Published in the Gazette Feb. 6, 1976.

For the loneliness and unfocused anxiety, the smug indifference to the environment, the dreary boredom of life in the technological society, the sovereign cure is a well-organized New England storm.

Late in the night it came up from the south, shrieking in the pines and chimneys and ripping down television aerials and festoons of power lines, and by the time the lights went out at 9:40 a.m. or so the anemometer on the wall was clocking the wind at 62 knots.

About the loneliness of modern man:

At the door was quiet, unflappable Ed Tyra, a presence as calming in itself as your doctor’s. He was making the rounds of the houses he watches over in the dark of the year, and he’d heard a boat had been carried away and wondered whether it might be ours, and as long as he was going by he might use a cup of coffee. No, nothing awry with our boat except that she’d been tipped on her beam ends. She’d survive. Well, we were to let him know if help was needed. He left on the kitchen table a bag of smoked perch. The phone rang. A gallant little woman living alone up the road had bottled gas, if we cared to drop over for a hot lunch. People in town were thinking about us and asked us to remember we could room and board with them for the duration if we chose. Foster Silva, out on Chappaquiddick, said there’d be no immediate danger of the pipes freezing as long as we kept the fireplace blazing. “My friend,” he added. One was not alone.

There’s no adequate way to report generalized tumult except the way Ernie Pyle did, from the worm’s-eye view. One sees what one sees.

About floating anxiety, about existential angst:

Suddenly, in the bay in front of the house a raft of Christmas trees was floating past. They had to be the trees the fishermen had massed on the South Beach dunes in January as a levee against the encroaching sea. If they were being swept away, then so too must be the beach itself.

It was indeed. Past houses from whose roofs shingles were sailing in clouds like flights of grackles, from whose sides clapboards were being stripped and clattering end over end across lots, one went down to the Katama Road opening onto the beach where the colored umbrellas blossom under the August sun.

The sea had broken through at a point a little to the east, toward Wasque, of the road, and there in front of the gray condominiums the surf was surging across little Mattakesett Bay. Between one’s house and the maddened Atlantic Ocean was a diminishing spit of sand.

About Modern Man’s alienation from Nature, about irreverence for the environment:

In the afternoon, perhaps four or five hours after the lights had flickered and gone out, the temperature inside the house receded into the 40s, and the environment was transformed from an inert, passive sacrifice to mankind’s idiocies into a drunken avenger. Suddenly you were face to face with forces older than any living thing – the winds that howled along the earth before the continents were born, the seas that have drowned many an Atlantis, the cold that is Nature’s failproof population-control device, the always coming on of night.

Just as suddenly, you were the first man, huddling in his cave before the fire whose flickering on the walls was the only light to see by, once the daylight had faded out of the sky. You wondered how long the darkness would be. In the flues echoed the thunder of the encroaching surf. Not a thing you could do about it, except carry pailfuls of water up from the bay to flush the toilet.

About the unpopularity of technology:

There was a magical moment when, roasting potatoes in the coals of the fire and broiling meat over it, and heating water for tea on a can of jellied fuel, you wearied of pretending to be roughing it in a cabin deep in the woods of Maine or Minnesota. You yearned for the throb in the walls and baseboards of the oil furnace, the clatter of the water pump in the shed, the whisper of motors in freezer and refrigerator, the smell of stew in the oven.

There was a moment when you wondered what Pilgrims and Greek philosophers did once the sun went down. You hungered to read a book, any book. You’d have paid a modest fee for the luxury of curling up with a crossword puzzle. There was a moment when you appreciated the appalling fact that the quality of the life you lead dangles precariously on a strand of copper wire. Let a tree fall across that, let the wind worry it to the breaking point, and you are falling into the abyss. The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, they dangle in the freezing darkness at the end of a thread.

The power was restored at our end of the Island a little after six o’clock. Through the long day and on into the night brave men had struggled in the torturing wind to repair the wires. They had done their job, and I don’t suppose they would understand if I tried to say they’d proved the human race will prevail because men like them have earned it the right to prevail.

Now let’s run down to Katama and see whether the ocean has taken over Mattakesett for keeps. Things get lost in a well-organized storm. Things are gained, and the harder it is to say what they are, the more precious they may be.

William A. Caldwell, a lifelong newspaperman, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1971 for his column Simeon Stylites at The Record of Bergen County, N.J. He retired to the Vineyard with his wife Dorothy and wrote Reflections of That Man Friday, a column in the Gazette, from 1973 to 1986. A collection of the best of his columns, Reflections on Martha’s Vineyard, edited by Tom Dunlop, will be published by Vineyard Stories this summer.