I’m twelve feet away from the northern eyewall of Hurricane Irma. Seated behind floor to ceiling panes of glass that can’t be thick enough. “Are they thick enough?” I wonder while staring at the murderous velocity of rain and wind that just a few steps away would lift me whole and launch me into the lake, a tree or another house. With death defying, tornadic ferocity the wind drives rain sideways in every direction at once. I hear tree trunks and limbs snapping like firecrackers off in the distance.
There’s still running water, but the electricity went off hours ago. There’s no internet. Comcast has opened up thousands of free WiFi hotspots for anyone whose service is down. You can log on for two hours at a time. Two hours at a time in the teeth of an historic maelstrom. I enter a username and password and hit a fucking pay wall. Comcastic!
The changes in air pressure are making my ears pop as the wind lives up to its cliché; it really does sound like a freight train. 130, 140 miles per hour but still not the Cat-5 death dealer that scoured 100% of Barbuda’s housing stock down to its concrete foundations. Not the 185 miles per hour that would take paint off a car, put the car in a hole and blow the hole away. This isn’t that, but it’s impossible to say exactly how fortunate I am beyond the fact I’m still sitting here watching the world get ripped apart.
I’m glad I boarded up my house and came to my in-law’s ground floor…