I was supposed to spend Sunday, Sept. 10, at the Franklin County Fair’s demolition derby.
It’s a little embarrassing how much I was looking forward to that. And how disappointed and sorry I am that instead of heading north from my in-laws’ in New Jersey a few days before that, my husband and I headed south, home to Key West, to get ready for Hurricane Irma.
Deliberately placing yourself in the path of a major hurricane is a cruel thing to do to your family and others who care about you. That’s my biggest regret about coming back for Irma. But my husband and I wanted to secure our home and our dog and not leave that burden on our 25-year-old housesitter who doesn’t have a car. And I’m a journalist whose beat is the Florida Keys. I’ve never been the kind of reporter who goes out chasing the big story but this time, it came for me.
We stayed, despite the evacuation orders that got more and more imperative, for a couple reasons. Again — journalism. There were other reporters who came in for the storm, as they always do. And because we were confident we had a secure place where we would survive even the most extreme impact. (Fortunately that didn’t quite get put to the test for us in Key West.) A lot of people I know who had planned to ride it out skedaddled at the last minute, Friday night and even Saturday morning, as the storm seemed to aim more and more precisely at the Lower Keys. A lot of people I know who stayed did so because they wanted to be here to deal with the damage right after the storm, not shut out of the Keys until it was deemed safe to return.
The storm itself was not a scary experience for me. Again, the building I was in — a three-story concrete structure on high ground, originally built as a Masonic lodge — felt stable and secure. The group I was with was practical and organized. We knew the building’s one point of vulnerability was the windows, and we had a plan to retreat to the reinforced stairwell if they blew out. They held, the water did not rise to where we were, and most of us wound up watching the storm from the ground-floor lobby through the hurricane-rated doors.
Afterwards we emerged and looked around. There were a lot of trees down. If your home or your car was unlucky enough to be underneath one of them, there was damage but most structures looked pretty good. And that turned out to be true for Key West in general and our home in particular. We have a big mahogany tree in our yard — that I had finally gotten around to getting trimmed a few months ago. Some of its branches now cover our deck and some fishtail palms from our yard uprooted and now cover our pool. We didn’t like them much anyway and most importantly the house is fine.
I found the few days after the storm to be scarier, in a lot of ways, than the event itself. As officials repeatedly warned us we would be, those of us who stayed were essentially on our own. Not just power but virtually all communications were knocked out. The hospital was offline, including the emergency room. The system that brings us freshwater from the mainland had spouted a million leaks so the water was turned off. Staying safe and healthy became priority one, then figuring out a way to do my job — not just report but communicate what I was seeing back to the mainland.
Sunday evening — when I was supposed to be at the fair, I was at a friend’s small hotel that had remained blessedly undamaged — and had a pool that was clean and blessedly cool. We remembered about landlines — the old kind of land lines that don’t rely on Internet service. The hotel’s phone system needed power but it turned out there was a fax machine on a dedicated line. Suddenly we could call home.
In the week since, the Keys have been a surreal place for those of us who stayed and I’m sure the evacuees who were desperate to get home. I’ve talked to people with crazy survival stories. In the City Hall where I normally cover local government meetings with a few other local reporters, I was surrounded by TV cameras talking to the governor. I walked into a Winn-Dixie grocery store on Big Pine Key and found myself talking to the president and CEO of the chain. My husband and I gave a ride to two women who were determined to walk from Key West to the mainland (that’s 120 miles) because they couldn’t take the conditions there any more. We only got them to 30 miles up the road but I’m praying more people would do the same. A couple nights ago, I had an unexpected overnight visit with one of my best friends from UMass — she’s a reporter for McClatchy in Washington and was sent to cover Irma. It was a terrible reason for a reunion but it was an enormous gift to see her.
Now that we’re fully reconnected (we got power back surprisingly fast and cell and Internet service followed — by Sunday, a week after the storm, we were on lightning fast Wi-Fi). We can let our family and friends know how we are, show them photos and videos of our experience and try to surf the enormous waves of rumor, opinion and information that are coursing through all the usual communication channels. It’s a relief, for those of us in relatively intact Key West, to have life start returning to normal. But it will be a much longer, harder haul for those just up the road. Giving up my time with my family in cool, green New England seems like a relatively small sacrifice. But it remains my biggest regret about this whole experience. Hurricanes, as an individual and as a journalist, require you to make endless judgment calls with no good options.
Nancy Klingener covers the Florida Keys for WLRN News – WLRN is South Florida’s public radio station, based in Miami (wlrn.org). She grew up in Whately and graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1989. Her husband, Mark Hedden, is a writer, photographer and executive director of the Florida Keys Audubon Society. His photographs are at markhedden.com.