Hurricane Voodoo

In the fall of 2005, before Hurricane Wilma, after the earlier hurricanes, I was staying in Birmingham, chomping at the bit to return to Key West. In my sleep one night, a familiar voice said, “Let’s stay up here a while longer.” I awoke, understood I was not to drive down to Key West just yet. Within a week, Wilma hit Key West and the Keys. Then, I was given the green light to drive to Key West. The carnage was beyond description. Every ground level home in Key West had a big pile of ruined whatever out front. Contract haulers cleared one street of piles of whatever, and new piles of whatever appeared. Two passes were required by the contract haulers on every street where there were ground level homes.

Up US 1 were piles of dead shrubs and trees every hundred yards or so. All trees, including mangroves, were leafless. John Jones told me that after the first hurricane, the shrubs and trees regrew their leaves. After the second hurricane, the shrubs and trees regrew their leaves. After Wilma, the shrubs and trees gave up, went dormant. A Birmingham friend asked me about she and her husband driving down to Florida City and bicycling down to Key West? I told her not to do it; the land and seascape down US 1 below Marathon looked like the moon, and the roadside was covered with piles of dead shrubs and trees. It was many months before shrubs and trees grew new leaves.

The voodoo was, I understood after I was living in the Keys again, that I had my own personal hurricane advisory center. I understood I would be told in a dream, if I had to leave the Keys because of an incoming hurricane. I wrote about that a few times, and said the weather forecasters and hurricane evacuation orders could be ignored, if I did not have a dream telling me to leave the Keys. What do I know? Maybe the angels have steered hurricanes around the Keys, because they did not want me to leave?

I know for a fact the angels steered Hurricane Michelle around Key West in early November 2001, when I was living there and had no way to leave.

I know, because the angels told my wife it was not God’s will that Key West be hammered by Michelle, a very late hurricane of considerable size and power, before she drifted east of Key West and the Keys, and wandered toward Miami and above. I remember very well asking a Key West police officer on Southard Street, near Duval Street, if the Michelle mandatory hurricane evacuation order applied to everyone? Yes. I said I had no way to leave. Would transportation be provided to me? No. Would I be arrested and jailed if I didn’t leave? Pause. No. That’s how I learned mandatory hurricane evacuation orders didn’t apply to local residents, or to homeless people.

It was in late summer 2006 that I learned mandatory hurricane evacuation orders were tied into rate of new residential construction. It was then that I learned what a political game that was. It was then that I learned Monroe County and Key West and other Keys cities had an interesting relationship with Tallahassee and developers, Realtors and Chambers of Commerce. It was then that I learned the hurricane evacuation schedule was basically arbitrary and was fiddled and tinkered downward anytime new residential construction in the Keys threatened to be choked off because new residences theoretically increased hurricane evacuation time. Confounding the theory, many residences were owned by part-time residents, snowbirds they are called, who never were here for hurricanes. Further confounding the theory, Conchs and long-time full-time residents, did not evacuate.

At the very first candidate forum that June, as I recall, held in Tropic Cinema in Key West, I was asked something about the hurricane evacuation schedule, which I might have answered differently, if I had known the full extent of the counfoundment. Not knowing the full extent, I said the Keys are a hurricane zone, and people who don’t like hurricanes perhaps should live somewhere else. That comment was reported with some flair in the next day’s issue of The Key West Citizen. I was glad for the press, but the irony is, I blew it. I blew it, because it did not occur to me to say nobody would have to leave the Keys because of an incoming hurricane, if I was not myself told in a dream to leave, and here’s why … Imagine how that rendition would have been reported in the next day’s issue of The Key West Citizen. Everyone in the Keys would have heard of it within a few days. And, in the same period of time, I would have become known throughout the Keys as a lunatic.

I became known throughout the Keys as a lunatic anyway, but it took so much more work and time (two more county commissioner races, two more Key West mayor races, and one school board race)  to achieve that reputation,

because I did not have the good sense to spin my own personal hurricane voodoo into my answer to the hurricane evacuation schedule question at Tropic Cinema, in June 2006.

So, forget the hurricane predictions now being bandied about for this year. Forget the weather channels. Forget the evacuation orders.

Trust me to tell you if we need to get out of the Keys when a hurricane is coming in. LOL trusting me.

Even so, I trust the angels to tell me if I need to leave the Keys because of a hurricane coming in.

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