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By Root 360 0

the little harbor of West Berlin, a mile to the east. The fishermen have been up since four, and have checked the weather, but on most days the satellites and the forecasters with their sophisticated models will tell them what is already apparent. On days when the air is too clear, the black spruces across the bay too visible, branch and twig too obvious, the air calm but the sea feverish with oily swells coming in from the southwest, the fishermen know there is "weather" coming, driven by a system that started, perhaps, at Hatteras and is even at very long distances making the sea shiver. A hundred miles to the east, on the Sable Bank, the swells are mounding up four hundred miles in front of the storm, and they already pound the south beach of Sable Island, making that midsea dune quiver like a jelly with the weight of water assaulting the sand.

In these parts, the northeasters are the worst. When the satellites tell them a nor'easter is coming, the fishermen will go out in their little boats and haul their traps and gear, and then go home, drinking coffee in the kitchen until it is gone.

December 2004. Such a gale has just come, and departed.

Two days ago there was no sign of it. It was one of those wonderful days in which no real wind blows, only a gentle sea breeze. The sea in front of our house was glittering in the early-winter sunshine. The harbor seals were cruising just off the rocks, their heads silver in the brightness, and the ducks that had escaped the fall-season hunters puttered about in the ripples; I could see mergansers and eiders and mallards, and an occasional loon. We had an early-season snowstorm, but it was rapidly melting in the sun and a perverse but heady smell of spring was in the air, bruised spruce and bayberry. The breeze was benign, the sun smelled of winter's end here at the beginning of winter, the chickadees flittered about, even the porcupine that waddled across the yard didn't seem so damned obnoxious. I figured that when the wind is friendly, anything is possible, and "personal" no longer translates as "malevolent." There was no sign whatever of "weather."

But then I checked the forecast. At once, the computer screen lit up with a red flag—a wind and blizzard warning had just been issued. A low-pressure system was lying over the Carolinas and was forecast to track northeast and "intensify dramatically"—a fraught phrase from a forecaster, that—before reaching the Gulf of Maine. We would get lots of snow and gusts of wind well into the hurricane range. The usually matter-of-fact prose of the forecasters referred to "damaging winds" and "whiteout conditions." We were warned to monitor updates and to stay off the roads when the storm came.

I lifted my eyes from the screen and looked out the window. The trees were barely moving and the bland sunshine gave nothing away. One of our cats strolled uncaring down the driveway. Gulls cruised overhead. Nothing outside indicated the anxiety to come. I got up to look at the barometer. The glass was steady. No change whatever. No sign that a roiling coil of supercharged air was churning into Pennsylvania, to be bent in its northerly course and steered our way.

But by the following dawn, sure enough, the fury was upon us. At the height of the gale I watched the spruces and firs from my office window. Their tips, often laden with cones, whipped violently about, and sometimes they broke, deadfall in the yard or the road, and would have to be cut up for firewood. The seas off our rocky beach were rearing up and hurling themselves on the shore with a thunderous roar. The swells were so high that they obscured the horizon before they broke—we figured later they must have been twenty-five or thirty feet high, tons of falling water that made the bedrock quiver under the onslaught. When the gale reached Force 10 and then, briefly, n, the pitch of the wind rose from a moan to a shriek that picked at the nerves; then I shut down the computer—we would almost certainly lose power anyway, out here in the woods—and closed the shutters, and waited. My wife, who