In the early evening of June 21, 1972, our TWA jumbo jet began its troubled approach to Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, D.C. I was seated in an aisle seat, next to my bride, Sophia, whom I had married three days earlier in Salonika, Greece. We were both euphorically in love but, at the same time, apprehensive about our future together. Understandably since Sophia had accepted my proposal of marriage after a courtship of only two weeks. We barely knew one another. Moreover, she had never visited the U.S. and would now be thousands of miles away from her family. The plane lurched and swayed causing nervous passengers to call out. Could our three-day-old marriage already be looking at an expiration date?
We were at an altitude of about two thousand feet. I glanced out the window to my left and observed a strange sight: towering pillars of dark cloud were hovering very close to the ground and were rapidly advancing in the direction of the airport, keeping pace with the progress of the airplane. These columns of cloud seemed ominous, almost apocalyptic. They were unlike any clouds I had ever seen or imagined.
Soon it started to rain, high-velocity volleys of raindrops, battering the fuselage and lashing at our airplane’s window. Then came an announcement from the captain, informing the passengers that “we are encountering turbulence” (um, yes, we had noticed that) and, a minute later, in a nonchalant voice, that “we are approaching the airport just ahead of a hurricane” (newsworthy, since there had been no prior announcement concerning a hurricane.) But not to worry, the captain added, all was well with the airplane and “we should be on the ground shortly.” The captain spoke with a senior pilot’s usual voice of authority and sang froid, but I wished that I had heard “will” instead of “should” in the captain’s reference to landing the airplane.
The jumbo jet continued its wobbly descent and, after a couple of hops on the runway, was skillfully guided by the captain to a safe landing. As it so happened, this airplane would be the last to land at Dulles Airport that day. (Later flights would be diverted westward.) Sophia was now in a country totally strange to her, and she had never before experienced a hurricane, but she was about to become well acquainted with Hurricane Agnes — as this superstorm would eventually be named — before she could make the acquaintance of a single human being in the U.S.
After clearing Customs and retrieving our luggage, we were met by my friends Phil and Anne, who had offered to pick us up and take us to our temporary residence in the District of Columbia. Phil and Anne greeted Sophia with warm hugs and kisses. So now Sophia was acquainted with two Americans, Phil and Anne, who were to become loyal, lifelong friends. The trip from the airport to D.C. proved to be memorable. Phil was driving a Ford convertible, the cloth roof of which could not fully withstand the fury of Agnes. The Ford’s windshield wipers proved to be almost useless against the deluge, visibility ahead was limited to a few feet, and, though Phil drove no faster than twenty mph the whole way, the trip was nerve-wracking. Water dripped into the interior of the convertible from several leaks in the canopy, so everyone got damp – both from rainwater and nervous sweat — by the time we arrived at our destination, my parents’ vacant house in suburban D.C. Phil assisted me in lugging our sodden suitcases into the house, then bade us a hasty goodbye before rejoining Anne and driving away.
My parents’ house would be our temporary home until I could manage to furnish my downtown apartment with a bed big enough for two, in place of the single bed that had served me well until now. (My failure to purchase a marital bed in advance of our wedding no doubt made a lamentable impression on my bride.) After Sophia and I entered the house, I checked the basement and found it flooded with about four inches of water. So, the newlywed couple celebrated Sophia’s arrival in the U.S. by bailing out the basement for the next two hours.
It was close to midnight by the time we quit our work in the basement. By then we were both hungry. Since the house had been vacated by my parents two weeks earlier, the fridge was empty. I looked in the pantry for something to eat and chose a box of Ritz crackers and a jar of Skippy peanut butter. Sophia looked askance at the peanut-buttered cracker that I offered her. In her home country, Greece, she had never tasted or even laid eyes on such a confection. I urged her to take a bite, which she did, but her immediate response was, “This is disgusting! How can you eat this stuff?” She settled for a few crackers sans peanut butter and a glass of water. Both of us were jet-lagged and eager to flop into bed, but sleep eluded us in the face of the incessantly roaring wind and the torrents of rain that were buffeting the house on all sides.
Sophia was plainly frightened by Agnes. No one had told her that she might be greeted by a hurricane upon her arrival in the U.S. Truth be told, I was frightened, too, since I had never experienced a hurricane either. Really, who had ever heard of a hurricane making landfall so early in the year, in June, much less coming through Washington, D.C.? To make matters worse, a lot of people in Greece had warned Sophia of the prevalence of violent crime in the U.S., especially in urban areas such as Washington, D.C., and that, too, was very much on her mind.
I knew that we couldn’t spend the night just sitting in the kitchen, we needed to sleep – and, just maybe, if we did succeed in falling asleep, we would awake in the morning to find that Agnes had left town. So, I locked the front door of the house, making use of both the deadbolt lock and the chain lock, and we went upstairs to the master bedroom.
We had been in bed only a few minutes, struggling to fall asleep, when we heard a loud, rattling noise arising from downstairs. Someone – a burglar, Sophia was sure — was at the front door, trying to force his entry into the house. I was alarmed and Sophia was positively petrified. I cautiously descended the stairs and turned on the light in the foyer, hoping that the intruder would take flight when he realized that the house was occupied. But the intruder wasn’t discouraged. He had already managed to unlock the deadbolt lock, so that the door was now a few inches ajar, and he continued banging on the door, evidently in an effort to break the chain lock. I hurried into the living room and grabbed an iron poker that was by the fireplace, and then, brandishing the poker, I timidly approached the front door.
“Who’s there?” I shouted, trying to sound bold, fearless.
“It’s Marty! Let me in, I can’t open the door!”
Marty, I knew, was my parents’ next-door neighbor. We had met on numerous occasions over the years. I released the chain lock, and a spectral figure resembling the Ancient Mariner appeared in the doorway, shod in galoshes and clad in a yellow mackintosh and matching sou’wester rainhat, all of which were shedding multiple rivulets of water. Marty came into the house – almost blown in by the raging wind – and stood in the foyer, while a puddle of water collected at his feet.
“My god, Marty,” I exclaimed, “what on earth are you doing out on a night like this?!”
“Well, your parents are away for the month – I guess you know that, since they went to your wedding – and I told them I’d look after the house. No one told me you’d be home. Have you checked the basement?”
“Yeah, it’s flooded. But we bailed out a lot of the water when we arrived, and we’ll do the rest tomorrow.”
Just then, Sophia, who had remained in bed with the bedcovers pulled over her head — resigned to a violent death at the hands of some crazed burglar breaking into the house — suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs. She had overheard a bit of our conversation and decided that she could risk venturing as far as the stairway. I encouraged her to come down and meet the intruder.
“Sophia,” I called to her, “come and say hello to a neighbor, a friend of our family.” She came halfway down the stairway and stopped, staring in disbelief at the clownishly dressed figure who stood in the foyer below. I could only empathize with her: Sophia had arrived in the United States about six hours ago, had already endured the traumas of a hurricane, crackers smeared with peanut butter and a burglar trying to break into the house — and now, after midnight, why on earth was she being invited to chat with a neighbor who was dressed in a weird, yellow costume standing in a puddle of water?
“Marty, meet Sophia. We got married in Greece three days ago, and we arrived at my parents’ house just this evening, right in the midst of the storm. That’s why you found the chain lock on the door.”
Sophia descended to the foyer and tentatively shook hands with Marty. “I’m so glad to meet you,” she offered. Marty replied in kind and expressed the hope that she and he would be meeting again, in drier conditions, in the near future. Before taking his leave and plunging once again into the storm that was howling outside, Marty urged me to call should I discover any major problem in the house. I let him out and again locked the front door, again using both locks – and Sophia took the poker from my hand and leaned it against the door jamb. “Just in case,” she said, with a wry smile. Then we both went upstairs to the bedroom and, with hardly any delay, fell into a deep sleep.
So, after a mere six hours in this country, Sophia had become acquainted with Agnes and with Skippy and had found neither to her liking. But she did like Phil and Anne, and Marty, too. And in the years to come, she would even learn to love Skippy, happily adopting peanut butter on toast as her breakfast staple. Our marriage, despite its very inauspicious beginning, has survived a few more hurricanes and has flourished for more than fifty years. Even so, Sophia has stubbornly insisted, all these years, on placing an iron poker close by the front door every night before she retires to bed.
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Elliot Wilner is a retired neurologist, living in Bethesda, MD. In retirement, he has enjoyed — with his wife’s indulgence — a long-deferred dalliance with creative writing. Several of his stories, essays and poems have appeared in literary magazines and other periodicals.
© 2025, Elliot Wilner
Halfway Down the Stairs 