Life Amid the Debris

Bucher’s partner arrived from Miami on the first passenger plane into Belize. Don Eckis was a warm, kindly person, a fine business man. He arrived with a suitcase stuffed with pound after pound of Kosher Salami, which would keep without refrigeration, and even more glorious, with a 1.5 KW Onan generator.

Bucher quickly hooked up the generator, which we christened Betsy, and we took an unexpected leap back toward civilization. We found that Betsy would run for two-and-a-half hours on a tank of gasoline. We turned her on in the morning to make coffee and to provide a shot of chilling to the refrigerator. We cranked up again during the day so that Concie could do her ironing and, again, the refrigerator could have a boost. We turned the generator back on at night when full dark fell and we had light until bedtime, plus the usual pick-me-up for the refrigerator. We could not make ice with that routine, but our food stayed cool and safe.

 

Our second unexpected post-Hurricane aid came from Bucher’s family in Georgia. They sent an enormous box by air freight with an incredibly imaginative assortment of food and personal items that they correctly guessed might be in short supply.

 

Bucher came home one day and announced that Ro-Mac’s, our newest and best grocery store, was giving away hurricane-damaged canned goods. Alex and I put on our rubber boots, took two large burlap bags, and trudged through the mud five blocks to the store. There we picked up an eclectic selection of label-less, mud-coated tins, filled our bags, and carried home our precious gifts.

Meals were interesting when we did not know what we were adding to the menu until a tin was open. We had some strange and wonderful combinations. However, with the refrigerator again operating, we could always open another tin, chill the completely incompatible food, and plan the next day’s menu around it.

 

A standard supper favorite became the “Hurricane Goodies” I invented to take advantage of the Kosher salami Don Eckis had given us. Concie made lovely biscuits, so I asked her to make more than Bucher and the children would eat at our main mid-day meal. In the evening I split the biscuits in half, spread them with mustard, and added sliced Kosher salami, onion, and cheese. The “goodies” went into the oven long enough to heat through and melt the cheese.

 

Tom Tattersfield was alone next door. A close friend from Miami had flown his plane down to Belize as soon as the airport was opened after the storm and had taken Lia and the children back to stay with them until living conditions improved. We asked Tom to plan to have supper with us every evening. It was good for all of us to join forces daily. Laughter came easily, a welcome antidote to the abysmal mess around us. More often than not our supper was a large plate of my “Hurricane Goodies.”

One memorable evening before our children left for the States, I was able to tell Tom that we were having steak for supper. This may have been a last gasp from my formerly frozen stores or Bucher may have provided it from his freezer plant. Tom arrived tenderly carrying a tiny crystal bowl. He had brought “proper English mustard” for the steak because he (quite reasonably) assumed that I would not provide it.

 

I was relaxing on the veranda hemming one afternoon after an aggravating day. Three times I had interrupted young men trying to steal Alex’s dory from under the house. Suddenly there were shouts and gun shots. A soldier being paddled toward the seawall in a dory was yelling at some men who were struggling along the street carrying a huge sack. A young boy, whom I was startled to recognize, paddled a second dory alongside them, obviously waiting for them to drop the sack into his little dugout.

The soldier landed, intercepted the men, and with much shouting and flourishing of his gun, forced them to open their sack. Watching from the veranda, Carli and I thought it was full of radios. The young soldier sternly rebuffed all the protests and self-justifications from the men he had apprehended.

As the soldier rounded up the looters, I called down to tell him that the boy in the dory was the one who had tried to steal my son’s dory that morning. The soldier thanked me, though he already had realized that the boy was part of the gang. The soldier asked if I would send my man down to watch his dory and the (presumably) stolen one while he took the men and their accomplice off to the Police Station. I agreed.

As they moved off down the Foreshore, I realized that “my man” was the roofer Bucher finally had found after a week of our being rained on nightly. I wanted him right up on the roof where he was.

I sent sweet little nine-year-old Carli down to sit on the seawall and guard the dories, promising to cover her from my post on the veranda with our shotgun. Carli perched on the seawall next to the dugout canoes and I stood in a corner of the veranda, the gun, unloaded, at hand, as I continued my sewing.

Not two minutes later a man in a dory paddled over near Carli, reached into the stolen dory, and took out the paddle. I leveled the shotgun at him, locking it under my arm in a menacingly competent fashion because it was too long for me to brace against my shoulder, and in my best sergeant-major’s voice bellowed at him to drop the paddle.

He looked upward in horror, threw both his own paddle and the one he was stealing into the stolen dory, and using both hands to propel himself, splashed off as quickly possible.

Loungers along the seawall looked upward in fascination.

Just at that moment, around the corner chuffed the garbage truck with a load of muck to be dumped into the sea. It pulled up with a flourish, a man jumped out to direct its backing up, he heard me, looked up, saw the gun, howled in dismay, and garbage men scattered along the Foreshore in both directions.

The garbage men returned slowly, eyeing me dubiously as they grinned winningly. From then on they dumped in front of either of our neighbors’ houses, but never in front of ours.

Through it all, Carli stayed where she had been told to stay, either unconcerned or petrified. I returned to my sewing, taking extremely shaky stitches. The soldier returned, thanked Carli, and reclaimed the two dories.

Our daughter came upstairs to christen me Shotgun Mama.