Storm
On hurricanes, memory, and family.
My family and I survived a tornado. Well, sort of. My dad, sister, and I were sitting at the dining room table, planning a vacation, when out of nowhere the power goes out. Now, a summer afternoon in Florida means heavy rain, without fail, so at the time it was pouring and we thought nothing of it.
Until the power went out. You know a tornado was coming, but we didn’t. Whenever the power goes out, my home’s generator turns on — basically a bomb beneath our front yard, with a round hatch-thing on the surface that lizards hang out in — and my dad always says,
“Oh, the power went out,”
in the only way that a man can say that phrase: with a mix of shock, fear, excitement, and awe. The generator activates automatically, by itself, signaling its awakening with a steady, metallic hum. Usually, for a few frozen moments, we stop and listen, until my dad invariably shakes his head and says,
“You know, as soon as I got this generator, we stopped getting hurricanes,”
and I’d shake my head, as well, saying,
“Yep. I remember, you got this right after Wilma. And now it just sits there,” though sometimes I would add, “but hey, at least you’ve got it for situations like this.”
And my dad, ever the pessimist, would shrug and say something like,
“Yea, I guess,”
before, more often than not, bringing up one of two hurricane stories. Either 1. The time, way back before the divorce, when right after some mild hurricane (Category 1 or 2) my family drove to dinner along debris-filled, abandoned streets, eating at the oldest restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, the only place open: an overpriced, Hawaiian-themed tourist trap with a bored flame-juggler show, where we never ate again; or 2. The time, after Hurricane Wilma (a Category 4, massive storm, biggest we’ve had since Andrew), when my family and an older couple, friends of my father, opted out of living without AC or electricity for a week by driving down to the Keys and staying at our exclusive, private resort club while most Floridians fought over rations at Winn Dixie. Every Sunday, at 3pm, that generator turns on, and whenever I’m home, and my dad is with me, we have that conversation.
Which is fine. Cause let’s face it: hurricanes are one of the craziest, scariest, most unique things about Florida. I’ve experienced at least a dozen, from Hurricane Andrew, which wiped the town of Homestead off the map when I was less than a year old, to the aforementioned Wilma, the last major hurricane to pummel Florida, which hit way back in 2005, when I was still in middle school. Since then, we’ve had a string of minor, forgettable storms, many that made landfall while I was out of state, at college (hurricane season really starts in August. Hence Florida’s replacement for snow days: hurricane days). My dad blames the peaceful, hurricane-free weather on his own bad luck. He half-jokingly wishes that more hurricanes would bring their manslaughtering destruction to Florida, so that he could get his money’s worth with the generator.
And, strangely enough, I pretty much felt the same way, though it has nothing to do with the seldom-used generator. What I am about to say will sound outrageous and insensitive, and that’s because it is, but I know that every Floridian who has ever been a privileged kid during a hurricane, and thanks to accidents of circumstance hasn’t had to really worry about property damage or loss of life, understands that the right hurricane can be a hell of a good time. Yes, the ramifications of that statement are as fucked up as they sound.
During a hurricane, you can have one family counting their canned goods, while a mile away another family hosts a hurricane party, inviting over friends to ride out the storm by getting shitfaced and playing cards by candlelight. We’ve hosted several such parties. The most notable was during Hurricane Charley, a Category 4 that brought winds from the west, allowing us to take some hurricane shutters off our sliding-glass door and sit outside in the backyard porch facing east, precariously sheltered as 100 mph winds whipped around the house, downing trees and entertaining uncles over beers (probably Red Stripe). You can have families drowning in flooded homes while some dude rides his wave runner over submerged streets, like my fifty-something-year-old bachelor neighbor one August, long ago. I mean, as a kid I once stood outside in the eye of a hurricane, looking up at the titanic, churning cloudwall of the eye, cycling grey with fury, laying waste all around, while for me the air was still and enchanted, the storm hovering over my home, and impossibly above I could see the blue of clear sky, hoping my parents wouldn’t call me in too soon, before apocalyptic winds swept away the spell of serenity with madness and chaos, four walls and a clinging roof the sole shelter.
Which is to say, I love storms. Few things in this world entertain me more than sitting outside, watching the immense, barreling barricade of a storm come crashing against the coastline, alien and vicious, bursting with lightning, the air heavy and wet, the wall of rain advancing towards you — then, it hits. A downpour, overflowing every gutter, waterlogging the wind, awakening dancing sheets of rainwater, deceptively delicate in the torrent’s pounding. And the smell of rain: calming, full — evoking, as only smell can, unseen memories, sequestered scenes surviving in the silent space where body and mind meet.
A hurricane happens gradually. Most begin as sandstorms over the African Sahara, crossing the Atlantic in plain sight to trained eyes, eyes that warn Americans long before landfall, so that when schools close and the storm arrives people have time to select their seat, emptying Publix of its bottled water and popcorn as the beaches clear and the stage is set for the star to arrive, infamous, ready for a simultaneously statewide show, with front row seats stretching from Cape Canaveral to Key Largo. As long as she stays onstage, and sings the old favorites, it’ll be a good time. But when the star steps offstage, and starts walking down the aisles, uncomfortably close to your seat… the show ends for you. Suddenly, the singing starlet sitting on your armrest, you’re part of the spectacle. This close, her beauty is stunning, intimidating — real, something you can feel, rather than an image on a stage, in the same theatre but a world all its own…
The winds roar. Seated at the table, off-guard, my dad, sister, and I look left: backyard furniture, gone. In canal, pool? Rainsheets sudden-sailing southward. Windshift — how? Accelerating.
Tornado.
That quick, and you know. Before the whistling, before the locomotive screaming, before the funnel — you know. And before you know, your body knows: first, the heart beating unthinkable. Your bracing body changes the world around you. Objects, chairs, tables shrink away, your periphery vanishing. I can only see out my window: palm trees, clawing frantic at speeding air, rain. Invisible dad beside me screaming
“This is faster than a hurricane!”
and sister also unseen shouts
“IT’S A TORNADO!”
Your mind accepts what your body knew. There is no control. You cannot name what remains, but your body does: danger.
In that moment, no, I do not remain. I am animal act alone.
I am moving. I do not know when or why I began. Dad and sister are with me, moving. But soon we are standing, watching, through sliding glass doors. And quickly, I am returning, me more myself. My sister screams she is going to film this she phone films this screaming. My dad yells Oh my god look at that boat! and I, slow, turn to look at his face, in profile, and it is tranquil, except the eyes, widening.
Each thought like drops of rain on water: solitary, distinct, a splash in silence. But my body is terrified. I think I could get my phone, but by the time I start filming, I’ll miss it outside my body’s fear. Backyard, I see things. Debris, everywhere: palm fronds, dirt, leaves green yellow and brown. The American flag, flailing. And, the tornado.
A boat across the water levitates off its lift, crushing it, rising 10 feet higher, diagonal — then crashing down on water. I saw the aftermath: a boat, adrift, against another dock, where strangers scramble, helping, and now a police boat. You don’t talk to your neighbors for 20 years dad says. They’re strangers. Then, this happens. People are shouting across the Intracoastal. They built the Alaskan Oil Pipeline, but there they are, in their backyard, people. Others step out onto streets littered, assessing, story sharing. He doesn’t live on the water, he doesn’t know there was a tornado. Well, let’s show him the backyard. Here’s where our glass top table smashed into the dock piling. Shattered: sat here countless high school nights — friend and I talked about Joseph Campbell, all sorts of bullshit, blacking out repeating All rivers lead to the ocean mystic coping, as if alcoholism wasn’t enough — never saw that coming. Well, fuck. Fish out the furniture. The canal is shallow.
But I wasn’t looking at the storm’s destruction. Standing with my dad and sister, I was in awe of the tornado itself, forming over the canal behind my house, some fifty feet away, rotating winds roaring wide its sudden circumference awesome and terrible, itself hardly a wisp of the gargantuan Fingers of God filmed ravaging the Midwest, nonetheless horrifying, seeing wild curving debris rising all in the howling, monstrous, nature transubstantiated incanted before us, vast and sudden, speed of it accelerating out of ago-5-second nothing, a summer afternoon squall seemingly like any other now throttling my heart piston pounding, shocked by fear primal death scenarios projecting, sliding glass shattering and poodles first to fly yelping, me screaming “PIERRE” ridiculous desperate despair too late, the small dog swept up in the storm’s churning maw, us holding onto the house with bleeding fingers every item sucked out into black hole oblivion: the couch, TV, the billiard table the fridge the other dog “BABY O” the movies every article of clothing books writings photos pasts futures all of it gone scattered destroyed lost, leaving heartbreak, the home’s skeleton and survivors, fumbling, scraping, crying incredulous, picking up life’s remnants never enough, but one memory at a time, the home’s box empty spaces stark relief against memories struggling to stay, memories with nothing to cling to, memories gone, literally, with the wind, time tearing, stripping, laying bare the Earth, pitiless, only ourselves staggering striving, to Genesis anew, and rebuild the castle lost, or forsake it all as folly, to turn aside, to wander, to fail and to find designs unknown, invisible architecture, symbolic scaffolding, the soul’s seaside ruin, read and written, and if never read again felt, known, cyclic rewrite of the soul, for the soul is nothing more, reread, renewed, on a page ever erased, forgotten, to die and to live, one thoughtword at a readwriting.
Luckily, none of that happened. Instead, the brief tornado whirled away, vanishing over the opposite shore, reborn briefly a lithe funnel of grey, then gone again, forever.
