Wilma diary

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

-Lear-

Three O’clock in the morning of Wilma and the jungle is quiet. The constant background drone of insects, the whisper of the wind are gone from the palms and the thick mangroves and the humid air hangs from the sky like a wet shower curtain in an airless bathroom. The desultory quack from the obnoxious Bufo Marinus, the Cane Toad who haunts the light over the back stairs hunting insects, sounds like an unechoed sonar ping in the stygian depths of a bottomless sea.

On the morning of Wilma, the wind comes up with the sun in the south east, but twilight remains while the wind rises in gusts. Now is Wilma upon us and her wind slowly building. Hear her now, she is a rising howl as trees wave like sea grass and the air thickens like smoke. Grand old trees fall, ripped and riven or snapped like matchsticks; everything with leaves is stripped bare and the thick green paste of wet mulch coats the windows. The lights flicker and go out and steel hurricane shutters begin to rattle as the monster outside tries to pull the doors open; tries to peel the roof back, tears the rain gutters away as though they were made of paper, breaks loose the great heavy aluminum beams of my pool enclosure; beating on the roof and showering the patio with metal. Green flashes fill the late morning darkness as transformers on the poles explode silently in the distance. Palm fronds fly like ugly birds with a speed that could kill you if you were foolish enough to be out there like Lear in the storm and strong enough to stand up to 95 mile per hour winds.

And then, after agonizing hours, after the slowly building crescendo, there is silence punctuated by one huge gust and then two more - and then nothing, like the D minor interlude in Wozzeck. Silence falls and a damp drizzle and brumous air. The barometer stands at 28.12 inches of mercury. The eye wall has passed over us and for a while we can go outside and assess the damage to houses and trees and shrubs and boats. “It’s not so bad,” says neighbor to neighbor. “more damage last year – the second half will be easier now.”

Then there comes the north wind. Then the mouth of Hell gapes open. Now there is no more to our kind mother nature than a furious hatred. The wind tops 110 miles per hour between the pounding gusts that sound like demon voices screaming. Is it fading now? No it’s louder now and louder again - like air escaping from a high pressure hose two hundred miles across.

We huddle over the battery television and listen to reports of exploding buildings, cars rolling sideways down deserted streets. The picture shakes as transmitting antennae whip in the wind and stations go off the air, one by one. The Red Cross and the Emergency Operations Center are losing contact with shelters and fire departments and hospitals and police stations and Amateur operators begin to take over. My antennas are blown away and I check into the Amateur Radio Emergency Services net with my portable VHF hand-held.

Two O’clock and the wind is down and my generator is humming on the patio and my chain saw is cutting a path through fallen trees wide enough to pass a car in my driveway. There is a chill in the air that we have not felt since last January. The north wind has brought us the flavor of Autumn and the morning and the evening were Wilma.

When we finally get out of the neighborhood, we see shredded mobile homes strewn all over and twisted aluminum siding wrapped around trees and electric wires. Lines are already beginning to form – cars waiting for ice and food from the National Guard and fuel at the one or two gas stations open. Just as it was last year, many who have little have lost everything. Those who have everything have lost landscaping. My wife goes off to work with the Red Cross and I take my turn directing the Red Cross Emergency Communications net.

The pre-Edisonian nights are stygian and in the leafless jungle behind my open window, only a lone owl hunts in the moonless dark. The sky is bright with stars such as can be seen only in very remote places and the bright slash of the galactic arm grins down at us from a quarter million years ago. Mars hangs red over the sea like the tail light of a departing God.

The predictions were that power would be out until mid November, but my lights and phones came on last night. The street is lit up again and the stars dim at night. It will be a week or so before I have much time to post here. I will be going down to Palm Beach County to do more communications work and I have a mountain of work to do around the ruins of my property, but I shall be back and I shall be cynical.