Wolcott Gibbs: “We waited for a hurricane that never came”
Last week, on the thin barrier of sand that separates Great South Bay from the Atlantic, we waited for the hurricane that never came. Sitting out the watch with us was our cat, who had ridden out the last one, just a year ago, all alone in an empty house facing directly on the uproarious sea. She had had quite a time. We were in town with our wife that day and the children and their nurse had been moved inland by the Coast Guard late in the afternoon, when the waves began to chew away the dunes. They looked for the cat, but she had found a private hideaway and they had to leave without her. In the night, after the dunes went, the sea tore off the porch, carried it out a little way, and then tossed it back, driving a hole through the side of the house big enough to take a freight car. We have no idea what awful sounds went with this crazy game. It was clear and calm in the morning, when the nurse and the children went back to see what was left. They found the beach lying fl at from the edge of the sea right through the hole in the side of the house. They didn’t find the cat at first, but there in the sand, in what had been a bedroom on the ground floor, were her prints, and they told a strange and terrible story. At some time during the night, it seemed, she had raced desperately back and forth in her perilous shelter, and she had not been alone, for mixed with her prints, overlapping and crossing them, were those of an enormous gull. What was the purpose or design of this mad dance in the dark, who was chasing whom, who ate or was eaten, wasn’t clear from the tangled evidence, but it seemed obvious that a tragedy had taken place. She was quite an old cat, far past her normal span, and they decided that she had met a fearful but somehow glorious end. In a way, perhaps, they were a little let down when she turned up at noon from some secret recess, damp and blinking in the sun, and with a certain wildness in her eye, but whole and, as cats go, reasonably sane. The mysteries of the night—what she felt when the wind screamed and the house split and the man- high waves came riding in, where her weird visitor came from and what they did, and in the end what happened to him— remained her private property, hers and God’s. Last week, when the storm from the south threatened again, we considered the cat and took comfort from her on the ground that no experience that lay in store for us could possibly compare with hers, what ever it had been. Her own expression, as she looked out on the furious and mounting sea, was supercilious and even bored.
-Wolcott Gibbs, first published 4/29/45 in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town. From Backward Ran Sentences (Bloomsbury, October 2011).
