In 2017, when Hurricane Irma hit the Caribbean, Honey and I were on vacation, nearly 4000 miles away on the American West Coast. For two days we had no news of my parents, cousins, aunt, uncle, or any of our friends. My sister was also in the US and by unspoken agreement, we refrained from calling each other, knowing that if we heard the anxiety and fear in each other’s voices, we’d lose our shit. The news reports and images coming out during and after the storm were horrifying and we mentally prepared for the worst. When my mom was finally able to get a call through, she said, “Everyone is ok, but it’s like the apocalypse here.” I called my sister and we sobbed with relief.
In the meantime, flights home were canceled indefinitely. The St Maarten airport sustained immense damage and was requisitioned for military and evacuation operations. Through a connection with a local airline owner, I managed to get us routed through Puerto Rico and onto a waitlist for a medical resupply flight one week after the storm. At the time, Honey ran a car dealership and repair shop and I worked for a major shipping company in the Caribbean. We didn’t have the option of sitting out while the place we called home struggled to get back on its feet. We were lucky to get seats and make it back to the island at all. When we landed, an old coworker told me we shouldn’t have come back, that there wasn’t going to be enough food for everyone. People were shaken and very much afraid.
That month, every single one of the shipping ports in the Caribbean got hit by either Hurricane Irma, or Hurricane Maria. Moving cargo and keeping a schedule became extremely complicated. That first week my office miraculously had power and internet and I was able to work from there. The second week, we lost internet so I moved my enormous computer to Honey’s office and set up temporary camp on a corner of his desk. No one had cell phone service so I plastered flyers at the internet hubs the island had set up at the airport and gas stations to let our customers know where to find me. Every night my extended family cooked a big meal together to keep food waste down and reduce everyone’s use of propane. The area where my parents live didn’t get city water back for 3 weeks.
In comparison to other islands, that was nothing. In St Thomas, power and water were out in some parts of the island for 6 months. In Puerto Rico, thousands of people died from an inability to access medication or lack of power to run medical devices. A hurricane itself is a terrible experience, but it’s in the aftermath that things get really complicated. I consider myself lucky that I got to see our family in the flesh almost right after Irma, to hear their stories of the storm, to see for myself that though the experience marked them, they assimilated it in their own ways and are more or less alright. I got to be part of rebuilding and experienced the solidarity that arises when a community comes together over a crisis. At such a distance, my sister didn’t get any of that, and her sense of powerlessness was a trauma in its own right.
When Hurricane Ian started forming in the gulf a few weeks ago, my sister was on the island with my parents, and I was in Cape Coral helping her partner with childcare for their two boys. Every day we discussed scenarios. Would she be able to fly back as scheduled? Would we have to evacuate? Where would we go with the kids and the dog if it came to that? What should we do to secure their belongings in our absence? As Ian strengthened and slowed down, it became clear that I was going to get stuck in Cape Coral and that my sister would make it back to Miami as scheduled. She landed in the late afternoon and raced across Florida, making it home within hours of the hurricane hitting the Gulf coast. As a mother, she couldn’t stay away while her kids were in such a situation, but she also couldn’t bear the thought of witnessing another major hurricane from afar, while the people she loved most were in the midst of it.
After several debates, my brother-in-law and I had decided not to evacuate. We’d checked with the city and were not in the flood zone. The house is concrete and is surrounded by fresh water canals that the city had been draining in preparation, so we boarded the windows and put up the hurricane shutters. Growing up with hurricanes makes certain things second nature. Empty the fridge as much as possible. Check. Buy candles, flashlights, batteries, propane, bottled water, paper plates, and disposable cutlery. Check. Fill storage bins with water for toilets/showers/dishes—my sister is on a well, and without power we wouldn’t have running water. Clean up the yard from any potential projectiles. Gas up the cars. Charge all of the electronic devices, find the emergency radio and battery pack. Have a go bag ready and a back up shelter plan in case something breaks through a window, or the roof gets damaged. Have games and non-electronic activities for the kids and explain to them what is going on. It helps to give them tools they can use to track the progression of the storm (this website has great colorful weather visuals with different layers they can play with).
To our collective relief, my sister made it home by 9pm the night Ian hit, and we all settled in to wait, posting regular updates and answering questions in our big family group chat. In my memories of hurricanes spent in our childhood home, three things always stand out: the noise (the house is made of wood with zero sound insulation), the endless ringing out of wet towels wedged into window frames to catch the water coming in through the cracks, and the oppressive darkness. When my dad built the addition to our house, he installed a front door with a tiny glass window on the lee side. When the entire house is boarded up, and the darkness lit only by candles or oil wick lamps (old-school style and less costly than battery operated lights—this was pre-LEDs), that window offered the only visual of what was going on around us and we frequently wedged ourselves around it eager to get a glimpse of the world outside.
When my sister and her partner moved into their new house in 2021, they installed a category 4 rated hurricane glass front door, through which we were able to see their friends’ and neighbors’ houses down the street. It was a novel experience for us to be able to watch what was happening without standing on tip-toes and peering out of a tiny window. The first and worst part of the storm hit us on the opposite side of the house, where the hurricane shutters protected the sliding glass doors to the lanai. When my brother-in-law installed the shutters, one piece of the hardware wouldn’t attach properly to the wall, and that weakness gave way as the storm progressed, ripping off two of the panels, which thankfully remained attached to a third panel and stayed trapped on the lanai. The hardware is always the weakest part of the shutters, and hardware failures were one of the reasons Irma caused so much damage in the islands.
Ian’s eye passed about 50 miles north of us but we got the benefit of the winds lessening as they changed direction. We were able to quickly unhook the downed hurricane shutters from the last remaining bolt and bring them inside to keep them from becoming projectiles. We then taped X’s across the glass doors, drew the curtains and wedged a huge dresser in front just in case. In truth, the change of direction couldn’t have come at a better time, which was another thing I heard repeated over and over after Irma. As the day wore on, we still had decent internet service and were able to reassure our families that we were safe and no longer in any real danger.
In the morning, we all woke early and walked around the neighborhood assessing the damage. We hadn’t been able to see images or videos of the storm as it was progressing, but we knew our neighborhood had been spared the worst. Some people lost fences and shingles, but since there weren’t many large trees, we didn’t get a lot of debris, which is the main cause of hurricane damage, aside from flooding. We had tried to get a close friend of my sister’s to bring her daughter over and stay with us, but she hadn’t responded to our messages and as soon as we had completed our walk , my sister took off on a reconnaissance mission. Our friend and her daughter had stayed in their studio, but had neither the means nor the experience to adequately prepare for the storm and its aftermath. Thanks to our preparations, we were able to absorb another adult and child into the household without too much complication and the kids were thrilled to have new playmates.
This is the part where you realize you’re either actually prepared to weather the storm, or you need to reevaluate your emergency plans. Having children whose schools remain closed for an undetermined amount of time adds extra complications. In my opinion, we had done pretty well and the kids got along uncharacteristically well (this is often the case in a crisis). The only thing we could not locate was the extra battery pack for charging phones. In retrospect, we could also have used some kind of solar charging device. We could have filled more bins with water, but we also could have hauled buckets of the neighbor’s pool water for toilets, which would have kept things smelling fresher, plus there’s always the yard for peeing (at least for the boys).
One neighbor and friend had a generator and kindly offered showers to our household the day after the storm. He even made us coffee the next day since we didn’t have an efficient way to boil water. We learned you can bake thawed French pastries on a pizza stone in a gas grill (it would be a crime to waste such things simply because your freezer’s out). It’s a great way to cook just about any frozen industrial food, as long as you lay down the parchment paper first. This all can seem like an adventure if you’re a kid, and the memories my nephews and our friend’s daughter will have of these days will shape them in some way, just as my memories of hurricanes and their aftermath shaped me.
In the larger reality, some things remain very serious and dire. Many people lost their lives in the storm, and some died after. The official death count will be inaccurate. You will never hear of the bodies washed up onshore, or tangled in the mangroves. The news will never report the particular smell of mold and rancid seawater wafting from the flooded houses or piles of debris lining the streets, waiting for the city’s dump trucks, already overwhelmed with the need to dispose of the contents of so many houses.
Many more people lost their homes and their belongings, all of the collected treasures that hold memories and the stories of their lives. A few years ago, I remember reading the account of a person who’d lost his home in a California fire. He talked about how you always think you have time to save things, or that it won’t be you, that by some mysterious magic you’ll escape unscathed. That the wild forces of reckoning will bypass your doorstep, at least this once. This was true for me and my sister and her family in this storm, but we carry with us the absolute knowledge that such magic and protection sometimes runs out and it’s best to make peace with the life you’ve had up til then, and the possibility that you may never had that again.
Once the storm was over and the yard cleared of debris, I knew I had to find a way to get home. The airports on the Gulf Coast were shut down and the gas stations in the city didn’t have power or generators to run their pumps, so people were getting cranky and anxious about having enough gas to move around. My sister’s friend was scheduled to drive her ex’s car to Ft Lauderdale that weekend to pick him up from the airport and the car was supposed to have a full tank of gas. I asked Honey to book me a flight, any flight, and after a whirlwind of packing, we set off.
There were a few things I hadn’t reckoned with because I had never had to deal with them on the island:
With no power, there are no traffic lights and every intersection becomes a stop. This makes for very slow going.
When people do not feel safe, or when they can’t meet their needs in their usual ways, they get very short-tempered.
Uncertainty makes it very difficult to think straight and some amazing things happen when you follow your gut.
When we picked up the car, it had less than a quarter tank of gas and said we could drive about 60 miles. We would never make it to the other side of Florida. The thought of being two women stranded with a child and a cat in a post cat 4 hurricane zone was terrifying. We knew getting gas in Cape Coral would be a bust (my sister sat for 3 hours in line with no success) so we tried a station in Ft Myers that had a short line. When people realized the pumps had no power, things started to get very tense. I maneuvered out of the parking lot and called Honey so he could scout gas stations within a 50-mile radius (our cells couldn’t get the internet to work), figuring that they might have power and lower demand. He sent me an address and we started following the directions, navigating the congested roads and anxious drivers. Everything flowed more smoothly once we hit I-70S and as we approached the airport I reasoned that fueling the gas stations in that area would be a strategic priority. Twenty minutes and some very courteous station attendants later, we had a full tank and were on our way. This felt like more of a miracle than I can truly say.
On the other side of Florida, everything was normal. Traffic lights had power. Drivers were no more or less aggressive than any other day. Gas stations could power their pumps and the trees were undamaged. The contrast felt surreal. During our drive over, my flight had been canceled for the 3rd time as Ian made its way up the Atlantic coast and we’d gotten word that my sister and her partner were leaving the next day to stay with my uncle until their power came back on. I thought they might get to South Carolina before I made it home myself. When I finally got a call back from the airline I pleaded with them to route me somewhere that wasn’t in Ian’s path, even if it meant a longer day of travel. I was tired and worn out and desperate to get home. They gave me a connection through Houston and I finally made it back to Indiana the next afternoon.
My sister’s friend wasn’t so lucky. There was no escape plan for her. Though she and her daughter (and their cat, Prince, who I’m currently fostering) were unharmed, they no longer have a place to live. They are temporarily staying with my sister and her family who returned to Cape Coral last week when the power came back on in their neighborhood. This is only a short-term solution, of course. This friend is working around the clock to save for a security deposit and first month’s rent, while still caring for her young daughter full time. In an effort to help her find a new place to live, my sister launched a fundraiser yesterday.
If you feel called to give and to share this campaign with your circle of people, I would be deeply grateful for your kindness and generosity.