Hurricane Hattie

Hurricane Hattie was supposed to hit Cuba.

By midday on the 30th of October 1961, we knew we would have a heavy storm, although the hurricane would pass Belize, well offshore, on her curving course to the north. At Bucher’s urging, I took Carli and went to the nearby shops to buy canned goods, batteries, and other supplies. Most businesses closed as soon as hurricane preparations were made and storm blinds were in place, and people, including Bucher, left work and returned to secure their homes.

We took porch furniture into the house, wired blinds and nailed windows shut, disinfected the washing machine and bath tub, then filled them with water. I put out warm clothes for all of us. We made sure that hurricane lamps were full and ready for use and that flashlights had fresh batteries.

At four in the afternoon the radio announced that the storm had passed above our latitude. We all sighed with relief, and said a little prayer for the hapless Cubans in its path. No one knew about the strong cold front just north of us. It stopped Hattie in her tracks. The storm made a U-turn and roared south toward Belize City.

We had supper. I put the children to bed, tucking them into their mosquito nets. I set up the coffee tray with our cups and a percolator, ready to be plugged in, and put it in its accustomed place on the table next to my side of our bed. Bucher and I retired, knowing that there was nothing to do but go to bed and pretend to sleep until the storm passed.

The blinds rattled with increasing fury in the mounting wind and woke us both a little after midnight. Bucher pushed past reluctant doors onto the veranda to study the clouds with his seaman’s eye. He returned to announce that we were about to have a visit from Hurricane Hattie.

We both were fully awake so I plugged in the coffee pot, knowing that the electricity was sure to go soon. Bucher and I sat reading and drinking coffee inside our mosquito-net tent as the storm intensified. We chortled when we realized that I happened to be rereading Gone With The Wind.

Alex, nervous at the way the house was rocking, called from upstairs. I went up to reassure him and his uneasy companion, our Beagle Pedro, then returned to our room. I realized how much quieter it was down on our floor. Even though Alex’s dormer windows were closed and the louvers outside them wired shut, the wind and the rain on the galvanized roof were deafening. I went back upstairs, brought Alex and Pedro down, and settled our son on the Hide-a-Bed in the living room.

The lights went out.

About thirty minutes later we heard a terrific banging upstairs. Bucher and I leaped to investigate. Alex’s blinds had torn open, though they were bolted top and bottom and lashed in two places with wire. We tried unsuccessfully to catch and re-secure them. Glass from shattered panes was beginning to blow into the room. We had no interest in being slashed to bits. We fled. The shutters continued to bang for another ten minutes before they tore away completely. The gentle tinkle of breaking glass was with us for some time, like haunting wind chimes.

With Alex’s windows shattered, water poured into his room. Quite soon it was dripping down into our bedroom below. I threw an old shower curtain over our bed, so we stayed more or less dry for a little longer. By then sleep obviously was past for the night, so we fumbled our way into the kitchen, made instant coffee on the gas stove, and sat in bed under our plastic sheet being elaborately casual about the whole situation.

The wind howled louder and louder; the house rocked under its onslaught. Bucher admitted that it must be up past one hundred miles per hour, and much higher in gusts.

The front doors blew open, heavy French doors with a pair of wooden louvered doors secured outside them. It took the two of us and both children to hold the inner doors against the force of the wind while Bucher re-bolted them top, bottom, and center, and nailed them shut with four-inch nails. Moments later they burst wide open.

The wind switched direction by about one hundred degrees in an instant as the edge of the hurricane’s eye passed us. The front windows in both Carli’s bedroom and ours blew in, frames and all.

Bucher yelled at us to forget the door. We grabbed children, pillows, blankets, air mattresses, and Pedro, and hurried down the back stairs to the little landing at the bottom, where we were lower in case the house fell down, and were protected from flying glass.

Bucher and I made alternating quick trips upstairs for one reason or other. I realized that my own urgent trips to retrieve this-or-that were inspired more by nerves than need. The warm clothes, so carefully laid out before the storm, already were sodden.

The view in our living room was incredible, horrifyingly beautiful, and beyond anything I had ever dreamed. Heavy, dark “rain” dropped from every joint in the ceiling. We later learned that roofing had blown away in two places. A fine mist of wind-blown rain swirled through the room. It was as plainly visible as if it had been a different color, coming in through the still-secured louvered outer doors, soaring up toward the ceiling, making a perfect loop, and then washing through the rest of the room.

Belatedly I draped a shower curtain over the bookcase, but decided that it was far too late to do anything more to protect things. Bucher came up the stairs and opened a back window. The pulsating of the house in the wind slowed appreciably. The only reason the house did not go was that the storm (and Bucher) opened it up so that the wind could sweep completely through—that and the fact that we were spared from the small whirlwinds within the hurricane that demolished entire houses, leaving neighboring homes untouched.

By this time thick, muddy water was almost ankle-deep on the living room floor, though we were some twenty feet off the ground. The water began pouring down the back stairway, so we moved downstairs into the little  former kitchen, which we used as a storeroom. One end of the room had only louvers, so it was wet with the misty rain blowing in, but we hardly cared.

Dawn of October 31st was breaking. I noticed that a house behind ours had moved about six feet closer than we were used to seeing it.

The wind shrieked deafeningly. I expected the shuddering of the house; a passing truck could cause that. I expected chattering blinds and a leaking roof. I did not expect the thunderous noise of the wind. We learned later that ten miles away, at the British Army base, the wind-speed indicator, which had been holding at one hundred sixty miles per hour, jumped to two hundred, and then went on swinging back around, broken.

We settled into our new refuge fairly comfortably, in a hurricane-y sort of way. The children huddled under a blanket, sharing a cot. Bucher and I were under another blanket on an air mattress on the floor, with Pedro curled up in the bend of my knees. Alex, restless at sharing the cot with Carli, took the second air mattress and settled himself in the small entry, one step lower than the room.

We all dozed fitfully.

Daylight and heavy, shuddering thumps directly under the small part of the house where we were sheltering brought me awake. I raised an eyebrow at Bucher and he suggested that I run upstairs and get coffee makings while he lighted the old kerosene stove. We were savoring that first hot, delicious sip of our morning beverage when he grinned and motioned to me to look out the window.

I had always heard about the high water you get with a hurricane, but the view out the window was quite a shock. Brownish water with high waves sloshed in frenzy a few inches below the window sill, although we were a full story above the ground. The fence between our house and the next was visible only in the troughs of the waves. As I watched in disbelief, the fence tore away, section after section joining the other debris swirling in the rising water. A fifty-five-gallon drum surged back and forth in the water below us, repeatedly striking one of the posts that supported our room with heavy, jolting thumps.

Water began pouring through the floorboards of the entry where Alex was lying. He got up, dragged his air mattress up the step into our room, and wearily asked, “Where now, Dad?” We let the children look out the window to see what was happening, then we gathered our things and started to get away from the rising water.

We had one scary moment. Bucher tried to open the door leading upstairs, but the shifting of the house had wedged it shut. He could not move it. After struggling for a few moments, he battered out a lower panel with a hammer and succeeded in opening the door. We all applauded his successful housebreaking.

Through the long hours I had wondered about two things, but thought that my good husband would not appreciate an interrogation under the circumstances. First, why did he clutch that hammer so tightly throughout the night?   Second, why was he so tense about the air mattresses? They were comfortable to have, but not, I thought, vital. Bucher explained later that if the house had collapsed, he planned to put Carli on one air mattress and send me off swimming and pushing her, while he followed propelling Alex on the other.

As the water rose, the wind diminished. It must have slackened to about one hundred miles per hour, a mere nothing. We parked the children on the stairway that lead up to Alex’s aerie from the back hall off our kitchen. It was on the lee side of the house, as dry as anywhere, and safe from flying glass.

The children settled themselves on the stairs with the air mattresses, pillows, and blankets. I hastily found warm things for all of us to put on because we were blue with the cold and wet. Drawers and cupboards yielded clothing that miraculously had stayed dry.   I grabbed a handful of wet comic books from Carli’s room and told the two to relax and enjoy the books in their cramped perches.

Bucher and I did the only thing that seemed appealing as we sat out the storm—opened a still-cold beer.

Throughout the hurricane and its aftermath, Alex and Carli were bright, responsive, helpful, and apparently unconcerned. Pedro, however, knew that the entire ordeal was devised by us in an inexplicable attack on his well-being. He sat in the middle of the kitchen, long ears back, glaring at us.

As it became fully light, we opened the back hall windows on the lee side of the house and looked out at the terrifying but fascinating scene around us. Water swirled ten or twelve feet deep between the houses and behind us as far as we could see. And we could see much more clearly than usual; almost every tree, fence, and shack between us and two streets back was gone. Great sections of fence, furniture, the corrugated sheets of galvanized zinc roofing, gas drums, trees, and an endless jumble of lumber billowed in the pounding waves. Someone’s cherished automobile washed back and forth with slow dignity.

Carli called out excitedly, “There goes a water vat.”

I looked out another window and moaned, “Don’t laugh. It’s ours.”

As scarce and precious as water was in Belize, we had to watch helplessly as our vat floated like a capsizing keg, then splintered into just another mass of lumber washing back into the middle of the city.

Hideous as they are, hurricanes do end eventually—though for a long time I didn’t think this one ever would.