Seven Villages, Janet Joakim

I grew up in the Minot section of Scituate; our house was across the street from the Minot Fire Station and three blocks from Minot Beach. I was a teenager in 1978.

Back then there were very few people living in my immediate neighborhood year-round. We lived on a road that ran perpendicular to Surfside Road. Surfside is a street that ran along a strip of land between Minot Beach and Musquashicut Pond. The end of Surfside Rd. was the beginning of a long stretch of barrier beach that was like small mountains of smooth beach rocks leading to Egypt Beach and Mann Hill Beach.

Before sunset that February evening we had watched the waves doing that dramatic dance against the seawalls creating huge walls of surf, some higher than the rooftops. Watching from a safe distance standing on the street behind the houses along the beach was simply awesome.
There were areas where the waves came over the seawall or the riprap and carried those smooth rounded stones we all knew so well.

The night of the storm we lost power, and I remember we had expected that. We could hear the wind and the waves down the street. We had been through many storms over the years, and were accustomed to losing power and waiting to be reconnected because we were in an area that was rather isolated in the winter.
We ended up with a houseful of people from the area who had had some level of invasion from the storm. The atmosphere became party-like with my father playing the piano and everyone singing, candles and kerosene lamps lighting each room.

We were not prepared for what we awoke to the next morning.

Our house was one of the first built in the area in the early 1700’s; it had been constructed on the highest point in the neighborhood. Aside from the losing our electricity during the storm, we had no damage from wind, and not a drop of water in our basement.

Outside, however, our neighborhood was devastated. The pond across the street had overflowed its banks and flooded all of the houses to the west, away from the ocean.

Musquashicut pond was brackish pond that was fed in a few places from the ocean and emptied slowly through a controlled system like a herring run that ran towards the north river in the marshes of north Scituate. That day it was immediately obvious that there must have been a major break somewhere along the Surfside Road or the barrier beach.

As we soon learned, the ocean broke through all along Surfside road and along the rocky barrier beach, taking houses and cars and boats along with it.

The first indication of the ocean’s powerful devastation was an oceanfront house that sat at end our street. It was a large stucco house set back from the ocean a little further than most. The ocean had come right through that house washing sand and rocks through the first floor onto the lawn and down our street.

Surfside road to the south had small cottages to large homes, all very close together, built along a seawall on the beachside, and on the other side of the road houses of all sizes sat on lower land - on the pond.

Many of those oceanside houses had suffered and broken as the powerful waves slammed over and through them washing the debris into the road. Rocks and sand were mixed with pieces of furniture, splintered wood, shingles, and bits and pieces of people’s lives all over yards, driveways and road. Houses sat ragged and wrecked, some literally in pieces.

Our neighborhood was decimated.

There are so many vivid memories of the days that followed that storm. Like when we got our phones back and I called my best friend who was a few miles inland and learned that she had loads of snow. We had no snow. Just rocks and sand. We were so focused on the devastation of the ocean that it was weeks before I heard about the people stuck in cars on the highway and that other parts of the state were living with record levels of snow.

My father told me just the other day that the only reason he hadn’t been stuck on the highway coming home from the Boston area was that he was lucky enough to fall in line behind a snow plow in his VW Beatle.

In our neighborhood we were focused on how to live with the damage left behind by a sea more powerful than we had ever known… I have so many memories of walking up and down the beach roads in the area and seeing all of those houses that had virtually been torn to shreds.

One memory that was surreal even at the time, was when a few days after the storm a couple of us walked down Surfside road and sort of joined a group of people that were in the road, picking through the rocks and sand and retrieving anything whole or in pieces that might be important to someone.

It was a bright sunny day. We were finding things like silverware and knick-knacks. I can remember holding up a piece of silverware and one neighbor saying it wasn’t his while another yelled, “That’s mine! I think I’m getting close to a service for four!”

My neighborhood changed after that. Some houses were quickly repaired; others were knocked down and rebuilt, while still others sat damaged for years.

The only house that I remember that was never rebuilt was what we, as kids, referred to as “the nun’s summer house.” A huge house set back on Mann Hill Beach that was used as some sort of summer retreat for the Catholic church. Nothing was ever built there again.

I don’t think there was one neighborhood along the coast of Scituate that wasn’t devastated during that powerful storm.

I grew up within the sound of that rolling surf and most of the time it brought comfort. But just a few times over those years I saw first-hand how that powerful ocean could turn on us. That storm was the worst we ever experienced.

janet joakim