“We saw the rain first from aloft. It looked absolutely black, as if a sudden darkness had set in in that part of the sky. The blackness seemed to hang straight down like a thick dark curtain from a solid altostratus deck at about fifteen thousand feet. How much further above this layer the build-up extended, I do not know. I kept thinking, ‘We’re not actually going into that.’ We did though, and somehow with all the rush, we didn’t have so much time to worry and become frightened as we expected. The rain was really terrific. It leaked in the nose and ran in a flood down the crawlway. The nose usually leaks and a soaking on a trip is not at all unusual, but this was different. I have never seen the water pour in and spurt so before. Where the plexiglass meets the floor section there was a regular fountain about six inches high that flooded the whole area. The noise was terrific. It pounded and crushed against the top and sides till we thought it would all collapse in upon us. I didn’t notice any particular temperature change in the heavy rain though the pilots afterward all reported enormous cooling in the engines. Writing was almost impossible. The forms and charts on the table were like so much papier-mâché. There was no place that we could put them out of the water’s way. “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.