Caribbean winds

I don't exaggerate when I say this feels like another world. One in which the gritty red sands of the Sahara and the dark ashes of a faraway volcano ride the powerful east-driven winds that cross the Atlantic and coat the bluest-blue skies of my island with a deep pink-edged bruma, like a fog in summer.

Not the gossamer-ghost fog of the northern climes but a fog that's more like a thin curtain woven of gray ashes and red sands. A bruma that brings with it, if you listen hard, the bellows of camels and the slithering sounds of flowing lava.

The winds here are as mythical as the light. Starting with Juracán, the Taíno god of storms, through the devastating god-strength hurricanes that have hit the island and affected, or even determined, some of its centuries-old history.

I remember two hurricanes that are part of my own (not-as-old) history here: Hugo and Georges. When Hugo hit Puerto Rico in 1989, I was recovering from an illness that devastated me to the point where I had to learn to walk and run and even drive again, from scratch. A similar thing happened to Puerto Rico after Hugo.

When the hurricane arrived, I remember how we momentarily came out of our hiding place in the back of the house to see the glass windows in the kitchen oscillate and ondulate within their frames, as the alchemist wind turned them back to their pre-solid state when they were made of liquid fire. I remember how the wind itself was so thick and so deep and so strong that it tried to bully its way through the building by pushing the parked cars back and taking the shape of a wave that had wrested itself free from the sea to wreak destruction on land.

People who've heard tornadoes always say they sound like a train. I don't remember any specific sound that the hurricanes made, except for the explosion of the kitchen window as it gave in to the rising barometric pressure and burst into a million little pieces. I do remember the wind howling outside the windows and how we wanted desperately for the banshee to subside, not knowing whether that was the true end of the hurricane or only its deceptively calm eye, whose siren-song respite actually promises a stronger whipping from the other side of the monster.

Almost a decade later, my husband and I watched as Hurricane Georges hit Puerto Rico in 1998, sitting in the darkness of the covered carport in our sturdy little cement-box house in Guaynabo. The darkness was so complete that we couldn't actually see any of the havoc unleashed in the streets outside but we could hear, which might be more terrifying, since we couldn't know what we were going to see when the light returned. For hours, we heard metal scraping against the road and nameless things being torn apart and tossed to and fro, like a happy cat playing with an unlucky mouse, by the wind.

Nobody sleeps on the night a hurricane hits. Those of us lucky enough to have a safe roof over our heads bide the time in darkness and listen to the transistor radio until the winds die down and the sun peeks through the dark clouds and we can assess the damage and move on. We were among the luckiest ones and we only lost the cover of our roof-top cistern, which flew like a frizbee into the yard of a nearby house, and a beloved ficus tree we had planted the year before. I wept bitterly over that loss because I had seen that ficus tree bloom and grow from a little twig on a pot into a gorgeous lush and leafy tree that Georges uprooted the way one would pull an ugly weed from the flower bed.

In 1998, after I had to leave my husband and home behind to go do my job, I swore I'd been in journalism long enough. The newspaper won an award for our post-hurricane coverage that year but the effort convinced me that I was done (finally and forever) with putting my job first. The drive to the newspaper early the day after the hurricane, as I made my way gingerly in my car through uncleared streets covered in debris while the winds still whipped by at almost 40 miles an hour, trying to avoid the profusion of electric posts that had fallen, like dominoes, one over the other with their electric lines snaked all over the roads, was absurdly risky.

The winds of Hurricane Georges not only shifted the history of Puerto Rico, they also shifted the history of my life. It was after that day that I decided to leave journalism to become a teacher. The next hurricane, I pledged, would see me among those who got to stay home.