Memories of Andrew

I got a text today from my brother, Matthew, reminding me that it was 25 years ago today that Hurricane Andrew made landfall in South Florida.  He and I were there to witness the event and lived in its aftermath.

I first heard about the storm’s threat the Saturday nine days before (Andrew came through on a Monday night) while I was at a seminar in Boca Raton.  Matt had been staying with me for only a few days, having just relocated to Miami, where I had lived for several years.  At that point, the storm’s prediction cone was pretty wide and best guesses took it north of my apartment on South Beach.  By the next Sunday, it had narrowed in on Fort Lauderdale, less than an hour north of us; to escape the destruction, we could either go well north -- we had relatives in Tampa -- or a little south.  We decided on south.

At the time, I was working as a massage therapist at an acupuncture clinic run by the wife of a mentor of mine; they were kind enough to let Matt and me join them in their apartment to ride out the storm.  All day Monday, Matt and I moved furniture, emptying my east-facing living room and placing as many of my possessions as possible on high shelves in closets in my first floor apartment.  In the evening, we headed down to South Miami, where my boss, Marlene, and my mentor, Bob, lived.  I remember putting my two young kittens, Kylie and Ashoka, in an empty office at the clinic around the corner, as the apartment building allowed no pets; I was really anxious to leave them, but I had no better place.

Safe in the apartment -- old Coast Guard housing converted to condos -- we awaited Andrew’s wrath, watching the green, computer-animated avatar of its wind and rain bear down on us via the local news until we lost power.  At one point, a large picture window in the living room bowed back and forth frighteningly while we put cardboard over it (being an upper story apartment, the usual prophylactic of putting plywood over the outside had been prohibited), but mostly, for us, the storm passed with little more than -- at times unnerving -- noise from wind and rain.  We remained awake until the small hours of the morning, eventually heading to sleep around three or four.

Probably due to nervous energy, we were up again by eight; the wind and rain had largely died down, the sky was cloudy but light, so we ventured out.  As relatively underwhelming as our experience of the storm from inside the apartment had been, the impact on the world outside was overwhelming:  we emerged into what felt like an entirely different world.  We could only be awestruck.  The lush, subtropical paradise of South Miami had been razed such that almost nothing stood more than about a dozen feet high.  Woody deciduous trees were snapped in mid-trunk, their crowns tossed aside like incompleted model train landscape decorations.  A neighbor’s ancient and expansive banyan tree had, over the years prior to the storm, entangled his favorite chair in its aerial roots; Andrew had stripped the tree of its leaves, uprooted it and tossed it back in the yard on its side like a great squat barbell, the owner’s chair still comically clinging, otherwise undisturbed, in the roots.  Power lines and poles littered the streets and cars were buried under detritus.  Palm trees stood like great phalluses lining the streets, shorn of their leaves, the only things of any height remaining.

We learned later that Andrew had not gone north of us, along the Dade/Broward county line, as predicted, but instead had turned suddenly south, with the deadly northern eyewall passing perhaps a dozen and a half miles south of us:  instead of moving further from the storm, my brother and I had come closer.  Indeed, only about a mile south of Bob and Marlene’s, the damage became significantly worse.

I don’t recall where I had stored my car, but it was undamaged.  By mid-day, I heard reports that authorities were letting residents back onto Miami Beach, so, expressing our gratitude to Bob and Marlene for their hospitality and the safety it afforded us, Matt and I retrieved my lonely kittens and attempted to make our way back home.  The drive was a post-apocalyptic steeplechase through downed trees, power lines, and billboards, with neighbors walking about, half-stunned, inspecting the damage and other drivers attempting to wend their way through the newly created maze.  As I recall, it took a few hours, but eventually we were able to make it back to Miami Beach via a causeway north of the route we normally took.  Streets were swept with sand shoals and piled with verdant wreckage.  Working our way south, we were forced to take residential and side streets, which were often blocked by fallen trees, but neighbors were already out in force, clearing sidewalks and roads of branches and trunks; we took part in several efforts that required chainsaws and teams of muscle.

When we finally made it home, we were astonished to discover that a single pane of the jalousie windows had worked loose, leaving a narrow opening for Andrew to deposit a small puddle of muddy water on the living room floor; the rest of the apartment was as we had left it.  We quickly went to work restoring the space to its former condition.

Over the next week, we had many experiences that told of how much our corner of the world had been upended.  Matt and I went to help a friend who lived in one of the neighborhoods where the damage had been more severe.  When we arrived, there was more roofing tile on her lawn than remained on her roof.  We found her in her flooded sunken living room, pathetically scooping water into a kitchen trash can with a measuring cup.  We spent the day with her, mostly picking up Spanish tile and emptying her new in-living-room pool.

Another day, a kid in my neighborhood, previously a stranger, invited us to his uncle’s house in Coconut Grove, a very wealthy suburb on the mainland:  having been out of power for three days, the meat in his freezer had thawed and he was cooking it all on his barbecue and serving it to anyone who would come.  We ate well -- and gratefully, as my own, much more modest, larder had been similarly compromised.  While there, I took a walk around the neighborhood and I stumbled upon a 35’ sailboat, still attached to its pier, a good hundred yards inland from the bay.

I was an avid cyclist during the years I lived in Miami and one of my favorite places to go was Key Biscayne; the route was a nice, eclectic 30 mile out-and-back from my apartment.  I had heard that the park at the south end of the island had been particularly badly hit by the storm.  When I finally made it down to see for myself, I felt as devastated as the land looked.  What had been rich, green, breezily swaying acres of Australian pine and palm trees, in which bright yellow and brown, tea-saucer-sized spiders wove glistening four-foot wide orbs, had been mown down to a height of no more than six feet.  I could stand on my bike at the park entrance and see, across an immensity of jagged, graying, desiccated stumps, down to the cape of the island.  I felt shocked as if I were a bug stumbling out of a field of wildflowers into someone’s lawn.

City-sized changes took place overnight:  with thousands of houses suddenly unfit for living, entire communities relocated instantly, many permanently.  This created traffic snarls like I had never seen:  an infrastructure that had grown organically over decades suddenly functioned like it had been imported unmodified from another, entirely different city.  By the time, a week or two later, when enough of the city was functioning that most of the inhabitants were returning to work, long stretches of previously fluid expressway were turned into rush hour parking lots, while others seemed abandoned.  Drivers got pretty good at four-way stops, since nearly all the city’s traffic lights were dead for days, many for weeks.  Postal service was rendered third-world in its reliability.

Most disturbing for me, though, was Homestead, a town and military base at the south end of the county, bordering the entrance to the Keys.  I had heard that that area had been hit the hardest, with families reporting their homes literally collapsing around them and many residents killed.  It wasn’t until months later that I visited it:  the military base had been abandoned completely and, apparently, suddenly, with yards still scattered with toys and playsets, curtains and blinds hanging raggedly in shattered windows, trees lying dead where Andrew had felled them, some with rusting cars beneath them.  It reminded me of films I had seen of atomic test sites.

The non-military parts of the city were worse:  nearly all the homes there were abandoned, too, but most were in partial or complete collapse and spray painted unceremoniously with contact information for the owners’ insurance companies.  Some properties, by that time, had been scraped clean of wreckage, leaving concrete slabs, with odd bits of plumbing or electrical conduit occasionally reaching up from them, as testaments to a family’s life and Andrew’s power to interrupt it.

Post-storm analyses revealed that Andrew had been a Category 5 storm, rather than the 4 it was estimated as when it hit.  Embedded in its inner tempest were scores if not hundreds of tornadoes, which apparently were responsible for the worst destruction, especially around Homestead.  On the other hand, steady, unchecked wind, can snap stiff, woody trunks, which is why the Australian pines of Key Biscayne and the decorative deciduous trees of Bob and Marlene’s neighborhood were killed, while the bendy native palms with their sacrificial heads grow back, after an awkward, Seussian stage.  Being especially strong, the hurricane’s center held exceptionally low atmospheric pressure within its eye, which lifted up the sea into a roiling hill of a storm surge; vertical forces like this, rather than the horizontal ones, were apparently responsible for events like lifting a pier by the boat tied to it and depositing it whole a football field inland.

I left Miami about eleven months after Andrew.  This is largely coincidence:  although my career was going well and I really loved the city and my apartment, an opportunity arose the next spring that took me to New York City.  My brother had come to Miami to live with me and to heal our estrangement of some years; leaving him behind, as well as a city I loved, was difficult, even as accepting the opportunity felt right.  I sometimes wonder what my life might have looked like had I stayed; Miami still inhabits my dreams.