Chapter 9: Tropical Storm

https://medcitynews.com/2013/11/hard-rain-surge-meaningful-use-audits-eligible-hospitals/

     "It's going to be a big one, Hank," exclaims his father as the wind picks up, whisking early October's browning leaves from the branches of the pear trees they're pruning. "See those big white birds?"

"Oh dad," Henry groans, dismissing the admonition even as he sees dark clouds gathering in the east, "it's black birds that bring trouble, remember?"

"Nothing superstitious about gulls coming up the Raritan when a storm's brewing in the bay," Henry's father patiently explains, laying down the ladder and gathering up his saws. "Let's pack it up and call it a day."

__________

     Mr. Hanken was right. A hurricane that devastated Bermuda a week before had deflected up the mid-Atlantic before tracking back toward the east coast. Although these tropical storms didn't receive official names from the U.S. Weather Bureau until 1953, people in central New Jersey knew that one would whip up the Raritan Bay every ten years or so. Henry had been a three-year-old and had no memory of the last one that had stripped the orchard on September 16, 1903, destroying the harvest and flooding downtown Bound Brook with torrential rains. 
    Since then the population of the heretofore sleepy village had more than doubled as bottomland and marshes were filled in by mostly Italian and Polish families with the ways and means to settle there. Their ways were work at the woolen mill and temporary housing at an Immigration House built by the LaFollettes. Their means was a new trolley line from New Brunswick to the Somerset County seat at Somerville. By 1918, nearly six thousand men, women, and children were packed into the square mile of tenable land, and nearly all of their houses were adjacent to one brook or another.

__________

     "Lord have mercy, what's that roaring sound?" Molly shouts over the howling wind early the next morning, leaning into Henry as they trudge down the trolley tracks toward the Talmadge Avenue bridge.

"It's just the Middlebrook running down the mountain," he soothes, switching sides to place his good hand around the shoulder of her long Macintosh, his worn wool aquascutum barely repelling the rain beating at their backs. "We'll make it to the point and back before it gets up to the bridge."

"Hurry!" she urges, shaking loose and running across the bridge while trying not to look at the muddy torrent. "We've got to get there before they're washed away."

     "Holy Joe, it's about to overflow," he exclaims as they reach the Calco dye pool. "You go on, I'll shore it up."

She splashes down the path beside the rushing Raritan as he starts plopping mud onto the leaking dam, leaning over to rinse his hands in the cyan water after each scoop.

     "That should do it," he smiles as the rain slows, hands on hips surveying the patched dam as Molly hurries back to join him. "Did you get my lucky things?"

"Dagonnit!" she curses, her normally ruddy complexion gone white. "The river's done washed away your cure."

Their trudge home is accompanied by a single caw repeated every half minute as a solitary big black bird glistening in the breakthrough rays of the eye of the storm flaps from sycamore to sycamore all the way back to Bound Brook.