This happened on the evening of our last rain storm, or what the old Cape Codders called a “ tempest . ” I’ve always liked that word, “tempest.” It goes back to Elizabethan times. Shakespeare used it as the title of his last play , in which the spirit Ariel says, “We are such things as dreams are made on. ” Its root comes from tempus , the Lati n word for time, and it connotes a great disturbance, one in which the doors between the present and the past might be suddenly flu ng open.