A Lovely Time of Year

Never in the memory of a living New Englander had there been such an Indian summer. Day after day, week after week, a warm haze hung over the states of the northeastern U.S. Maple and sumac painted the hills and shed bright, crackling drifts of leaves. Offshore, the sea was blue. Streams ran gently or dried up, and at dusk the smell of dust and wood smoke perfumed the air. No rainclouds obscured the sun or the bright autumn moon. Then, last week, nature exacted her tribute.

As winds sprang up along the tindery countryside, every chimney spark, every pile of smoldering leaves, every discarded cigarette seemed to explode into a forest fire. The New England coast was masked by towering plumes of yellow-white smoke. So were great areas of New York and New Jersey.

Fast as a Race Horse. The flames struck hardest at Bar Harbor, Me. (pop. 4,300), summer playground of the rich and famous on mountainous, timbered Mt. Desert (pronounced dessert) Island. All one day and all through one night, a great fire eccentrically marched and countermarched around the outskirts of the town, while hundreds of soldiers and townspeople fought to control it. In the afternoon, when the shifting wind began to blow a gale from the northwest, the fire crowned into the tops of trees and leaped forward "as fast as a race horse could run," blasting through wooded estates and touching off great houses along the shore.

It also closed the road which linked Bar Harbor with a bridge to the mainland. At nightfall, with the town all but cut off, with electricity gone and with thick, fire-reddened clouds of smoke whipping everywhere, 2,000 people--mostly women and children--gathered on the town pier. Fishing boats and Coast Guard vessels, some of which were forced to maneuver through the smoke with radar, began taking them aboard. Hundreds crossed to the mainland through heavy, gale-driven seas. Then Army bulldozers opened the road and automobiles began running the fiery gauntlet again.

Like a Butter Pat. By morning, when the danger began to abate, Bar Harbor was a ghost town, surrounded by hot and smoking ruins.

Blackened chimneys were all that remained of two resort hotels, the Belmont and the Malvern. The summer homes of Author Mary Roberts Rinehart, Conductor Walter Damrosch, the late Henry Morgenthau Sr. and scores of other wealthy people had burned as though they were built of butter pats and bacon rinds. U.S. cancer research had received a terrible blow. The red-brick Jackson Memorial Laboratory, with its irreplaceable records and 90,000 precious mice, which had been carefully inbred for generations to produce various manifestations of cancer, had been destroyed.

Maine endured other grievous losses. By week's end eight towns had been destroyed, 1,056 houses burned, 100,000 acres of woodland gutted, 13 people killed and 2,500 made homeless. Maine's fires--and hundreds of others scattered through New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York--still blazed and smoldered.

Nothing would end the danger but a soaking rain. But this week fire fighters, looking up through rifts in the smoke, could still see the clear blue sky of the finest Indian summer in history.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.