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It is about 10 o'clock. The last broadcast has put the storm off the lower Maryland coast. Minnie, my wife, and I decide to go to bed. We do not say much, but I know what she is thinking about. We have been through this before. Linda, eleven, and Freddie, seven, are already asleep, innocent of the storm and its possibilities.

In bed, I do not sleep. Minnie and the kids do, however. The boom and shudder are no lullaby for me. As the bed quivers, I think back. Will it be as bad as '50? An extra boom qets me out of bed. I go to the window and in the brightness of my neighbor's window lights, I can see the waves assaulting the sea wall 20 feet away. The wave hits and the crest bounces thirty feet in the air. The base of it sweeps back in a shallow trough to futilely oppose the onrush of its successor.

Water from the crests is slopping over onto the concrete walk that leads from the concrete patio at the top of the sea wall to the street. All this—a magnificent spectacle—if one were not emotionally involved.

The tide is moving onto its flood. I notice the ladder leading from the top of the wall ten feet down to the beach. I remember belatedly I have taken no extra precaution to secure it.

In bed, the storm of '50 possesses my thinking again. Will this one be as disastrous as that one? Eight thousand dollars damage in 24 hours! The sea wall, which I had thought impregnable, had … crumbled and cracked like an egg shell. Ten feet high, two feet thick at the top and four at the bottom, but no match for storming water. Porches torn off, cellar flooded, furnace ruined. Our first floor filled with muck and mud.

All that now replaced. To be ruined again? God forbid!

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