Hurricane Andrew was coming.
Offshore hurricanes threatened us each year, but the last big one to slam South Florida had been Betsy in 1965. Hurricane Andrew looked like another storm that might choose a different tack, maybe detouring to Cape Hatteras or out to sea. As South Floridians emptied Home Depot of batteries and plywood, I stood outside in my purple bikini cutting coconuts off the palms with a twelve-foot tree saw. They might fly off in the storm and break our windows, and it was my job to remove them while my dad tied my new aviary to our sea grape tree with a long chain. I was into my second Corona and slicked from head to toe with suntan oil.
A hundred yards across the calm, brown water that served as our backyard, at King’s Bay Yacht Club, hundreds of sailboats and yachts cruised into the basin like refugees. Their captains lashed them onto docks, the walls of the turning basin, and to one another, hoping the basin would provide a nautical refuge. After a few hours I could have walked from one side of the basin to the other hopping from boat to boat.
I sunbathed on the bow of our little open fisherman, the Déjà Vu, as a manatee cow and her baby cruised by, their tails sluicing the water. I leaned over the boat’s railing and watched a blue parrotfish picking at crustaceans on the dock pilings. The manatees toured through the boats in the basin, then swam back the way they came.
We watched the hurricane on a small black-and-white antenna television in the kitchen. Hurricane Andrew’s circumference was larger than the width of the state of Florida, and meteorologists speculated that its eye winds spun up to 175 miles per hour, with tornadoes inside of the storm gusting up to 206 miles per hour. Andrew had been upgraded from a Category 4 to a Category 5 hurricane. We were used to seeing hurricanes bounce away from us, following the warm Gulf Stream to the north. But I still couldn’t understand why we were among the only people in the neighborhood not taking precautions.
“Why aren’t we boarding up?” I asked my parents, who were preparing tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. “Should we do something?”
“The lights will go off, maybe a window’ll break, and a little water might come in,” my mom said. “It’s not a big deal. We’ve seen this a hundred times.”
“It’ll be fun,” my dad said. “We’ll light candles and play some games and it’ll all be over.”
“Tell that to the neighbors,” I said. From outdoors came the sounds of buzz saws slicing plywood and hammers driving nails. Poppy walked into the kitchen, concern on his face.
“You’re worrying for nothing,” my mom said. “Come have a sandwich.”
“Should we go somewhere safer?” Poppy said. He and my dad exchanged a few words in French about “the little one” being overly concerned.
“I understand you,” I said. They switched to Arabic.
“It’s not like we have a lot of places to take a flock of birds and a bunch of cats,” my mom said.
“North. Inland. Somewhere away from this thing’s path.”
“You’re a worrywart,” my mom said.
On television, people cleared grocery stores of water and canned goods, and the home improvement stores ran out of wood, tape, flashlights, and batteries. The ATMs were stripped of money, the gas stations emptied of fuel. This was bad news because I often let my aging Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais run on fumes. I went out and turned on the ignition, and the low fuel warning light shone yellow.
Back inside, the phone rang and my mom handed it to me.
“I found a baby bird,” the male voice said. “I don’t know what to do with him.” It was my friend Matt, a sweet younger guy who suffered a puppy crush on me, though he had accepted our arrangement as “just friends” and had become one of my dearest confidants. I wanted to date someone older than I was—as most girls I knew did—and I didn’t give Matt a chance. He bought me thoughtful presents for every holiday, took me to romantic restaurants, flattered me with kind and heartfelt words. He was cute, too: dark hair and a well-proportioned face, deep-set dark eyes, and long eyelashes. We spent hours hand in hand, walking from frozen yogurt shop to frozen yogurt shop, thinking the exercise earned us giant hot fudge sundaes along the way. We made tie-dyed T-shirts and sold them at the flea market together, and spent long days at the beach tanning and playing in the water.
“What kind of bird is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Just a brown baby bird.”
Had this been an average day, I would have told him to leave it alone if it was fully feathered. Its parents were likely nearby, and it was learning to fly; but it would never survive a storm. I told Matt to bring the bird to me.
I didn’t want a North American native bird in my possession, but I had little choice. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the breaking of which comes with a fine of up to two thousand dollars and two years in jail, kept most people from capturing songbirds, such as cardinals and blue jays. Matt dropped off the baby bird and rushed home to continue boarding up his house.
The wild bird’s alert eyes peered at me from his fragile head. He looked like a woodpecker, but intuition told me he wasn’t one. I didn’t recognize his species, which wasn’t unusual, because I didn’t know much about native birds. He had a brown body, a small red crest, and lanky gray legs. I wasn’t sure how to care for him, not knowing his species, but I couldn’t take him to a wildlife care center with the impending storm and no fuel in my car. Poppy said he didn’t know what kind of bird he was, either, and Poppy was superior to me at bird identification. I cooked some hand-feeding formula and offered it to the baby in a pipette. He opened his mouth wide and swallowed the pipette, notably different from how my baby lovebirds ate.
What I didn’t know about feeding passerines, the order of birds to which I knew he belonged, could have filled a book back then; but I did know he needed to be fed every couple hours. If the electricity blew, how would I heat the hand-feeding formula? Cold hand-feeding formula slows down a nestling’s digestion and can cause infection, even death. Baby birds also need to be kept warm in an incubator, or at least with a heating pad, and I wasn’t going to have access to either should the storm take down our power lines. And did he have diseases he could pass on to my birds? There was no way to tell.
Taking care of a bird—any bird—was a welcome duty, but with the hurricane on the way, I needed to move my outside aviary birds into cages inside the house, and try to figure out who the pairs were. If I couldn’t tell the individuals apart, I’d have to place each lovebird into a separate cage or they would fight, possibly to the death. There was a lot to do in my avian world. Matt’s stepdad, Larry, came by and asked my dad to help secure his sailboat in the basin, and they spent an hour tying the boat down while I safeguarded the birds and my mom dragged our potted plants into the garage.
Sometime in the afternoon the National Weather Service announced emergency evacuation imperatives for neighborhoods in the path of the storm. Our neighborhood, King’s Bay, lit up on the weatherman’s map. Poppy’s friends who lived a few miles inland said we could stay with them, but we couldn’t bring the animals.
“I’m staying,” I said, as we all sat around the TV in the kitchen.
“Come with me, Chérie, we’ll have fun,” Poppy said. “You cannot stay here alone. Do you trust your Poppy?”
“If I can’t take the animals, I’m not going. There’s danger coming. Can’t you see it on the map?”
“Nicole, we’re going and you’re coming with us. End of story,” my dad said as if I were a child talking about my trip to Narnia.
“We’ll be back tomorrow,” my mom said.
“Maybe I can siphon some gas from the boat?”
“Marine fuel won’t run your car,” my dad said. “It’s mixed with oil.”
I walked into my room and closed the door. The neighbors outside shouted to one another to hurry up. I wasn’t angry, upset, or scared. I was resolute. I’d ride it out with my animals. If only a window broke, what was the big deal?
Police cars drove up and down our street with bullhorns
blaring. “This is a mandatory evacuation zone,” they warned, static punctuating the beginning and end of each sentence. “You must leave your home.” They repeated their orders in Spanish.
Two policemen came to the door. Through my bedroom window I overheard them talking to my parents.
“We’re making sure you folks are packing up,” one cop said, his radio buzzing with garbled voices.
“We’re headed to a friend’s place in Kendall, but our daughter doesn’t want to go,” said my mom.
“We can arrest anyone who doesn’t leave on a second-degree misdemeanor.”
“No problem, Officer, we’re all leaving.”
My mom appeared in my doorway a minute later. “Did you hear the police?”
“They’re not going to arrest me.”
“They could. And then what would you do? We’d have to come bail you out in the middle of a hurricane. You can’t take your animals to jail, can you?”
She was right. Being arrested would eliminate my post-storm options. I had no choice but to leave and force myself to believe that the storm would exhaust itself over the Bahamas, even if my intuition said otherwise.
I called Matt and asked if I could stay with his family. Matt’s family was also in an evacuation zone, but in a non-mandatory area, about half a mile inland and not on the water. I could walk the three miles home from Matt’s house after the storm if necessary. His mom, Gloria, said I could bring some of my birds, so I packed my ten youngest lovebirds into a cage, those just starting to eat on their own, along with the wild baby bird in his own small cage.
I rolled a small aviary with ten black-masked lovebirds into our rec room, and stacked the rest of the cages containing peach-faced lovebirds—about sixty birds—onto counters, shelving, and the floor in the bird room behind the kitchen. I always knew Bonk—I could pick her out in a crowd of green peach-faced lovebirds—but her mate, Binky, wasn’t as easy to recognize in my hurry netting the aviary birds, so they were separated. I didn’t want to risk putting Bonk into a cage with another bird that might hurt her.
I put extra food and water into bowls for Gladys, Emmeline, and Paisley. Not long after Nona passed away, Poppy had found my dear Sylvester, the tuxedo kitty I’d trained to give me his paw and to sit on command, dead in the front yard at just eleven years old. We’d had a cat memorial service, complete with candle lighting and a Hebrew prayer. I missed him.
My baby albums with my infant photos and a curl from my first haircut were near the sliding glass door facing the canal, along with a Tiffany-style stained glass lamp shade Nona had soldered after she retired, so I moved those to the couch for safety. I changed clothes and grabbed an old radio to take with me.
The birds seemed protected in the back room, buffered by the kitchen on one side and the garage on the other. The next-door neighbors had several parrots, and they left them in their home when they evacuated, too.
“You have one last chance to come with us,” my mom said. I told her I wouldn’t. “I’ll leave you the address in case you change your mind. Don’t forget to lock the door.” She headed toward the car, where my dad was waiting.
“Chérie, please come with your Poppy. Do not let me be alone.”
“You aren’t going to be alone, Poppy. You’re with everyone else.”
“That does not mean I am not alone.”
“Poppy, come on.”
“Call me every hour. I will wait for your calls and not sleep until I know you are safe.”
Then they left.
My parents believed the storm was a minor speed bump in our day; they left home with no preparations to secure the house, no putting away or taking of valuable and sentimental objects, no thought to the possibility of more than a window breaking. I stood in the middle of the living room, the day still bright, and thought I should stay. I could hide from the police and hunker down in the house to look after the animals; but in the end, I forced myself to trust what my parents said. Matt picked me up in the late afternoon.
I don’t know why I left Bonk behind.
* * *
Mitch and Brad, Matt’s older brothers, were boarding up windows and moving furniture into the middle of the living room when Matt and I arrived. Gloria and Larry, Matt’s stepdad, kissed me and welcomed me inside. Karen, Brad’s pretty fiancée, was there, and Gloria’s little Maltese, Goldie, ran around our ankles begging to be held. I placed the cages of lovebird babies and the wild baby bird into the bathtub in a hallway bathroom and closed the door. I figured they’d be safe because there were no windows in that room.
Matt’s family loved me and considered me an adopted daughter. With three sons, having her sons’ female friends around was fun for Gloria. She came back from every shopping trip with presents for me: elaborate hair ties, shower bonnets, and fancy soaps—girly goodies she couldn’t buy for her boys. Larry had a racing sailboat, now moored in the basin behind my house, and Matt and I spent summer evenings cruising around Biscayne Bay on the boat, curled together on the bow, almost in love.
Gloria and I drove through deserted streets to buy dinner. Most of the stores were closed and boarded up, but one fast food chicken place had a long line in front of it, so we parked and waited. The wind trembled every leaf and the sky turned oyster shell gray.
Back at Matt’s, we found some board games and puzzles and ate our dinners. The storm appeared and sounded like a normal Miami thunderstorm—thunder and lightning, the wind howling through the space under the doors. Matt and I spooned in his bed and I fell asleep with the warmth of his familiar body behind me.
I woke up alone at midnight in a darkness that felt almost sinister. The power had gone out, and the storm rattled the boards over the windows. I knew Matt’s room was an addition to the home, and I believed it was less safe than the rest of the house. I scrabbled my way into the living room by feeling along the walls, following voices and candlelight coming from the master bedroom.
“Matt, you left me in there by myself.” I was scared, but when I spoke, my words came out as angry.
“You were sleeping. I didn’t want to bother you,” he said.
I wanted a drink, but was too self-conscious to ask for one. I sat cross-legged on the king-size bed with everyone else. We listened to the storm, wind and rain and thunder, debris pinging like birdshot against the boards over the sliding glass doors in the bedroom. I tuned my radio to Y100 and we listened to Bryan Norcross, our famous local meteorologist. He was our link to the outside world. The phones had long gone dead.
“It’s not the strong winds that destroy windows and homes,” Norcross said in his soothing, authoritative voice. “It’s the debris that turns into projectiles.”
As the wind escalated, huge pieces of debris flew against the house, vibrating the walls. Matt held my hand. I still wanted a drink, but we were huddled in the bedroom, and I didn’t know how to ask for alcohol from people who weren’t drinkers.
“When we move, you need to move to your safe spot, too,” Norcross said from his newsroom, preparing to retreat to a back room with his scant crew. “Examine your house and find a safe place, but don’t lock yourself in anywhere, because if the water starts rising you may have to fend for your life.”
I squeezed Matt’s hand, imagining water flooding the room and wondering how we’d escape, since all the windows were boarded. Wind whistled through every crevice in the house, and I hoped the water wouldn’t reach the ceiling. How would Goldie survive? I’d hold the little Maltese above the surface if I had to drown to do it.
At three thirty in the morning, Bryan Norcross and his crew said they were moving to a safer spot inside their studio and that we should do the same.
We didn’t move right then, but fifteen minutes later windows shattered all over the house like a series of bomb blasts. We ran into the closet and slammed the door, huddling together and watching the walls sway. I imagined the house peeling apart in the wind. The roof shook and my ears popped. The square attic door above us danced from the pres
sure building in the house. We communicated with our eyes as objects hit the house and vibrated the floor and walls. No one spoke.
“Do not think that you are in any way safe,” said Norcross over the radio waves. “If you have not hunkered down and gotten that mattress over you, friends, this is the time to do it. Get into an interior closet, get a mattress over your head, and wait this thing out.”
I clasped my hands over my ears. Larry showed us the pressure lowering on the barometer he had taken off his sailboat. I was thankful to have someone nearby who wasn’t panicked. Maybe we’d live through this.
Then the batteries in my radio died.
More crashing sounds and splintering glass and wood, like a demolition crew taking down a building rebar by rebar. I held my breath, listening for my lovebirds chirping, but the storm growled on the other side of the wall, drowning any living voices. I held little Goldie in my lap and petted her, consoling myself.
After an hour in the darkness the storm relaxed, and we left the closet. Bradley peeked outside and reported that the storm seemed over. We opened the bedroom door and walked into the living room, starting to assess the damage in the darkness, when another wall of wind and debris struck the house, and we ran back into the closet. The lull had been the eye of the storm, an eerie break in the calamity, like the bells ringing between rounds in a prizefight. The pressure dropped again—the winds had reversed and grown stronger—and the house shook to its foundation. I waited for the roof to collapse and kill us all.
The hurricane ditched us around sunrise, crawling west to say good morning to Fort Myers and Clearwater. Every window in the house was broken; a foot of water stood in the sunken living room; dirt and debris were strewn all over the kitchen. The pressure had pushed one of the windows from the frame, leaving a large, rectangular gap in the concrete of the house. Cabinet doors were torn off their hinges in the kitchen, and the piles of dishes inside had delicate heart-shaped green leaves stuck between the plates. The baby lovebirds were safe in the bathroom and chirruped when they saw me, clambering to the front of the cage.
The Bird Market of Paris Page 8