Word: allenated
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hurricane that would more than solve his cub reporter's problem arrived without prehistory: no forecast, no cute nickname. Resurrecting names and places from old clippings, conducting new interviews with survivors, Allen has, in effect, retracked the storm. There is the occasionally odd and saving incident. In New Jersey, 60 colonies of beavers manned their dams in Palisades Park and, in the process of saving themselves, kept down the flooding of 42,000 acres of nearby land and highways. But mostly Allen's story is a sequence of unremitting havoc...
Houses Afloat. Allen accumulates the details until his account reads like one repeating tableau of purple waves, elms falling, houses collapsing, corpses in shoes and socks-all other clothes having literally blown off. Only the very sturdy and the very fragile seemed to survive, like the Sandwich glass and blue china dug up later on one New England beach...
What of the human beings, shaken, dwarfed, rendered insultingly insignificant? Allen ends his story in New Bedford, speaking for himself. Owning neither a raincoat nor a hat, he fared forth bareheaded on his first and most unforgettable assignment just in time to see a wall of water rolling toward the harbor...
Boats were aground, houses were afloat -it was the primal nightmare or the ultimate disaster movie. "The mind, in art and in life, feels a basic need for some kind of arrangement," another survivor summed up for Allen. "Suddenly deprived of this, it finds itself facing a horror and a loss that is far deeper than any mere physical distress of the moment...
After it was all over, the young reporter got a raise (from $20 to $25 a week), married and settled down. Paradoxically, somewhere in the eye of the storm the college boy had found what he was looking for. Now, four decades later, in his scrupulous recording of chaos, Allen has at last connected literature and life, honoring the grim truths of dislocation on which all order must be predicated...