Hurricane Memories and Thoughts

Some of my very first memories are of Hurricane Carol, one of the first named hurricanes. The storm swept into New Bedford MA when I was about to turn four years old in the fall of 1954. New Bedford is on the ocean-it had once been a whaling center. The house I lived in with my parents and two younger brothers was on a dead end street that ended at the water.  My brother Joe was 2 and a half and my brother Mike was a year old. I can remember watching geysers of water shoot straight up in the air in the backyard as the wind started to blow. My mother showed concern at this phenomenon, and must have called my father at his restaurant. He came and took us and a neighbor lady (who came running out of her house with a towel around her head, fresh out of the bath) to the restaurant for the night because it was on higher ground.  I remember lots of rain and the tree limbs blowing and peeling off the trees as we rode through the darkness. This must have been particularly frightening for my parents. There was no TV in the house at that time, and even if there had been, no cable broadcasts or satellite weather data collecting and reporting with details and instructions..  They may have had some warnings on the radio based on reports from ships at sea, but that is all. No one had any real knowledge of the severity of what was to come, or the duration of the storm. I remember little of that night-just flashes of the restaurant with no customers-just people taking shelter, and a most vivid memory of my father leaving us. He had forgotten to lock the house doors in our hasty evacuation, and returned to do so in case of looters. I remember being scared when he left, and even more scared when he returned, for his clothing was soaking wet up to his waist. He had had to wade through deep water to access the doors.

When the storm passed, my father managed to get a pump from somewhere to pump out the basement of our house. It was full of water, and there were fish swimming around in it. Many of my parents mementos were lost in that flooding, but at least we did not lose our home. Many, many people did, and I have flashes of memories of housing sites with pipes sticking out of the ground where houses had once stood. There is another memory of big boats resting on bridges. And then the memories are gone.

Since that experience, I have witnessed storms here in New England, and worried about relatives in Florida as terrible storms strafed that state with all kinds of destruction and loss of life.

This hurricane season is  different from others as  I remember the places Evan and I visited on our cruise this past spring. Haiti, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands have all been affected this hurricane season, and these names are no longer associated with flat shapes on a map. ( No, I have not forgotten about the impact on the US this year.)  These names conjure up memories of experiences of real places and people with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings and emotions. I wonder how these places are today, and how are the people that took us on tours, served us a drink, drove a bus we were on,  answered a question, smiled at us or poled a raft for us down the Great River in Jamaica. I hope the flora survives to bloom another day, and fauna continues to thrive. I wonder what it looks like in these places now, and would I recognize them. I hope they are ok. Most of all I wonder at the power of nature and the systems present on this planet, named Earth , that is our Home.

Map of Labadee, Haiti-an area owned by Royal Caribbean for the enjoyment of its guests.

The ship we cruised on . In this shot it is anchored off the coast of Haiti.

We took this shot as we sat on the bamboo raft Michael poled down the Great River in Jamaica.

Beautiful flowered archway in the Cayman Islands.

A rare blue iguana in the Cayman Islands-the only place they exist except for a few in zoos in other places in the world.

Stingray City-a sand bar off the coast of The Cayman Islands. We jumped in the water with these creatures. It was very strange, but invigorating to be in the water with them. There were a lot of them, and they would swim so closely to us, sliding right  up against our legs and trunks. I hope all these creatures, and flowers and residents are OK. The Cayman Islands have very little ground above sea level, and no barriers from an angry stormy sea.

So we watch the weather channel and hope the Hanna, Ike and Josephine and their relatives, take their fury out over the  Ocean rather than the Land. We watch-and wait, because even  though there are many people studying and predicting and many computers modeling, we are still at these powerful natural manifestations' mercies.