I’ve been in wind storms in the Pacific Northwest many times. I think every November we had high winds of 75mph or more, and I remember one particular Thanksgiving that it was so bad we were without power for a week. Old growth fir and cedars fell like match sticks. I had just put a nicely stuffed turkey in the oven when the wind and rain came and changed everything. That turkey had to be thrown out. One of our fir trees fell precariously close to our house.
But never have I experienced a full-blown (pun intended) hurricane. Hurricane Odile came to Baja Sur (Southern Baja) where I live on September 14, 2014. When it finally hit us, it was labeled a category 3. That means we had sustained winds of 135-150 mph. It hit land in Los Cabos (San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas) at 22.52 north latitude 109.56 west longitude. It made landfall just south of us. El Gavilan neighborhood where we live is at 23.20 north latitude and 110.13 west longitude, so we got it bad. The Spanish word for hurricane is hurican, and the Spanish word for storm is tormenta. That’s what this hurricane has been. A torment.
Many times during the night I thought the glass doors and windows were going to give way, and we ran from door to door in our valiant attempt to bolster them. That was in between sopping up the water in every room of the house. It was so scary. The wind blasted, reverberated, resounded, raved, thundered and roared on through the whole of the night, bringing with it a torrent of water. We stayed up all night long during Odile’s “visit” because every window in our house leaked. The high speed wind and rain meant that we had 2” of water in every room of our house, and all night during the tormenta, we battled the water. It was 83 degrees in the house, even in the wee hours, and we were as wet as our floor, dripping sweat as we worked with towels and mops, a floor squeegee and our trusty little shop vac.The two of us did the best we could. Finally around 4:30 AM, we could do no more. The rain was letting up and so we fell into bed, totally exhausted. But we didn’t sleep very long. At 6:00AM we were up, back to work. Around 8:00AM we ventured outside to survey the damage.
Things had collapsed, crumbled, buckled, sagged, given way, crashed, and fallen into pieces. In our area, many old growth cardon cactus, some possibly as old as three thousand years, couldn’t take it. Now they are broken into pieces and sprawled onto the ground.
Our house is made from block and there is a lot of tied steel (rebar) cemented inside those courses of block. Thank the powers that be! I vividly remember the Mexican man who tied our steel, Burrito (his name is really Jose), telling me that our house was made to be muy fuerte (very strong). Thank you, Burrito. You did a good job. Mi Casa es muy fuerte, and we are some of the lucky ones. Some of the paint peeled off one small section of our overhang over the back door. We lost our beautiful tropical plants, our “green fence” of passion fruit vines, and some cactus. Our palms look like they’ve been through a hurricane!
Power poles and electric wires are lying all over the area.
While many rely on conventional electricity, we have a great solar system, so we have not been without power. When it is cloudy we have to use our generator to help to keep the batteries charged, but we are happy to have put in such a nice solar system. Many others who have solar power, lost their panels when the sheer force of blasting wind lifted them off their roofs and blew them to smithereens. Our panels were spared.
Looks like our outdoor shower needs a shower! 
The large palapa carport (made from palo de arco sticks and palm leaves) we had in front of our garage is gone. The leaves held together well, but the hurricane pulled the huge support beam right out of the wall and then the cement post gave way as the whole thing fell onto our two cars. Until the palapa was taken away, we couldn’t go anywhere even if we wanted to. It took Greg two and one half days to get the whole thing taken apart. He is my hero. He did this exhausting work in 80-90 degree heat with 78% humidity, mosquitos and flies attacking him, dirt raining down on him from the leaves, and a sore back from a surfing accident three weeks ago. I helped as much as I could, but he did it mostly on his own, and we made two big piles of the good sections. Some happy news is that we were able to help others less fortunate with our labor and our palm leaf sections. Greg made two trips in our pickup, pulling our trailer, to haul the good sections to Todos Santos, and he was able to deliver them to three different families who lost their roofs. Now they can rebuild them and get roofs back over their heads. Donating like this makes all of us happy.
It’s been ten days now since we experienced the biggest hurricane Baja Sur has had in 98 years. I’ve got to say that I never imagined the devastation Mother Nature could bring. I remember seeing photos of Katrina and the damage done by her. Photos don’t tell the whole story. They do give you some sense of the suffering that comes from high winds and rain that a hurricane brings, but merely viewing pictures is the easiest way to experience such a natural disaster. Being in the thick of it is another thing altogether, and not one I’m eager to repeat.
The pueblos of Todos Santos and El Pescadero are mostly destroyed. Todos is (was) a town that draws a lot of artists and tourists. El Pescadero is about 10 miles farther south (where we live) and is more of a farming community. Both towns lost their baseball stadiums, and were without power and water. There was a huge coming together of neighbors helping neighbors work with clean-up. The military came to maintain order and brought food staples for distribution to anyone who needed them. We watched about a hundred people accepting little bags filled with flour, rice, dried beans, oil, and sugar. Most people use propane for cooking, so propane has been an issue too. But I don’t think anyone has gone hungry, what with the distribution from the army and neighbors’ generosity. Yes, there was a 10:00PM curfew imposed and there were some seedy characters looking to take what didn’t belong to them, but they were definitely in the minority.
The President of Mexico, Pedro Nieto, visited and made promises he has been keeping. Truck after truck has come from mainland Mexico on the ferry and traversed the rest of the way here to help with restoring electricity. Within a week they set up a bunch of huge generators for a make-shift power plant in Todos. It took ten days to get the same for El Pescadero, but now our little town has power too. Both towns are being cleaned up; it’s a government and community effort. It lifts our hearts to see how fast it is happening.
The government closed all the restaurants for health reasons. Without refrigeration for so long it was a concern that people would get sick from the unrefrigerated food. Dengue fever is a concern because of the mosquito problem, and we can only hope there will be some spraying in the stagnant pools to eliminate the nasty pests. Dengue fever is dangerous, can be fatal at its worst, and causes extreme pain at its least. There is no cure for it; if it doesn’t kill you, it has to run its course, which can take anywhere from two weeks to two months or more, depending on the strain.
The airport in Los Cabos was completely destroyed, the wreckage is unbelievable. Many of the roads in Baja Sur are fractured, cracked, torqued, and split. The dirt roads were pretty bad to begin with, but now many of those are simply impassable. A river rushed through them.
Some highway sections have given way making driving more difficult. I cannot tell you first-hand anything about Cabo or San Jose. We have been told things that make us sad. We’ve heard that Costco was completely wiped out by looters. I can understand when people’s homes have been destroyed and they are in need of food and water, but they are stealing more than groceries. They take jewelry, televisions and appliances; whatever Costco offers for sale was taken.
As we haven’t had much in the way of phone service and we have no internet, the news has been hard to come by. I was able to get into Todos Santos and go to a restaurant that has wifi, but the restaurant was closed. So a bunch of us sat on the sidewalk and were able to use our laptops for a few minutes. I was able to read and send a few emails before I just couldn’t stand the bugs a minute longer, but I found out from an email that my internet service won’t be back for a month. Everything was blown away. Except the bugs. Being incommunicado is strange after living in this age of technology for so long. I realize that I have become complacent, taking it for granted. I have new appreciation for such luxuries.
If you drive around here, you may think there is a new trend of having your plants lean to one side, or completely have a lie-down. Cesar, the guy who brought us all our plants and trees when we landscaped, came over and righted all the plants a few days after the hurricane, and he helped us tie up and brace the palms. There were a couple of banana trees that looked like they might make it, so he righted them too. We will have a new palapa built, but the plants will take time to heal and get back to where they were. We are more sad about the ruined landscaping than the palapa carport.
Remnants of our carport…now piles of palapa leaves and poles
To participate in the clean-up from the mess left in the wake of the storm, means working in hot and humid conditions. The bugs make it even worse. There are a bazillion hungry flies, mosquitos, and these things called bobos. They are a gnat-like insect that hover around your face in the hundreds. They get into your eyelashes, nose, ears, you end of inhaling or swallowing them and they love to go to any spot on your body that has a wound. For example: scratch a mosquito bite? It’s an invitation for a bobo to feast on you. It makes sense to wear long sleeves and do like the Mexicans who put a handkerchieves on their heads before adorning their baseball caps, leaving the handkerchieves dangling down the sides of their faces and onto the back of their necks. If you don’t have tools in your hands, you can use a handkerchief to swish, snap, and swat all around your face and arms to keep the bugs off. It’s effective, but like I said, you can only do it if a hand is free for the handkerchief snapping exercise. Fatigue and stress has overwhelmed us.
One surprise we never expected was discovering the box in which we keep our important and legal documents wasn’t waterproof, and we found them soaking in four inches of water. They were sitting in that water for two days before we got around to investigating our “safe” box. Now we are trying to salvage them. Littering every surface all over the house are soggy papers as we attempt to dry them out.
At our neighbor John’s house, almost all the windows and doors were blown out. Broken glass is everywhere. Doors burst apart and blew away. John’s kitchen cabinet drawers flew open, and filled with water. All his hanging lanterns were ripped from their chains, and smashed to the floor. We found his refrigerator tipped over and door panels lying everywhere along with the broken roof tiles, stools and chairs. His curtains were blowing in the breeze through the openings that used to be his windows. His outdoor furniture sailed off as if it had a different picnic to attend. He’s lucky. He has insurance, and for what it won’t cover he has enough money for repairs. We live in a gringo neighborhood, and most of us have either an income or a retirement fund from which to draw for repairs.
Our Mexican neighbors do not have much. The homeless, hungry, and those without power and water, are suffering. The youngest and the oldest are the most vulnerable. I have seen strength and determination on the faces, in the eyes, and the actions of the people in Todos Santos and El Pescadero. People still know how to wave, smile, and laugh in times like these. Everyone wants to know how you fared, if you need help. While there has been great destruction, there has also been an amazing show of strength and generosity.
And I know one thing more: I am no longer a hurricane virgin.
Usually, I do not write poems that rhyme. They are more difficult for me–constraining. But I wrote this one for a student I had when I was teaching high school in WA State.
How about you?