inside my head - 1989; slammed by hurricane Hugo in Puerto Rico
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It was September of 1989 in San Juan, Puerto Rico and I was enjoying my first day out after being flat on my back with dengue fever for 3 weeks. My girlfriend Sandra and I were enjoying a comedy by a local drama group when her pager started vibrating. Puzzled, she looked at me and gestured to come with her. Exiting the theater she told me that the message had been from the FBI, telling her to secure her Bureau car.
Sandra, a native Puerto Rican and in her 30’s at the time had been an agent since shortly after graduating from college. In the era before the www information age, she was about as close as an inside source as you could get. A few phone calls with a mobile phone the size of a brick (and weighing just as much) sent us scurrying to prepare for the possible onslaught of the first major hurricane to hit PR in decades.
When you are on an island and a category 5 hurricane is coming, you have very few options. You can’t leave, so you buy water, you buy food and necessities, you put all the furniture on the first floor of the house up on plastic milk crates as high as you can…. and you wait.
You are comforted by the fact that the house is, in fact, constructed of solid concrete reinforced with rebar throughout. You are, in fact living in a nearly indestructible edifice. While you’re waiting and thinking about the really solid house you are in (just a few blocks from the beach) , it suddenly occurs to you that even with the milk crates if the neighborhood floods too much, you’re still in a shitload of trouble because all the houses in PR have rejas (wroght iron security bars) over the outside of the windows and the ONLY way out is through one of the 3 padlocked downstairs wrought iron doors.
You are glad you are a strong swimmer, but you are wondering in a detached way if in the aftermath it would be possible to hold your breath long enough to unlock the doors. You think about the Poseidon movie and wonder briefly if you should unlock just one lock downstairs, but that thought is very brief since crime is rampant here and the police corrupt and if it does get really bad there will be looting and THOSE people will definitely have guns. Sandra has all her guns upstairs, they are ready too, but hopefully unnecessary. You are glad again that the house is made of thick concrete and has bars over all the windows. You are a pacifist at heart but know perfectly well how to handle a gun and would shoot someone if you had to but hope you never have to make that decision. You are exhausted from the weeks of dengue fever and preparing the house for the hurricane and you want nothing more than to sleep.
Soon, it is dark. Suddenly the wind whips up and the lights go out. They will stay out for the greater part of two months, but you don’t know that yet. Sandra, your little dynamo hard ass FBI agent girlfriend is most defiantly NOT relaxed. She is saying “coño, coño, coño”. You take a flashlight and a futon and Sandra and make a bed on the floor in the interior upstairs hallway. There are no windows there. It is safe. Leaving Sandra to fall asleep, you exit the hallway.
You are not worried; you are in fact, exhilarated. You wonder, not for the first time if that means that you are missing some fear factor that makes other people much more sensible than you. But you don’t worry about that either because that’s how you are.
Back to the storm; the winds sound awesome outside but it is too dark to see anything. You hear an occasional “BOOM!” like a cannonball hitting the back of the house and you know that the nearly ripe and very large coconuts from the giant palm tree taller than the top floor are barraging the house. Worried that the glass from the windows facing that side might shatter, you pull the blinds down. You sit and listen for a long time.
Finally succumbing to exhaustion, you go out in the hall and collapse next to Sandra, She is out like…….. well, like all the lights.
You wake. Sandra is still sleeping. You venture out of the hallway again. The storm is still raging but it is light. You go to the windows and see that they are not broken. The coconuts were too big to fit through the rejas. The wind is glorious in its violence. The palm trees are bent nearly horizontal under the onslaught of the gale and the pounding rain. You try the battery-powered radio, but all the stations are off the air. You are still exhilarated.
After a few hours, the wind winds down to nothing and the rain stops. The sun comes out. You and Sandra venture downstairs. You unlock the door and pick your way among the debris outside. You have no way to know if you are in the eye or if Hugo has passed.
You realize now that it was much more than coconuts hitting the house. At the back of the house is a road that leads directly to the beach and it has acted like a wind tunnel. There is a ten-foot high pile of trees and debris surrounding the downstairs floor. Some of the trees are huge, deposited in their entirety, roots still intact. You are once again glad you were in a concrete house. It is unscathed, but everything not firmly attached including the trees that used to make your yard a dark dense jungle, are gone. The few trees that are not gone look bizarre. Stripped of their leaves it looks like winter, which of course in Puerto Rico never happens. It is quiet. Too quiet. You hear no birds, no cars, nothing.
Your house miraculously is an island on an island. Most of the rest of the neighborhood is flooded from the storm surge. The north coast of Puerto Rico is now at your back fence being held at bay by a cinder block base that supports an ugly chain link fence. You and a couple of your neighbors are on a small hill you never noticed before and these houses are the select few not flooded.
Turning on the battery powered AM radio you find an English station that is broadcasting again. It is not the eye. Hugo is gone. Time to clean up.
In the days following, the news trickles in. During the day as well as at night, you hear gunshots. You hear that a family down the street was forced out of their house at gunpoint and stood there while the looters loaded up their truck and left. You are sad. You are a pacifist but the guns are ready and you and Sandra both know how to use them.
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