Hurricane Season Again June 21
The rainy season started this week. For the first time since early December, I wake up to pitter-patter. Without an umbrella, I am forced to drive to campus, even though it is only a 5-minute walk from my apartment. Foliage bleeds green, vast puddles form over the hardpan earth, saffron finches find shelter under my eave, and a family of lime-colored iguanas takes to the trees, clumsily jostling leafy branches like creatures twice their size.
My guy-pad is alive with flying male ants. Drones take flight when the rains come. Either it is the fragrant promise of a fresh start or a suddenly flooded nest, complacency ends, here and now. Too bad the males are so poorly evolved for the task—they flail about with Spruce-Goose-size wings, crashing into walls and my legs, never managing to gain enough altitude to truly make a break for it. There is no time to practice for the liberation, especially with Homo Sapien maliciously swinging a broom while uttering war cries.
Trinidadians are fond of saying this place is blessed to have no hurricanes. At least not in a spell. Flora hit Tobago head-on in 1963, defoliating the little island. Before that, 1933 was the last hurricane to smack Trinidad, destroying thousands of homes and toppling 60 oil derricks, which spilled rivers of oil throughout the deep sout’. But storm intensity only grows in a warming climate, and there have been close calls in recent years, leaving some to wonder if blessings have a shelf life.
My teaching friend Amy knows from experience that Caribbean storms are best to avoid. She and the other teachers at the Dominica Peace Corp school were feeling seasoned in 2017, having just weathered Jose and Irma. Then came Maria. September saw three major storms, but it was the third one that hit Dominica straight on. Amy and a few hardy souls decided not to board the last ferry to St Lucia, a 4-hour voyage to the nearest US Coast Guard station.
The destruction was cataclysmic. For days, communication was limited to live footage from helicopters. Survivors were on their own. The island was completely stripped of green. From overhead, it looked like the aftermath of a Western wildfire. Amy’s stateside family did not know if she was alive for 24 hours. 160 mph winds shook the concrete hotel in the capital Roso. Neighborhoods were stripped of their galvanized roofs, which then became projectiles. She most remembers the sound produced when one would crash into the house, “like a freight train hitting you.“ A deluge fell for four hours, as ground floors filled with water. The storm surge at high tide reached the tops of coconut palms, washing away homes, killing more than thirty.
And yet none of this makes the news back home. Why should it? We live in the backwaters. Even the big earthquake in Trinidad was ignored by CNN. The only thing deemed newsworthy is a class 5 hurricane, preferably heading toward Florida.