What’s ominous is that it’s a perfectly beautiful day, and nobody in Puerto Rico is noticing it, apparently. But it may be that we’re thinking of Jamaica, all of us who went through Hurricane Maria on 20 Sep 2017. The Jamaicans are waiting for a category five hurricane named Melissa to tear through their island.
“Tear through” may not be the best description: it implies something moving fast, and this hurricane has crawled at 2 mph for days now. This gave Jamaica plenty of time to prepare, and they would have used it well, had they been able to. But they had two problems: they couldn’t imagine the enormity of what was about to hit them, and they didn’t have much at hand to combat the storm.
It was agonizing to watch, last night, a young black Jamaican walking through a fishing village on an island. Melissa, a rough beast come round at last, was only 100 miles or so away, but the water was already ankle-deep in the streets. Most people had left, and those who didn’t were there to “protect their property.”
The island will be obliterated and anybody left on it will be dead.
That didn’t stop the fishermen from going down to the sea and shoveling sand into whatever bags they could make or borrow. One man had piled a single row of sandbags in front of his gate: the row was perhaps 9 inches tall. The storm surge is expected to be well over 15 feet.
There were people with more resources lining up to buy sheets of plywood. They were wasting their money, and they probably knew it. The 9 AM update on Melissa has the storm at 180 miles per hour with barometric pressure at 896 mb. A plywood panel will last all of 10 minutes. Then, it’ll stop being protection and become a weapon. You don’t want to be hit by a sheet of plywood traveling over 100 mph.
I didn’t buy plywood panels, I bought shower curtains. I would have bought a tarp, if I could have, but the shower curtains at least covered the large pieces of furniture. Several large windows blew out during Hurricane Maria and the wind was howling through our apartment: I retrieved the curtains the next day on the street, a couple of blocks from our apartment.
The statement “I bought the curtains” is true, but doesn’t quite describe the process. I am generally aware of storms several days before anyone else, since I’m a news junkie. By the time everyone else is perking their heads up, I am well into focused panic. By the time anyone thinks they should really drift out and pick up a gallon of water or two, I will have filled the bathtub, the washing machine, the 50 slowly-decaying plastic containers that once held kitty litter. I will have memorized the coordinates of the storm and will be counting down the precise number of hours, minutes, or even seconds until the next weather update.
I do all this knowing that it is pointless: only the fact that I live in a house with three-foot thick walls abutting the next house with three-foot walls will keep me safe. In that, I am enormously fortunate: I don’t live in a plywood shack next to the sea. My livelihood is not a wooden boat tied with weathered rope to a flimsy pier. I am in much better position than any of the fishermen in that village, and I could just as easily sit home, close the windows, and let the storm roar. But no, I will be out buying shower curtains at the dollar store.
Melissa went through not one but two periods of rapid intensification, which meant that a tropical storm on Thursday afternoon became a category 3 hurricane by Friday morning. Rapid intensification used to be rare—it’s now almost predictable. Nor is it just that the storms are stronger: they are also popping up in weird places. The western part of Alaska recently had a typhoon, which almost by definition cannot happen: typhoons are in the Pacific, yes, but on the other side. They hit China and Indonesia. They don’t hit Alaska, causing apparently severe damage and forced evacuations.
Nobody can deny that climate change is here, so we’ve decided not to talk about it. Six months ago, a landslide in the Swiss alps took out an entire village. It was less a landslide than the collapse of half a mountainside. Sad for the Swiss, of course, but of no importance to the rest of us.
It will be our turn next, perhaps, and everyone in Puerto Rico knows that Melissa could be sitting 100 miles south of Ponce (our largest town on the Caribbean Sea) instead of Kingston. But we’re lucky: the worst that can happen today is that our PTSD will switch back on.
The people in Jamaica are lucky, too, in that the pilots flying into the storm to determine intensity and take meteorological measurements are in their planes flying into the monster. They’re not being paid, of course, because of the government shutdown. In fact, they probably won’t be paid, since Trump is balking at back pay. They won’t be thanked, either.
Still, they’re up there, or at least I presume they are, since several news reporters on a couple of legitimate sites mentioned that there are a lot of AI generated fake videos out there. So the black dude walking through his fishing village may not exist at all. Too bad, because I wanted to send him some money, as most people would. That’s the problem: who is real, and how do you best help them?
So I think there’s a storm, and I think that Jamaica is in worse trouble than they can imagine. If all of this is real, the storm is going to do to Jamaica today what it took the Israelis half a year to do to Gaza.
Alaska got no attention and no help from the federal government. In the past, the US was there for little islands / nations like Haiti and Martinique after their storms: no one expects that now.
Instead, a US destroyer is headed towards Venezuela, as Trump visits Asia this week. Trump has made seven strikes on fishing boats, killing over a score of people. Dead bodies have been washing up on Trinidad’s beaches. (The two countries used to be joined, geologically, and are even now only less than 500 miles apart.)
The East Wing of the White House has been demolished, and my hysterical laughter, for which even now I have no explanation, is gone. Instead, raw fury has taken over, followed by lethargy.
I’m glad there are other places in the world: other countries who still keep something of what they are or were. My country is gone, though only a handful of us know about it. My illusion is gone as well, and I’m grateful, though saddened.
I’m going to end my life with the destruction of my country as I knew it. I know that there will be something after it, but no one knows what, nor will I be here to see it. I have memories, of course.
That doesn’t feel, somehow, like a good thing.
