The great hurricane of 1938 is legendary in these parts, and everyone has heard tales of wind and wave savaging coastal New England.

But another drama played out that day, one less familiar than awe-inspiring floods, catastrophic property damage and heroic rescues.

In “Thirty-Eight: The Hurricane That Transformed New England,” Stephen Long reveals an aspect of the storm that’s seldom discussed: its impact on trees and forests.

In addition to claiming 600 lives and causing millions of dollars of damage, the hurricane blew down a staggering number of trees, estimated at 4 billion feet of timber.

How they were all removed is only part of the story. Long, the founder and former editor of Northern Woodlands magazine, takes a broader view, using the hurricane as a framework story to show how forests grow, thrive and change.

We learn about their evolution before the storm, what happened to them on Sept. 21, 1938, the herculean cleanup, and what toll the next big hurricane might take.

It’s a slow-motion drama that’s well-told and at times fascinating. But the author delves so deeply into the background that the hurricane is frequently an afterthought, lost among the trees, as it were.

This makes the book’s title misleading. It’s largely about forests, and mostly Vermont and New Hampshire forests at that. If you’re going to read just one book on the 1938 hurricane, this isn’t it.

But for those interested in deepening their understanding of that epic event and seeing it with fresh eyes, the book offers rewards.

A powerful anecdote relates how a 14-year-old boy was walking through the Vermont woods at the height of the storm when a falling pine tree missed him by 15 feet.

He crawled beneath it for safety, and within minutes, every tree in the forest came crashing down. With nothing left to land on him, he made his way home.

In between stories like this might be 30 pages on why white pines thrive in New England or how the maple sugar industry was changed by the storm.

The pace is leisurely, probably too much so at times. But it’s all delivered in a polished vernacular, and the author’s enthusiasm shines on every page.

He’s especially adept at dramatizing the process by which trees grow, compete for space and die, and how different species supplant each other as conditions change. Although this plays out in almost geologic time, Long compresses it into a compelling time-lapse video.

Course-changing disruptions are a normal part of a forest’s evolution, and they come in three flavors: fire, wind and human activity. Forest fires are rare in New England, and Thirty-Eight, as the author calls it, was one of only three monster hurricanes to hit since European settlement.

As for humans, they cleared vast swaths of New England land for farming in the 18th century, then abandoned much of it in the 19th. Old forests disappeared and later grew back with species that did better in open, sunlit conditions.

The process repeated on a smaller scale around the turn of the 20th century, the heyday of New England logging, when the quality of lumber was judged by its suitability for making pine boxes. These were used for pretty much everything in the days before cardboard.

The demand for lumber dried up in the Great Depression, and for a decade, portable sawmills sat idle where they had last been used as saplings sprang up around them.

They were still there in the fall of 1938, when New England suddenly found itself buried beneath millions of fallen trees that covered fields and blocked roads. The scope of the cleanup was fearsome, but there were factors that made it even worse.

For one thing, the chainsaw had not yet been invented. For another, there was growing anxiety that the wood might spark inextinguishable fires of biblical scale.

The bureaucratic machinery of the New Deal soon revved into action to confront the crisis. An army of workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration marched in to help the U.S. Forest Service reduce the fire hazard and reopen roads.

The sawmills were pressed back into service and produced a mountainous supply of logs and lumber that vastly exceeded demand.

Less than two months after the storm, a government agency was established to buy up salvaged timber from landowners. It was held until the price stabilized, then eased into the market.

Some of it went to post-hurricane reconstruction and some sank in ponds where it was being stored so it wouldn’t dry out. More than two thirds was bought by a building supply business that became a familiar name in New England: Grossman’s. The rest ended up as crating for military supplies during World War II.

That was the end of the cleanup, but what the storm did to forests endured in other ways. One of the most fascinating chapters follows the author in his quest to seek evidence of the hurricane on his own land, 75 years after the fact.

He finds a series of shallow pits next to small mounds. These mark where a long-gone tree was blown down, its root mass gouging out the pit, then decomposing into the mound as everything else disappeared. The relative positions of the two indicate which way the tree fell, and Long matches that with the direction of the wind in 1938.

Even now, the storm’s traces are there if you know how to find them. The great hurricane is still with us and probably always will be. Long has done us the favor of creating a new way to think about it.

“Thirty-Eight: The Hurricane That Transformed New England” by Stephen Long; Yale University Press; 251 pages