We are about to enter “northeaster season,” that time of year when ocean storms strafe our exposed peninsula, often rearranging its topography. They also tend to rearrange our image of ourselves, from that of beleaguered residents enduring the onslaught of summer tourists to that of “rugged New Englanders,” enduring our character-building climate of winter gales and occasional blizzards.
But this is an image we borrow, not own, and the whole idea that we live in some region of extreme weather won’t bear close examination. In fact, if you really think about it, we live in one of the most benign and stable landscapes in the country.
Take those “fierce northeasters.” (and, by the way, the traditional pronunciation is “northeaster,” not “nor’easter, as popular belief has it – as opposed to “sou’wester,” which is the traditional pronunciation). Anyhow, northeasters may take down a few trees and cause us to lose power for a day or two, but they hardly compare to a direct hit from a Category 4 hurricane, which we get maybe once in a generation, as opposed to the Gulf of Mexico and the Southeast coast, for whom devastating hurricanes are usually an annual event.
And what about floods? Well, unless your house sits on or above the beach, in the path of storm surges or severe erosion, we don’t really have “floods” here in the classic sense, in the way, say, West Virginia experienced flooding last spring. Unless you have actually witnessed it, you have no idea what destruction one of those mountain river floods can wreak – rivers that can rise thirty feet overnight, flood waters with currents so strong they can tumble house-size boulders down the river bed like bowling balls.
And when was the last time we had a wildfire that remotely compares in size to those that increasingly devastate large areas of the Mountain west? We tend to use words like “fragile” and “unstable” and “ever-shifting” to refer to the character of our land, and indeed the prospect of the ocean breaking through a barrier beach, or toppling a beach house from its perch above the shore or sand dunes gradually burying a dune shack support such a view. On the other hand, we have nothing comparable to the earthquakes and massive mudslides experienced on a regular basis on the West Coast. New England sits in the middle of the North Atlantic Plate, one of the most geologically stable regions in the world. The last major earthquake to get anywhere near Cape Cod occurred on November 18, 1775, near Cape Ann. Not exactly “earthquake country.”
Finally, we have nothing that remotely compares to the destruction wrought by the tornados that each spring rip across vast areas of the Mid-West and the South. Hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes may cause more damage and loss of life, but for sheer terror, in the intensity of its force and the total unpredictability of its course, nothing rivals a tornado.
And I won’t even talk about volcanoes along the Pacific Rim, or “Ring of Fire.”
So the next time we get a northeaster and you’re tempted to think of yourself as a “rugged New Englander,” braving the worst the elements can throw at you, you might do well to imitate the old Cape Codders, who, with typical New England understatement, used to refer to a northeast gale as - “a breeze.”
