From the Eye of Irma in St. Barthélemy

The eye of the hurricane is quiet. Surreal. Like a still, flat lily pond floating amongst the sharpest most violent waves of ocean surf. It is difficult to picture it in your mind’s eye, but yes, you are literally in the palm of Nature’s hand, and at any moment she could simply close her hand and crush you like a bird.

St. Barthélemy, the small island in the Caribbean just south of St. Maartin, was one of the islands in the eye of Irma’s initial path through the Caribbean. Described as “the playground for the rich and famous”, it is a petite French island with a modest population of roughly 10,000 and a healthy dose of designer shops and French bakeries nestled amongst tropical waters and palm trees. When I arrived I was greeted with the words, “welcome to paradise”. I had been warned that September was hurricane season, but in St. Barth’s they are prepared. Hurricanes are routine.

Seven days later, I was hunkered down in a large cement house, windows and doors boarded shut, with around 15 other people escaping the storm. Some were local islanders whose homes were not solid enough to endure Irma’s predicted deadly winds: an Italian restaurant­‐owner and his young apprentice chef, a French painter with his wife and two children, a housewife accompanied by her cat and two golden retrievers. The other half of the group were New York tourists, including a fashion designer clamouring to get back to the city for the beginning of fashion week and a Saudi Arabian prince and princess evacuated from their exclusive, glass‐panelled oceanfront villa for fear of the windows shattering to bits in the storm.

We huddled together in the living room when the hurricane peaked. A few families draped over each other on the couches sleeping, or trying to sleep, just closing their eyes and listening. Others sat awake, quiet, wide‐eyed. The bedrooms lining the edges of the house felt dangerously close to losing their roofs, the storm prying at the corners of the house like a giant’s fingers hungry to get in and devour anything inside, and finally we bolted in the middle of the night to the common area in the centre of the house, as far away as possible from the winds. Someone put on some classical music to set the tone as the candles burned, the storm raged, cracking sounds of destruction echoed outside.

During the storm you are blind. The windows are shuttered closed and every opening to the outside world has been, if you are prepared, carefully sealed off. You could be hurtling through space. Underground and be sucked through a wormhole into another dimension. The sounds of destruction outside invoke scenes from Jurassic Park when the dinosaur is approaching, destroying everything in its path to get to its prey, and suddenly a wall is simply ripped off and you are confronted with the quiet eye of a monster before you are gobbled up. Vanished. Gone.

Hopefully all of the preparations were thorough enough, the roof is solid, and the windows are secure. Hopefully the neighbours did the same and tied everything down. Hopefully they didn’t leave something loose that could spin like a blade into the side of your house and poke a hole in all of your efforts, unsealing your fortress to the fates of the storm. You hope. But while the wind is howling outside there is as little as you can do.

A former general from the Swiss Army was in charge and announced over dinner that the electricity was soon going to go out and there were garbage cans full of water in reserve for flushing the toilets and minimal bathing. After dinner we waited for Irma to come. The doors rattled. Metal crashed. The wind, at 185 mph, was a roaring, powerful machine. You wait, listen, and stay – as much as possible in the blindness of your protected cave – alert to what is going on outside.

And then, when it’s over, you open the door to the world and indeed there is a feeling as if you have been transported, lifted up and whirled like Dorothy to another land. The lush landscape of St. Barthélemy was raked of its green leaves and left brown, scraggly, and naked and exposed. Tired. Palm trees beheaded and stooped over in defeat, bent in half. Cars magically moved up the sides of mountains, their roofs bashed in like skulls with emergency lights blinking futilely. Some houses completely gone, disappeared, blown apart into small pieces that now just look like random garbage in a junkyard. At the airport, a small plane was simply ripped in half.

My boyfriend, Jeff, is from the island. Before the storm hit we secured his villa, pushing tables inside and gathering any debris that might be transformed into a projectile weapon, and we saw turtles rushing around. Several turtles were circling the house, each on their own path looking for something, or so it seemed. There was a determination in their step, a destination. A purpose.

I have never seen turtles in the wild. They moved faster than I had imagined. Their legs were wobbly but with quick, sharp movements. High, trotting steps. I figured they knew the storm was coming somehow and were scared; running around hoping for shelter in what they must have sensed was a huge weather pattern on fast approach. One turtle raced toward the four-­‐wheeled ATV, poking its nose around the tires, up under the engine. Another one stumbled through the leaves. They seemed confused, like Chicken Little running aimlessly in a panic unsure of what to do.

I thought perhaps we should save them and take them inside away from the storm, but Jeff said they would be okay. Better to leave them to their own instincts to survive. I offered one of them a crisp Pink Lady apple, a final meal, biting the pieces off myself to create a pile easier for it to eat. I figured the turtle would have little chance of enduring what the news was describing as the biggest storm ever recorded brewing over the Atlantic. The turtle ate hungrily, more brazenly than I expected, stretching her neck out long and biting into the apple, wide-­‐open mouthed and sure. Perhaps she knew there were no guarantees about when she would next have a meal. Perhaps her instincts told her that all of her usual food sources would soon be inhaled by Irma and blown away.

After we secured his villa, we went to Jeff’s parents’ place with his brother and the 15 other people taking shelter. The house is much larger than the average villa in St. Barth’s and extremely secure. As a fourth generation islander, his father was no stranger to hurricanes and bolstered his house accordingly. Reinforced with metal beams and thick wooden joists crossing the ceiling of a large attic, even an SUV hurled onto the roof by Irma’s powerful arms would have a hard time getting through to crush the humans below. Their father recently passed, narrowly missing one of the biggest storms in history to hit St. Barth’s, but his wisdom and efforts lasted beyond the grave and we were all thankful. As we gathered together to take shelter from the storm the locals murmured with relief that it was the best hurricane house on the island. We were lucky.

After the storm, Jeff and I came back to check on the damage to his villa. There was a large branch blown through the storm shutters that landed right in the living room next to the couch. If we had been sitting on the couch during the storm, one of us could easily have had that branch shoot through our chests like an arrow to the heart. The sight of it was eerie, like the arrow was aimed but missed its mark.

The ATV where the turtle had sought shelter was turned on its side, crumpled in the bushes in the foetal position, if it’s possible for a vehicle to assume such a humble pose. Part of the metal roof was crinkled up into a ball like a tin can crushed in a bar­‐trick show of machismo. What was once a peek‐a­‐boo view through leafy palms of the water and surrounding islands was now a full, expansive view as most of the vegetation was blown away.

The beauty of the view was mixed with the uneasy feeling of being suddenly unprotected. No leaf had been spared. No branch unturned. If one of the lingering gusts of tropical wind decided to pick us up sweep us away, the journey straight out to the ocean would no longer be buffered by plants and greenery. We stood, like last survivors after a wildfire, in a landscape that felt completely bare.

But there was, in the corner, one small plant that remained.

I looked at it, amazed. It was perfectly situated in the corner of the cement curb lining the parking area. A low hanging, bushy palm. And underneath, barely discernable in coloring from the browns of the dirt and leaves, was a pile of turtles. Jumbled together in a group they poked their heads and legs out of their shells. Taking their first baby steps. Slowing making sense of their new surroundings.

The turtles had seemed so solitary before, each on their own trajectory scrambling into the bushes. At first we were the same; Jeff and I planned to weather Irma in his villa cooking quinoa by candlelight and enjoying the show. He had been through many hurricanes and knew what to do. But when Irma jumped to category five we decided to play it safe and join the others in the “bunker”, just in case. I joked that a coconut might fly through the window and knock him in the head if we stayed in his villa alone, what would I do? I wouldn’t be able to revive him. We didn’t know how real it was – the only thing wrong about my prediction was the object. Not a coconut: it was a branch that Irma transformed into a deadly spear.

Before the storm, when I lamented the likely death of the turtles, Jeff said that those who don’t make it through the hurricanes are just not part of the cycle of life anymore. It’s Nature’s call, that’s what they say on the island. At first I thought it was such a heartless approach, but after the hurricane I understood. What it means is that Mother Nature forces our instincts to kick in, and when our instincts kick in, we can survive.

The turtles did know what to do. When I saw them running around the villa they weren’t crashing off into the bushes in a suicidal reaction of fear. Each turtle was searching for the perfect spot, and when one of them found it, the others came to gather together and stay safe.

In these times of destruction it seems to be what we have to do. If we had decided not to join the group in the bunker, would we have lived? Maybe. Or maybe one of us would have had a branch shot through the heart, leaving the other to scramble alone in terror trying to figure out what to do, how to save the other, how to not go insane in the midst of psychological and natural disaster.

We will never know if we would have had the instinct to move ourselves out of the living room, away from the storm doors, away from invisible dangers lurking outside with the wind. But luckily, we didn’t have to find out. We made the right decision, like the turtles. We survived, huddled all together, in the midst of one of Mother Nature’s biggest storms.