Jed Wolf

When Hurricane Esther formed off Africa’s western Sahara in September 1961, I was already intimate with turbulence. The newly launched TIROS satellite tracked her 150-mph winds as she teased the Eastern Seaboard – much like my mother’s moods swept through our Stamford, Connecticut household, unpredictable and fierce.

Our stretch of privileged coastline, that gilded nipple of Connecticut where Greenwich tries to ignore Stamford, was built on glacier-dropped boulders and old money. Between the bus-sized rocks, pollution festered. We’d find baby birds without upper beaks, casualties of DDT. Rabies ran rampant from overcrowding, and it wasn’t unusual for an armed father to drop an “overly friendly” raccoon before a clambake.

My sister Lisa and I watched our status-conscious parents attempt to stake their claim among yacht clubs and garden parties in both towns. Our father tried to tame my mother’s discontent with baubles and trinkets, but couldn’t erase her feral past or the memories of the brother who’d molested her. Her own kids, like the smell of garbage, could send her into a rage. Lisa and I would rather plunge neck-deep through mushy ice in mid-winter than let our parents know what we were up to.

Hurricane flooding exacerbated everything. Kid’s were enlisted to deal with bloated animal corpses snagged in hedges with other garbage, too numerous for pet cemeteries We’d drag them to local beaches to decompose until cleansing full moon tides washed them away. Inundated swimming pools turned opaque green, concealing eels and sand sharks just in time for Halloween. Teachers couldn’t domesticate us, and classmates from higher ground treated us like we ere feral. We hated watching marshes disappear and poured sand at night into bulldozers’ gas tanks while attending private schools.

At Jones Beach, I struggled to shore to escape a hairy man exposing himself between waves but could tell no one, learning to ignore moments of violation like everyone around me. When we crossed the Atlantic on the S.S. France, I climbed an upper deck rail and contemplated jumping. I released my grip on high-speed boats, fished alone on rough water in tiny dinghies, tempting fate while my sister pulled out her hair and starved herself into submission.

The babysitter who asked us to undress her while our parents were out knew we’d never tell. Just as we never told about the dancing school where white-gloved girls refused to touch my bitten-raw fingers, or the boys’ school showers where those who refused to strip were forcibly exposed. “Boys will be boys,” they said, while bullying was condoned and tears marked me for life.

One summer in Maine, a matriarch made us prove we could swim by jumping off a boat in forty-five-degree shark-infested water. My simmering resentments were the only warmth keeping me from drowning. Later, trapped for three weeks on sailboats in the Virgin Islands, I clung terrified in the cabin while fathers slammed us through forty-knot winds, watching through the portholes as us children snorkeled between shreds of flushed toilet paper.

The McDonoughs’ Nantucket summer home offered brief respite. Sean, thirteen like Lisa, caught my attention despite his freckles and kinky red hair. His mother who hadn’t not shamed me for spilling Dr. Pepper, showed the first real kindness I’d encountered. I swept floors in exchange for Fantas, learning to trade small domestications for larger freedoms.

During endless rainy day games of Mille Bornes, I studied Sean’s pudgy frame in modest trunks, grateful he wasn’t one of the buff teenage showoffs from boy’s school I simultaneously hated, admired, and didn’t dare glance at in locker rooms. The game’s objective – to exhaust other players while never revealing your own collapse – felt familiar after six years at boys’ school, where I’d learned to hide everything.

According to the McDonoughs, Hurricane Esther’s high surf had breached the dunes five years earlier, gouging a channel that transformed a peninsula into an island. The claw-shaped formation curved into the ocean like a miniature Cape Cod, and the rabbits had been “doing it ever since,” as one of the twins giggled. “If they eat all the vegetation, the island will wash away,” Sean added soberly. When his mother mentioned they were going there tomorrow to “help” relocate the rabbits, I found myself oddly eager to participate, despite Lisa’s eye-rolling at my obvious flirtation with Sean.

The next morning, about a hundred townspeople gathered at the village dock. An assemblage of Skiffs, Whalers, and Dories waited beneath leaden clouds that loomed in an ominous circular formation. There wasn’t room in Sean and Lisa’s boat, which was unnerving until they took off without waving, but I was used to acting stoic. Mrs. McDonough’s musty foul weather gear draped over me like a tent as we bounded across the relatively flat harbor toward the narrows.

The chubby guy steering our boat couldn’t resist ranting about whirlpools and great white sharks as churning currents yanked us port and starboard. I distracted myself by recalling how sinistra and destra meant left and right in Italian, longing for the red wine our grandparents had used to anesthetize us on a bumpy flight to Rome. When I asked a stern-faced woman about the traps we’d be using, she dismissed me with my mother’s familiar “they’re there” tone.

After anchoring our vessels to the beach, a man with a megaphone announced we’d be forming a human chain. The mere thought of holding hands with strangers made me clench my fists – I hadn’t held anyone’s hand except being practically handcuffed to my grandmother throughout Europe to keep me from gypsies and perverts. Before I could fake a medical excuse, I was yanked between a meek, childless couple who looked as uncomfortable as I felt.

We tried spreading across the island, but a high dune separated our groups. Marching over damp mounds and heavily browsed plants, we heard warnings not to damage the remaining vegetation. Though the view from the dune’s crest was magnificent – a pastel desert of beiges and sage greens piercing the water on either side, vanishing into distant fog and the lines of people behind us looked like paper angels foreboding was everywhere.

Just as I caught myself in a moment of forced reverie, a horsefly struck my jaw with stunning force. As I swatted wildly, something wolf-like leaped from the sand in front of me. Then another, and another – each rabbit the size of a bobcat, one grazing my ankle as it shot past. These were nothing like Tuck’s pet bunny Coniglio that we’d set free in his tangled garden.

Blood trickled down my leg, but I waved away concerned hands. “Leave me alone,” I barked, preferring as usual to resist others and continue on my own. The rabbits scooted ahead as we reached the island’s midpoint. Unable to maintain formation across the widest part, our ill-conceived brigade continued in groups. People sounded ridiculous yelling “Go, yah and move” like cowboys. Though some escaped, most rabbits dashed ahead of our cacophony. When they defiantly faced us, we were told to stand our ground and clap. The sudden bursts were terrifying, but clapping worked to flush all but the tiny ones, who crouched in depressions, seeming to thank me for not stomping them like others did, “putting them out of their misery,” we were told.

The fog thickened as we approached the island’s end, where waves crashed in from three sides. The bobbing shapes in the surf weren’t seals but rabbits, swimming desperately among corpses. Someone screamed “they’re drowning!” while others stood frozen. A teenage boy stripped off his shoes and shirt, diving into waves that smashed from every direction. Using one arm to tread water, he grabbed a live rabbit by its ears and fought his way back.

The rabbit’s scream – that horrific, baby-like crying meant to shock predators into releasing them – pierced the air as its claws raked the boy’s chest. But he didn’t let go. When he finally sat in the sand holding the soaked animal, looking like Mary cradling Jesus in Michelangelo’s Pieta he moaned, “He died of fright,” rocking the lifeless bundle. “He died of fright.”

On the ferry back to Hyannis, Lisa offered me a drag of her cigarette. “Do you believe this shit?” she asked, and for once, I felt almost privileged to be who we were – wild things who understood what it meant to resist capture at any cost.

In 2014, they finally eliminated all rabbits from Esther Island using dogs