain of that now than I was then.
– S.Z., Providence, May 2025
