“We noticed the ocean particularly on the last day when the storm swept out to sea again off the Georgia coast. The day before on our way back to Morrison Field from Eglin where we rode out the blow, we flew low over the Everglades and saw roofless homes and millions of uprooted palmettos. The next day as we flew up the coast, we could see other remnants of the storm—huge pieces of timber, trees, roofs of outbuildings, and maybe even houses. The interphone was busy all the while as first one and then another of the crew saw something also afloat. As we got nearer the storm but still only in the scattered stratocumulus which is typical of almost any over-water flight, the rubbish seemed to disappear. Whether it was simply that the water itself was too rough for the timber to stand out or whether everything lay below the seething whiteness, I don’t know. On our first trip into a tropical storm, the navigator kept repeating over the interphone, ‘That water gives me the creeps.’ It did. I kept thinking about ditching in it and floundering around in a ‘Mae West’; I guess we all did. The waves were huge. Every now and then one would crest up and just as it was about to crash, the wind would grab hold of the foam and mist and crash it back into the sea. I took several pictures of the gradually heightening sea, though I doubt that its seething, alive look could be transposed to paper.
“We saw the storm hit the Carolina Cape. It was easy to see how trees in the Florida swamps without much root to grasp the earth were uprooted. Trees along the Carolina and Georgia coasts—big ones, taller than the houses in the vicinity—were bending before the blow the way wheat seems to ebb and flow in a summer’s breeze. The seas were very high and in occasional breaks in the lower clouds we could catch glimpses of yellowish breakers and a littered beach. It looked as if the rain and thrashing surf had churned up the bottom, and mud had mixed with the foamy water. The shore was littered with debris, big trees, and blackened seaweed, mostly. As a sort of aside, on the matter of stirring up the bottom, we found several conch shells and bits of coral on the beach after the storm that are not considered native in these parts.