(from The Drool Room)

The storm is definitely coming and as the hurricane races up the Atlantic seaboard, we race to Dudley’s and Hudson Park. The beers are frigid cold because the ice has been packed in for the expected loss of power and we suck green bottles empty as we push through the wind to the sea wall, already awash with each wave that tops the surge that rides above the incoming tide. The five most adventurous of us surf this suddenly violent water, wrapped in the shiny sea-mammal black of wet suits, as we cheer and drink and dance in the bright yellow of foul weather gear.

An hour passes and the hurricane multiplies itself. Our voices are lost in the wind’s howl; our footing is lost in the deep green surf that now ebbs only between waists and knees. We cannot both drink and grasp the railings, so we retreat to Dudley’s. There the water swirls ankle high and the Molsons and Mooseheads go rapidly. We place bets on the high water mark, noting, before we are reduced to the light of oil lamps, the carved marks of storms past.

At one in the morning, the water covers our knees, at three it has drained back through the floor. A crust of salt is everywhere. We drift back to the seawall in the now dull rain, drunk on alcohol and Mother Nature.

In the park a fifty-foot sailing yacht, its stern inscribed with the name of a port twenty miles away, lies against a tree, impossibly far above the waters. We climb aboard, climb the rigging, and wait for the sun to arrive beneath growling clouds.

Ira Socol