A first Day Birthday

I wore what I had, warped leather shoes and miss-matched socks. This was me looking forward to getting baked. By baked I mean lathered in a batter of flour, eggs and water on the first day of school. It is how my friends normally greeted me on my birthday in early September. This time I hoped for a belated celebration due to the circumstances and so I carried my books in my hands, well, the ones not soaked and dried. I walked alongside my friends into the school yard and into the gym. Inside the gym we were, honestly, still outside.

 Walloped into numbness, it rained and we didn’t care, looking at each other in the rain saying, “Like yea, been there done that.”

 Even though I still expected to get my usual birthday greeting, I thought wrong. My birthday was now to be remembered for a different reason. One I already hoped to forget.

Most of us carried eight subjects in our senior year, and final exams waited at the end of it. So, do I remember the night in September? I do, but I wish I didn’t.

Orientation ended with the arrival of a tempestuous beast. Our more experienced parents and grandparents prepared mentally for what lied ahead and it showed on their faces, but on the eve of the first day of school, a hurricane we later nicknamed Ivan the Terrible arrived, and we fledglings celebrated!

***

(September 2004) The rooms were dark since all the windows were covered with ply board. My siblings and I, along with our grandparents, listened to authoritative voices on every public service announcement platform stressing the danger and direness of the situation. Evening arrived and we practiced, huddled around the battery powered radio like moths around a flame, and the storm wasn’t even there yet. I for one believed this could be overkill.

So I asked my grandmother, “Why the long face? It’ll be fun,” and she looked at me as if I was stupid.

 “A young bird doesn’t know a storm,” she said.

Another public service announcement chimed in on the radio. Schools being used as emergency shelters were listed and the emergency contact numbers along with them. All schools were closed until further notice. I was so happy, no school and I get to ride out a hurricane. It is every teenagers dream, isn’t it?

Granddad also listened. He sighed, “Oh boy, here we go,” he said, a trip down memory lane for him but memories of what?

Anticipation of arrival during the daytime when I could see everything and say ‘wow’, ended in disappointment. My younger sisters Joy and Melissa went to bed as disappointed as I was, but I didn’t follow them. I stayed with my grandparents. My parents were asleep.

Granddad sighed again and went to bed too. I didn’t get it, “Why is everyone going to sleep?” I asked.

Grandma got very annoyed, “It’s going to be a long night Sherice you should get all the sleep you can.”

 When I checked on her later in her bedroom she appeared very worried and not relaxed enough to fall asleep, unlike Grandpa Ralph who was already snoring.

The night whistled. I never heard that before. Looking under the groove of the window where I could still see under the ply board, I thought I would be able to see the air I listened to, but I only saw the effects. Palm trees in the yard bowing lightly and gracefully in choreographed worship and then with palm branches high in the air like hands in praise, back and forth, on and on in an awesome display of the power of wind.

“Sherice, go to bed. You’ll have no problems waking up later on, trust me, you won’t miss a thing,” Grandma had a savage reply for just these kinds of situations, and it kicked the remaining fun out of the experience because I knew nothing good would follow those remarks, nothing good ever did.

Setting my grin aside, the whistling slowly transitioned to howling. I again looked under the window and then glanced at my wise old granny for answers, but her eyes were closed. This was where the fun began.

I walked the house. In the dining room, my dog Max curled up under the dining table whimpering. Rottweilers aren’t afraid of anything, right, only a bright flash coming in under the front door accompanied by cracking thunder. I never ever heard it that bad before either, not even in the occasional thunder storm. Our roof design amplified the thunder. I learned that in school, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

Begging Max to come to me was another first, but I begged, “Hey Max, it’s just a little thunder, come, come on, please come,” unfortunately the intervals between lightning and thunder got shorter and shorter. Max wouldn’t budge.

Although, the last crackle really slapped me onto my feet. Ok, so I took Grandma’s advice and finally went to bed. By then the wind really picked up, almost screaming like a siren, and I didn’t know the ply boards were supposed to vibrate. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep in all that noise, but I tried. Not why but how could anyone else, Grandpa Ralph, sleep in that? The ply boards rattled, almost like the thunder. How much worse could it get?

(Six hours later)

Forget the floating flashlights, and the radio, and ply boards!

“Max, Max!” In a state of panic I shouted at Max but didn’t think he could hear me. Of course the dog could hear me. He shook, and whimpered, squinting in the rising water and torrential downpour coming through a gap in the ceiling bed. The dining table sheltering him toppled on its side. Why was I even calling Max? Max was the least of my problems.

I still think it is impossible for rain to fall so hard, and it surprised me that the ceiling bed clung to the upper walls with all the forces trying to yank it off. Dad pulled two more squares down and with a rope he harnessed the ceiling to his body trying to hold it down. Despite his construction site muscles, he almost took off by means of a ceiling parachute. Mom, who also in futility tried to bail the rising water out with a metal bucket, shouted at him, “Keith, let go or else you’re gonna get sucked up!”

“Huh? I can’t hear you,” he said, dangling up and down trying to use his body weight to hold the ceiling bed in place. This desperate act came from knowledge of a lack of insurance on the house.

“Keith, Let go, you can’t hold it!” mom shouted, this time he listened.

My dad was like a real super hero. The ceiling bed blew away the way a sheet of paper would the second he let go. Dad’s obedience might have saved his life. We only had one room now to shelter in and we needed to get there. Inside our grandparent’s probably slept, and if they were sleeping they had nerves of steel. We waded through the water and waterfall of needle-like raindrops to get to the door. Barging in, we saw Grandpa Ralph still sleeping and Grandma sitting on the bed beside a bucket on the mattress, catching a stream of water from above. Amazingly the roof and ceiling over their bedroom, despite the leakage remained solidly intact, perhaps due to a common sense design.

Each room had its own roof which was purposely designed for such an event. Maybe theirs was built properly enough.

Grandma expected this visit, and the expression on her face told me she’d been here before. Nonchalantly she leaned over and jammed her elbow into Granddad’s side to wake him up, Ralph, wake up and move over, we’ve got company. Keith is the roof gone?” she asked.

They abandoned their home to shelter with us in ours. Fate can be cruel sometimes.

“Everything is gone,” dad replied.

As wet as we were everyone including Max climbed into bed and huddled together.  Granddad still slept and we needed him to budge a little. He got jammed in his side again even harder this time, “Ralph, wake up and move over.” Grandma said.

He only rolled on his side with a groan this time saying, “What, let me sleep.”

“The roof is gone, make room for everyone,” after saying this, Grandma again lied down and closed her eyes. She’d definitely been here before.

Daylight took forever and ever and ever to come. The stinging rain, lightning and thunder, and enduring the night evoked feelings of survival like in the old maritime stories I enjoyed reading at bedtime. Now I understand why they were written.

After a long and merciless flogging, a sudden calm drifted over us, the eye of the storm finally made it. We walked out to survey the damage, it was bad. I think I heard Dad say, “An angel has covered us under its wings tonight,” when he saw the utter devastation surrounding the single room we sheltered in. The rest of the house was gone and under a cloudless sky, as far as the eye could see, debris of the frames and roofs of so many houses littered the path ahead.

We had no choice, staying meant certain death when the eye of the storm passed. Instead of running the gauntlet we walked by faith, carefully, hoping time stayed on our side. There could have been downed power lines lurking in the debris and so many other hazards to think about, but our family wasn’t the only one out there and everyone headed in the same direction behind us, assuming that wherever we were going, there would be the safest place to be.

We made it to our Grandparent’s house before the eye of the storm passed. Their house stood like a beacon, and we sheltered in place there with seven other families.

This proved to be the longest night of my life. When the other side of the storm landed on the roof, it shook the house to the very foundation. I kept asking my Grandmother, “How much longer?”

“It’ll pass. If you go to sleep, it’ll pass even quicker,” she said.

I cried and said, “I can’t Grandma? It’s too awful.”

“You already survived it once. All you need now is a little faith,” she replied.

This gave me enough comfort to sleep. At daybreak the raging bull continued to rage as if there was no end in sight, I found an un-boarded window inside the bathroom on the ground floor. Everything outside bowed and buckled in a thin veil of white. I watched the walls of a house give way. A night of terror it endured, but it could endure it no more. The walls fell outwards one at a time, and I imagined this being what happened to my house while we sheltered in my grandparents bedroom there.

One more day passed and the violent weather petered out by nightfall, but no one dared to go outside. We went to bed instead. By morning, light bouts of rain fell but in-between the sunshine, and one at a time we ventured out. My dad was the first to go out to inspect the roof.

It remained intact. My grandparent’s house came out of the melee unscathed. As a matter of fact, it was the only house left standing.

In a three hundred and sixty degree scope, as far as the eye could see, it looked like a bomb had detonated. Buildings which took months and years to build with the strong arms of many men were crushed in the palm of Ivan the Terrible in one night! I learned, I learned, I learned.

I learned about the true power of wind and water, and ended up with new-found respect for hurricanes. The anniversary of my survival is now on my birthday. Nobody in my household wished me a happy birthday on my birthday and I wasn’t offended. For the first time it became a wakeup call that my birthday could become enshrined in natural disaster every year. A first day birthday was now the worst birthday in the world.

The only interaction we had with the outside world was a radio. Schools which were being used as shelters were to remain as such while those that weren’t would be reopened in days as long as they were able to. Also, the external examination body embarked on a lively debate about whether or not to postpone final year exams. When the verdict came back, the answer was no, so seniors were first in line to get back in school, that is, if we could find something to wear.

So, I wore what I had on the new first day, warped leather shoes dried in an unreal blistering sun, a miss-matched pair of socks I found in the rubble of my destroyed home, and by some miracle I also found some of the text books my parents bought for my final year, wrapped in plastic but still wet, which I also attempted to dry in the broiling sun.

My clothes were wrinkled and I couldn’t press them. I gave myself a fancy hair do to compensate. When I got there we all looked the same, stunned, walking in the same direction in a bundle like drooling zombies mindlessly entering the school campus, but herded into the gym like sheep. When I looked up, I looked up at the sky. One minute it was bright and sunny, the other it rained and poured. Nobody cared. This cycle of sunshine and rain continued for most of the morning.

I still anticipated my birthday tradition which no one talked about. Eventually I realized it might not come at all.

I walked alone to the classroom. On the way I heard giggling around the corner so I stopped to listen to the gossip if there was any. Then there was silence.

I inched, and inched but still heard no gossip. As soon as I broke the corner I immediately got slammed in the face with a gooey but familiar texture, “Surprise!” they all shouted, “Happy birthday Sherice! We love you,” they said, and plastered my hair a little more. I got baked!

No birthday cake or reason to celebrate, but they remembered. My friends remembered my birthday and this time it became a real surprise for me. We were all in the same place, having survived the worst hurricane in our memory to this day and the first for all of us, but my friends were awesome. If there was something to be happy about, they would find it, and this is the reason why I should not have been surprised in the first place.

There wasn’t a single person unaffected by Ivan the Terrible. Four of my friends lost their homes the way I did, but real friends stick together, don’t they?

For the rest of the year I stayed at my grandparent’s home while ours was rebuilt. The whole community banded together to help rebuild each other’s homes, and by the end of the year, most of those who sheltered with us that night got their homes rebuilt. Along with all my friends, I prepared for graduation. We made it!

I remembered my grandmother’s words of wisdom, “You already survived it once, now all you need is a little faith.” She survived Ivan the Terrible, but sadly, she passed three months before graduation.

Grandma had advanced heart failure. It was a miracle she survived such a brutality of nature as hurricane Ivan in the first place.

I still get baked every year, and still look forward to it. It helps me remember my first day birthday, but it also helps me to forget something else.

THE END