Wild Ponies and Wild Weather WITH the Atlantic hurricane season about to begin, the trusted weather forecasters at Colorado State University are predicting 10 storms severe enough to earn proper names and four wind-whipped into the demonic rampage we call hurricanes, with two of them major hell-raisers. That's a relatively mild season, but if it's your house that is demolished, it's an active season for you. This year's roster of storm names - some of which will acquire the honorific "Hurricane" - includes Debby, Rafael, Alberto, Valerie and Helene. I'll never get used to land-scrubbing, wave-rearing, home-wrecking, cyclonic mayhem referred to by human names. It's too reminiscent of pilots" painting their girlfriends" names on warplanes, a fad especially popular during World War II, when R.A.F. Hawker Hurricane fighters ruled the Battle of Britain skies. I'm not sure why we choose to domesticate violence in this way - maybe it's a throwback to the ancient deities - but no one has invoked the paradox with more lyric poignancy than the poet Randall Jarrell, who wrote: "In bombers named for girls, we burned/The cities we had learned about in school." Because upstate New York doesn't reside in the hurricane belt, I probably won't have nightmares about the villainous Beryl or Nadine. But at least one morning every summer, I wake to torrential rain, a real toad-strangler pummeling the roof. When a hurricane thrashes the mid-Atlantic, my hilly town often reaps the fringe of the storm. The rain starts blowing sideways, and sometimes we see hail the size of purie marbles. That's when I know the Chesapeake Bay will be clobbered yet again, with wind and water overwhelming the strip of small fragile barrier islands that hug the coast. And that's when I worry about the wild ponies on Assateague Island. Like so many other horse girls, I grew up reading the "Misty of Chincoteague" books and longing for a petite tan-and-white pinto to ride in my own backyard. In "Stormy, Misty's Foal," a hurricane pounds the island. This isn't a normal northeaster, which ponies might use their wiles to outwit, but a colossus, vividly portrayed, with winds screeching and sharpening and lashing the shore. In the end many ponies die. But not Misty, thank heavens, and when her foal is born on the heels of the hurricane, they name it Stormy. Reading the book as a girl, I was scared for the wild ponies bolting in terror through the brambles and startled by the death toll. But I didn't know then that the book was based on a true event, the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962, one of the most destructive storms of the 20th century, which bore down on the East Coast for nearly three days, with massive waves that tore up the roads and trees, collapsed buildings and left downtown Chincoteague under six feet of water. One local resident recalled seeing waves shove the dunes right into the houses, filling them with sand. During that storm, the real Misty of the books survived only because her owners led her inside their house, which stood on higher ground. It took decades for the delicate coastal ecosystems to recover, the cities and towns to rebuild, and the wild ponies to regain their numbers. In one way the storm was lucky for the ponies. Assateague was being developed as an island resort, but after the roads and structures were washed away, developers abandoned the idea, and the island joined the National Park Service instead. Only the fittest and smartest ponies survived, and their genes live on in the current herd, which is vigorous, canny and well adapted to the rigors of a maritime landscape. A unique species of feral horse, a little stunted from dining on salt marsh grasses, rose hips, bayberry twigs, thorny greenbrier stems, poison ivy, seaweed and other forage, the ponies now roam two sides of one national preserve - the Maryland herd in the Assateague Island National Seashore, the Virginia herd in the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. Except for the Pony Penning festival, at the end of July, when the Virginia herd is made to swim to a nearby island, where the local volunteer Fire Department auctions some of them off, the ponies run free among the pines and scrub, in the company of deer, foxes and a colorful convergence of native and migrating birds. Migrating tourists add to the biomass in summer. HOW the ponies got there in the first place remains a mystery, although there are intriguing theories. Did pirates turn horses loose to graze while they were off looting and return to find they'd vanished into the dense thickets and woods? Did 17th-century growers, who imported European horses, decide to pasture them on the island to avoid taxes and discover that some wandered off to begin a herd? Did a Spanish galleon, bound for the English colonies, break up off the island, where local Indians came to their rescue, but the ponies ran free? Did a boatload of Spanish horses, blinded for work in the mines, sink off the coast, and the terrified horses, despite the raging storm and their blindness, somehow manage to swim to shore? No one knows. However they got here, the ponies" ancestors faced poor food, scorching summers and cold, damp winters, sandpaper winds and cyclical storms. In response they grew thick furry coats and learned a host of survival skills. None have died in a storm since the mayhem of Ash Wednesday 1962, when half the herd - about 50 horses - perished. Like many animals, wild ponies can sense a drop in barometric pressure. When a storm threatens, they know to seek shelter in hilly areas and huddle together with their rumps facing the oncoming wind. The island edges may erode in a storm, but their refuge probably won't sink into the sea. When Hurricane Irene struck last summer, all of the ponies survived. Anticipating heavy storm surges, their protectors provided hay, and the ponies retreated to the hills. But that doesn't mean the they won't be vulnerable to some future rogue storm. Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable. Even aided by hindcasts, as forecasters call reading the entrails of past hurricane seasons to predict the future, we really don't know what stew of storms the Atlantic will dish up, any more than we know the final scores of the Caribbean's coming cricket matches.