Hurricane Season: It ain't over until the windblown lady sighs

I’m originally from Florida. Born in Coral Gables, in 1953, I was raised in that nice town, Hialeah,  that features a famous racetrack and today is sort of Santeria Central for folks to cut up goats and have crazy voodoo ceremonies. Needless to say perhaps, but the price of real estate in Hialeah has gone down a bit. Last time I drove through there, I was afraid to stop and when I finally did pull up in front of my childhood home I didn’t dare roll down the window or unlock the doors.

The thought of leaving the car to go knock on the door of my old house and meet the current owners wasn’t quite as appealing as a private tete a tete with Charles Manson.

I digress. On September 11, 1960, just after school had started, Hurricane Donna roared through South Florida. A full on Category 4 storm. BAM! And that wasn’t Emeril Lagasses’ seasonings flying through the air, it was things like 2X4s with the killing power of a surface to air missile.

Donna was, at that time, the only hurrican of record to produce hurricane-force winds in Florida, the Mid-Atlantic states, and New England. Sombrero Key, Florida reported 128 mph sustained winds with gusts ro 150 mph. The storm surge was no slacker either.  The great wall of seawater rose up like an angry Mother Nature past 13 feet in the Florida Keys and 11 feet along the southwest coast of Florida. Depending on just where you were, the rainfall was measured from around 6 inches to over 12 inches and the landfall low pressure was 27.46 inches of mercury, making Donna (at that time) the fifth strongest hurrican of record to hit the United States.

Hurricane Donna was utimately responsible for 50 deaths in the United States.

But what I want to convey here, today, is how native Floridians prepared and coped with such a massive and dangerous beast of a storm. We went to the movies.

That’s right. Hey, our parents busied themselves screwing sheets of plywood over the windows of the house and our family business, and sent us kids to the movies to get us out from underfoot. That was the first time we’d ever been the only people in the theatre. Just before the movie ended, my dad came walking down the darkened aisle and said we had to leave “now.” We didn’t argue, but nobody who knew my Dad argued with him. This was a guy who never even raised his voice. His eyes always told you that you could be messing with seriously bigger trouble if you didn’t jump when he whispered. If my girlfriend, Rosemary, reads this ( she lives in Portland, Oregon now and I just saw her about 3 months ago) she would tell you that I understate the effect my Dad had on people.

Even still after we got home, the parents were still busy with preparations, so we got our skateboards and grabbed some pillowcases from Rosemary’s moms stash. They made most excellent sails for a kid on a skateboard.

Then the wind really started to pick up and here came the annoyed and tired parents looking for us, their voices unable to outscream the howls of natures’ blunt force trauma. Into our respective houses we went.

Believe it or not, television didn’t go 24 hours in those days. I don’t remember there being anything but a test pattern on the tube by this point. We listened to the progress of the storm on the radio. Ooooohh. We were in for it now. Great blasts of wind would almost seem to move the not yet darkened house. We still had electricity. But then, as my Dad allowed us all to peek out the front jalousie windows that were somewhat protected by the front porch, we could see the eerily colored explosions of electric transformers on the power poles around the neighborhood. The lights went out and there we sat huddled in the dark, listening to debris hit the roof and sides of the house.

At some point we had some sandwiches that my Mother had made earlier and I was told to go to my room and go to bed. I was a seriously passive little girl then. I’m the other way, more often than not, now. So off I went with a flashlight into my darkened bed which was just under a rather large window covered only by a closed awning. “Sleep? You people have got to be kidding!” We didn’t say bad words in those days. Gee, we didn’t even think them, so you’ll see my childhood reminescences are rather vanilla.

When that infamous eye of the storm came over, we all left the house to see what had happened so far. Houses were built much sturdier in those days. There were building codes that were actually followed, and not subject to the whim of graft and payoffs that created a lot of the grief following Hurricane Andrew in 1992. We had lost the TV antenna and a few of the white tiles off the roof. You could actually see blue sky. The wind had calmed. Dad looked worried, since this meant that the next act of the show might be worse.

But here was the bad news: our prized Key Lime tree had blown over with the roots torn brutally, like a virgins knickers, from the ground and just laid there pathetically. My Dad panicked. This was the living source of his daily tonic of Florida Tom Collins. Something had to done, now!

Dad looked frantically around for something to use to raise the tree but everything had been battened down or stored. Later, after the storm we used my swingset and a block and tackle with all the neighbors to raise the honored tree upright and tamp down the roots. It survived to provide drinking pleasure for many more years.

The wall cloud on the other side of the eye hit like an out of control freight train gone off the tracks on a downgrade. This was the only time I’d seen my Dad frightened, and he’d been in some of the battles of WWII and then Korea in the Navy. Mom didn’t say much. The cat was really hard to find after it had worn itself out bouncing off the walls in fright. The dog huddled at our feet. At least I didn’t have to go back to my gosh darn room and be alone. Mom did put a stop to that.

And then by the next morning it was over.

Most houses in the neighborhood had survived reasonably well. A few had lost windows due to rapid pressure changes and some had once stately palm trees inelegantly, crudely implanted horizontally through the middle of the house. Like I said, this is when building codes were enforced by that nasty old guvmint that just cain’t do anything right, ya know.

The children were set to work picking of the mountains of leafy debris, broken branches and just crap that had been blown in from who knew where.

Honest - I saw sticks of wood that had gone right through trees. No shit. We all reflected on what if it had gone through us. Ugh. Gross. (Oops, bad language!)

We were without electricity for the better part of a week. That meant that we had to immediately relieve the freezer section of ice cream and sit on webbed lawn chairs in a rather untidy backyard and force ourselves to consume it in great quantities. I was a skinny little kid - then.

We then went into town, toward my Grandparents place in Coral Gables and our family business on Coral Way. Thier house had survived fine, with just a lot of damage to the towering avocado trees. One of the bigger banana trees was a lost cause, but my Grandmother, Ruth, was a natural born green thumb type. The exotic jungle that was her yard came back more verdant and lush than ever in time. If the State of Florida really wants to know where a lot of those invasive alien plants came from, look no further. This woman was illegally importing stuff and poking into dirt down there for nearly 50 years. We all lost a lot of the hundreds of orchids that had been tacked up in the trees.

The big steel shutters that had been put into place along the front of the plate glass windows of Tropical Pet and Garden Supply on Coral Way were turned into a mess of twisted metal and the windows were gone. There was a lot of sweeping and mopping to be done there. It was going to be a few weeks before new glass was installed and business truly got back to normal.

With nothing much else to do a couple of days later we drove down to the Florida Keys … or what was left of them. That was scary to see pilings in water where a favorite restaurant, The Blueberry Inn, had been. My Mom wondered what had happened to the piano they had in the dining room. She used to play piano quite well. Dad said that it was probably washing around in pieces in Florida Bay. We went as far as we could, but lack of electricity had disabled some of the drawbridges that still existed in those days, and it was obvious that it just got worse so we turned around and came home.

As for the Miami area, life slowly came back to what passes for normal down there. The lights came on and several days later us poor kids were forced to go back to school. It took the Keys a lot longer to come even close to normal, but they’re really used to ‘big blows’ like that down there and the Conch Nation seems to take such events in stride and keep on trucking.

Anyway, when I see 24/7 news coverage of the next big hurricane, a little chill runs up and down my spine. I know just how frightened people can be, and just how damn dangerous hurricanes are.

Update on Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 23:03 by mavenandmeddler

Thanks, E. J.