Labor Day reprise: Three years ago on the night the big storm hit East Hampton

The nightmarish tail end of Ida

I first published this on September 3, 2021.

What did we do before cellphones and minute by minute radar updates?  All those red and yellow and green amoeba-like squiggles scooting across the screen…look!  Another band of squalls!  They’re headed right at us!

Squalls?  What are we, sailors on the high seas?

I can’t decide if it’s better or worse to know what’s coming and when.  Rain is rain.  Wind is wind.  When it arrives, you’ll see it, and you’ll hear it.  We live in a small artist’s studio, 600 square feet on the floor, but with a tall 30-foot ceiling under steeply slanted roofs and gigantic, 20-foot tall wall-size windows.  Getting hit with a storm like last night’s is like being inside a snare drum with Keith Moon banging paradiddle rim-shots on your head.  The sound is deafening, the curtains of rain cascading down the windows made the place feel like being inside Niagara Falls.

That’s the way it sounded when I awoke suddenly at 3:00 a.m. and put on my slippers and staggered down the stairs from the sleeping loft.  I could see the rain slamming sideways into the sliding glass doors.  Outside those doors is a patio at the lowest point on the entire property, surrounded by a gently sloping grassy yard shaped like a funnel with the patio at its tip. 

I turned on the outside light.  Rivers of water were coursing down the grass.  The patio was already under a couple inches of water.  The sump pump I had bought at Lowes about six months ago was sitting out there like a lonely little black statue waiting to be turned on.

I grabbed a rain jacket and slipped my bare feet into a pair of L.L. Bean duck-waders and slid open the glass door.  The rain and wind almost knocked me down. 

“Tracy!  I’m going outside to plug in the sump pump!”

“Be careful, Lucian!  Take a flashlight!”

I waded over to the sump pump and found the plug and tried inserting it in the outdoor receptacle.  It was one of those damn GFCI outlets and the circuit breaker had been thrown by all the water!  The sump pump wouldn’t turn on!

I rushed back into the studio and plugged the thing into a wall socket and a stream of water shot out the top of the pump!  Yaaay!  It was pumping!

But the pump just continued shooting a spray of water out some kind of safety valve.  The hose had to be kinked somewhere along its 100-foot length. The rain was hitting me sideways.  I couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of me as I traced the hose to the kink and undid it.  Behind me, I heard the pump kick in and the hose stiffened in my hand.  I figured I’d better follow it to the end to make sure it was pumping. 

The hose snaked across the grass and over a low retaining wall and down into a depression where I figured it was a good idea to pump all the water from the patio.  A hundred feet in the dark in a gale with wind trying to push you over just a few days after you recovered from COVID…I wouldn’t wish it on fucking Texas Attorney General Paxton.

I finally found the end of the hose and thankfully, it was spewing water in a two-foot geyser.  I fought my way back to the studio to find Tracy wildly throwing towels onto the floor to stop a pool of water pouring under another door from reaching our living room rug.  It was coming in fast, and it was finding its way.

“I better go get the wet vac from the other studio!” I yelled at her over the din from the rain and wind.  It was so loud, I had to yell at her inside the studio. 

Into the face of the raging storm I trudged, across a broad expanse of grass to the other studio, got the wet vac, and back I struggled, dragging it behind me.  Inside, I plugged the thing in and madly began vacuuming up the leak coming through the other door.  It took about 3 minutes to fill the six-gallon cannister.  I switched it off and removed the top and struggled over to the sink and dumped out the water we had sucked up. It was black and the consistency of cake icing.  About a pound of dog hair immediately clogged the drain.  I quickly unclogged the drain and handed the vac over to Tracy and she started vacuuming up the leak across the floor.  It was like trying to chase liquid smoke.  The water flowed everywhere at once.  Tracy was scooting the vacuum nozzle across the floor expertly, the leak disappearing and then reappearing immediately behind her. We had to keep the water from reaching the large rug that covered half the studio floor. If that rubber mat and woolen rug got wet, we’d be drying out the damn thing for weeks and the whole studio would smell like wet dog.

I headed back into the maw of the storm outside.  It hadn’t let up.  Even pumping 25 gallons a minute, the sump pump was struggling to keep up.  The water was rising at the base of the sliding glass doors.  If the fucking rain didn’t let up soon, the pump would be overwhelmed and water would lap against the glass door and start coming under the crack.  I traced the hose along its hundred feet back to the nozzle.  Still spewing.  Leaning into the wind, I fought my way back to patio.

Inside, Tracy was pursuing the leak through flotillas of Ruby’s dog hair.  Thankfully, the studio has concrete floors, so the wet vac was working perfectly.  Then the thing started coughing and spewing a stream of dirty water out the top.  I shut it off and struggled over to the sink to dump it again.

I dumped water and cleaned out the drain from two more six-gallon cannisters. Outside, the rain was finally letting up. We no longer had to scream at each other to be heard.  I checked the wall clock.  Three hours had disappeared, and it was light outside.  I had been sucking on my rescue inhaler like it was a baby’s binky.  Tracy’s face was pouring sweat, her house slippers were soaked, her night-shirt clung to her body like a second skin.  Suddenly it occurred to me that we had been working through that storm for three hours and had hardly passed two sentences between us. 

Tracy vacuumed up the last of the leak.  The rug was saved.  I went outside to check the sump pump.  It was coughing out the last of the standing water on the patio.  The trees still leaned over from the wind, but the rain was just pelting straight down, not gushing sideways through the air.

We got married three weeks ago.  We endured breakthrough COVID together.  We survived a glancing blow from one hurricane and beat back the ravages of Ida.

We collapsed next to one another on the (dry) couch that sat on the (dry) rug and sat there silently listening to the rain hitting the studio windows with a soft tattoo rather than Keith Moon’s banging rim shots.  We were a team, and more in love than ever.  The night was ours.