My First Hurricane

I'll just come out and say it, so you can judge me however you want: Hurricane Dean was a letdown. I wanted more. I know that's a horrible thing to think, let alone write, but there it is. I only say it because I've heard other people, blans and Haitians, say the same thing. And actually, I got a better show than most of the people I know in Port-au-Prince. The capital just got a little bit of rain, nothing compared to the torrential downpours that hit the city at least a couple times each week in the rainy season. When the hurricane came, I was on the southern coast, a little closer to the action.

On Friday I flew from Port-au-Prince to Jeremie, a good sized city, and one of the most remote parts of the country. If you look at a map of Haiti, it resembles a lobster claw, with the southern half of the country as one long peninsula. Out at the end of the peninsula, on the north side, sits Jeremie. Jeremie calls itself the city of poets, and it has produced some great writers, including Alexandre Dumas, who wrote "The Three Musketeers" among other books. The city is well-known for a pastry you can get there called "konparèt"; it's about the size of a hamburger bun, but sweet, dense, and hard as a rock. The closest thing I can compare it to is biscotti. It's made with lots of ginger and it's delicious.

I was glad to be flying because I've heard nothing but horror stories about the road that connects Jeremie to Les Cayes, the nearest city. I went there for another human rights training for police officers. All day Friday was perfect and sunny. Saturday was noticeably windier, but still quite sunny. The UN outpost next to where we did our training was busy stacking sandbags all around their compound. I was supposed to fly back to Port on Saturday afternoon, but the flight was canceled on account of hurricane. But generally, people weren't very anxious about it, speaking casually of the coming storm, which they referred to as "move tan" pronounced to rhyme with "mow a lawn." In literal translation, move tan is Creole for "bad time" or "evil time" and refers to tropical storms, hurricanes, or anything that causes a day or two to go by without sunshine.

So, with no flight back, my coworkers and I had to decide what to do. Most of them had come a few days earlier by SUV to take care of other stuff. We decided to drive to Les Cayes, hopefully getting there before dark, and well before the hurricane. Thing is, there were six of us, and only five seats. I knew they'd be happy to cram four into the back seat, but I figured I'd just as well ride in the back with the luggage, and they'd definitely be more comfortable that way. So for five hours I was getting pitched around with the cooler and suitcases while we worked our way south. I can't overstate how bad the road was. It would have been impossible without a 4x4, and even then it was slow and torturous.

We landed at our hotel in Les Cayes, which happened to have CNN. One of their correspondents was in Port-au-Prince, breathlessly reporting that people were doing nothing to prepare. The computer models showed the storm coming right for us, since Les Cayes is out at the southwestern end of the peninsula. It looked like a buzz saw tearing through the city. After a little while I went upstairs and slept right through the whole thing.

In the morning, one of my coworkers came and woke me up to survey the destruction. He had woken up at 3 in the morning when the eye passed by several miles to the south, and said that the wind was very strong. When I went outside to take a look, it was cloudy and rainy and windy, which is incredibly rare here in the morning. The wind wasn't too very strong, but every few minutes a big gust would come through and rattle the tin roofs all around us, threatening to pull off the ones that weren't nailed down tight. Off on the horizon I could see the hundreds of coconut and palm trees that line the seashore, their branches flapping in the wind like pompoms held out the window of a moving car.

We left Les Cayes after breakfast. We got news that the worst part of the storm would be rolling through there at noon, so it seemed prudent to hit the road and get further inland, driving east back to Port-au-Prince. Leaving Les Cayes we drove along the coast where the water, usually azure, was muddy brown and beating against the shore in big, rough, irregular waves. The wind was intense along the shore, pushing the car around quite a bit. As the road took us away from the coast, we saw banana and plantain trees that had been blown down in their fields. Several big trees had been knocked down onto the road, but they were already pulled off to the side and in the process of being hacked into firewood.

The drive back was generally uneventful. Around 11, we hit the tail of the storm, which packed the biggest punch. It was a solid wall of rain that forced our chauffeur, who normally drives like a maniac, to creep along, hunched over the wheel and unable to see, even with the wipers full-speed. But once we made it through that it was smooth sailing. We got back to Port-au-Prince and talked to people who said the storm was a little anticlimactic for them. Oh well, maybe next time.

Just kidding.

Sort of.