HURRICANE
* ( a passage from my fictionalized memoir, House without Doors, told in the voice of the 12 year old MIra - see https://www.ritamendesflohr.com/words#/house-without-doors)
There are times when the Waaigat is flat like a mirror not a ripple can be seen. That is the famous quiet-before-the-storm. There is no wind at all. You can see all the buildings around the Waaigat clearly reflected in the silvery water.
Papi does not need the Waaigat to tell him that a storm is brewing. He has his barometers and his wind meters and can predict the coming of any storm long before they announce it on the radio. Friends and relatives often call him to find out what his barometer is saying, whenever the skies look terribly dark and menacing. In the hurricane season Papi follows the movements of all the hurricanes in the whole Caribbean to see if they will come our way. He says that only the ones that start near Trinidad, or further south, will have a chance of reaching us. Most of the time they lose their strength by the time they come anywhere near our island, and all we get is a thunderstorm. Or they veer north, just as they are about to hit us, and go on to cause havoc along the Gulf of Mexico.
Papi always gets very excited whenever a hurricane is approaching. I am never sure if he really wants it to come, or if he is afraid it actually will. Perhaps we never think of hurricanes as causing disaster because we know that they will not really reach the island. Still Papi remembers the hurricane in his youth that brought enormous waves, causing a flood over the low lying parts of town. Many of the people who lived in little shacks by the sea were made homeless. I am sure he does not wish that to happen again.
Then, when I had just started second grade, came the hurricane called Hazel. Papi was the first to know that this time it was for real. Eventually the radio too began to announce hurricane warnings. People were told to tape up all glass windows so that if they cracked, they would not shatter into little pieces. We had to stay quietly inside the house and turn the lights low. We had to have supplies of drinking water and of sand to put out fires.
I remembered an old photograph of the Hansenstraat all flooded over, like the canals in Amsterdam that flow between the rows of townhouses. That was only after a rainstorm, not even a hurricane, when the drains got clogged. But no, this was not just a rainstorm, this was a hurricane and it was coming full force towards our little island.
It made me think of the stories my parents told about the time of the war when they had to blacken the windows at night so that the German submarines would not know there was an island lying in the dark sea, an island with a large harbor and an important oil refinery. Perhaps if we kept really quiet and did not budge, the hurricane would not notice us and pass high above our heads, leaving us unharmed.
I was scared. Hurricane Hazel seemed to be aiming right at us in full force. It would blow off our roof and the rain would fall in, washing away our furniture and everything we own. The whole island would be flooded and we'd have to climb on top of the house and wait there to be rescued by a helicopter, while the waves were roaring below us, leaping up high and threatening to pull us down. I had seen pictures of the floods in Holland when the dikes burst and the entire province of Zeeland was underwater. How frightening it was to have a safe and happy home one day, and then the next it would be washed away in the flood.
photo by my grandfather Benjamin Gomes Casseres - from the nineteen forties
But Papi was not afraid of the hurricane. He was the last one to leave town, after taping the showcase windows of his store, like all the other storeowners, and pulling down the metal shutters over the entrance. The streets in town were totally deserted, he said. Everyone was home, waiting for the hurricane with their bottles of water and their bags of sand.
The Waaigat became clear like a mirror. There was no wind at all. Then the skies turned black as night. Papi was home now, all excited, watching from his tower window. The rain started to come down with a vengeance, beating furiously on the roof of our house.
That was the beginning of the Flood. I prayed that our house would become an Ark, and the rising waters would lift it up and we would float away and be saved, like Noah and his family.
We have seen torrential rains before - they usually last for a few minutes, sometimes a couple of hours. This time they went on forever. The thunder and lightning were fierce. Papi had taught us to count the seconds between when you see the lightning and when you finally hear the thunder, to figure out how far away the storm was. But now there was no time to count - you could not tell which blast of thunder belonged to which lightning flash.
Our roof did not blow away. The Hansenstraat did not flood over. The hurricane had veered north, just as it approached the island - all we got was just the tail end of it.
No, nothing terrible ever happens on the island.
****
Notes:
photograph by my grandfather, Benjamin Gomes Casseres - taken around the nineteen forties.