Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White Read Free Book Online Page A

the control knob was probably buried behind about eighteen small, hard-to-handle items of food left over from previous meals and saved against a rainy day like this one.
    I switched to Rockland, 1450 on my dial. The town manager of Camden was speaking. He said preparations had been made for mass feeding, and that you could get fed at either the Grange Hall or the Congregational Parish House, and you were invited to bring your own food. A bulletin said the core of the storm would pass to the east of Rhode Island. From Bangor, the news was that the Gene Autry show would continue as planned. The Boston Fire Commissioner advised me to keep calm and follow instructions, and I thought again about my obstinacy in the matter of the refrigerator. In Nantucket, winds were seventy-seven miles per hour.
    At noon, I took a short vacation from the radio and looked out at the familiar scene, which, because it bore so little relation to the radio scene, assumed a sort of unreality. It was thirty hours or more since I’d slipped into a hurricane mood, and I could feel the telling effects of such sustained emotional living. I went outdoors. A light breeze was blowing from the southeast. Rain fell in a drizzle. The pasture pond was unruffled but had the prickly surface caused by raindrops, and it seemed bereft without geese. The sky was a gloomy gray. Two rosebushes bowed courteously to each other on the terrace. I got a berry basket and walked out to the pullet yard, where I collected a few damp eggs. The pullets stood about in beachcombing attitudes, their feathers in disorder. As I walked back to the house, I measured with my eye the point on the roof where the biggest balm-of-Gilead tree would strike when it toppled over. I made a mental note to evacuate my people from front rooms if the wind should shift into the west, but was doubtful as to my chances of evacuating my wife from any room whatsoever, as she doesn’t readily abandon well-loved posts, especially if they are furnished with traditional objects that she admires and approves of, and she is inclined to adopt a stiff-backed attitude about any change of location based on my calculations. Furthermore, she can present an overwhelming array of evidence in support of her position.
    Back indoors, the storm, from which I had enjoyed momentary relief by taking a stroll in it, was on me again in full force—wild murmurings of advance information, almost impossible to make head or tail of. Edna’s eye was at sea, and so was I. The eye was in New Jersey. No, it was in Long Island. No, it was not going to hit western Long Island or central Massachusetts. It was going to follow a path between Buzzards Bay and Nantucket. (This called for an atlas, which I produced.) All of New England will get the weaker part of the storm, but the Maine coast, “down Bar Harbor way,” can be hit hard by Edna late this afternoon. I bridled at being described as “down Bar Harbor way.”
    Not only were the movements of the storm hard to follow but the voices were beginning to show the punchy condition of the poor, overworked fellows who had been blowing into their microphones at seventy miles per hour for so many hours. “Everything,” cried one fellow, “is pretty well battered down in Westerly.” I presumed he meant “battened down,” but there was no real way of knowing. Another man, in an exhausted state, told how, in the previous hurricane, the streets of Providence had been “unindated.” I started thinking in terms of unindated streets, of cities pretty well battered down. The wind now began to strengthen. The barometer on my dining-room wall was falling. From Rockland I got the “Top of the Farm News”: 850,000 bales of cotton for August; a new variety of alfalfa that will stand up to stem nematode and bacterial wilt; a new tomato powder—mix it with water and you get tomato juice, only it’s not on the market yet. Low tide will