September Rain

Friday evening, six or eight hours before Hurricane Ike was expected to make landfall, the outer band's high winds whipped through town. I had made a lot of stupid plans with people on what to do during the hurricane. I wanted to fly a kite in the wind. I wanted to make trashcan hurricane drinks and soak some apples in there to eat after we were done drinking.

But the wind went from very calm to very violent very quickly, and none of my stupid ideas came to fruition. The sound you hear when you hold a conch up to your ear resonated outside, and trees and picket fences knelt in mercy to the wind.

Within the hour, the power went out.

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There was still no electricity on Saturday morning, but by noon, the rain clouds had cleared out and the strong winds had passed.

There were heaps of debris lying on both our front and back lawns, and half the picket fences around our yard had been knocked over. Our fence is a wall of rotting wood, fifteen or so years old and having edured probably more than twice as many tropical storms. We simply stood them back up and nailed the boards back together.

My mother keeps a tree in the front yard with low-hanging branches with prickly leaves that not only stab me when I mow the lawn, but also leave an itchy sensation hours after the fact. The storm had ripped most of the branches off, and I silently celebrated inside, hoping the damned thing doesn't make it.

Shingles had been shredded from our roof in several areas, causing water leakage into a few of the second-storey rooms.

A few years ago, when Rita was supposed to demolish the city, we bought a huge roll of tarp in preparation for roof damage. When Rita veered east and missed us completely, we stashed the tarp away in some dark corner. Consequently, after Ike damaged our roof, we were unable to find it. So in its stead, we took down our shower curtains and nailed them over the holes in our roof.

We cleaned up and made ad hoc patches for whatever damage we could before evening, before it got too dark. I settled myself on the roof with a copy of the latest Maxim, an issue with a nude Megan Fox donning the cover, body parts strategically covered by a bedsheet.

A cold-front was passing into town as Ike was making its way out, carrying a comfortable breeze that made having no electricity slightly bearable. Someone in the distance with an incredible sound system -- and, apparently, a generator -- blasted some Spanish opera-sounding music. The night was like a scene ripped straight out of a movie, based in some European country like Italy or France, with a shot of the rooftops of a town, the streets uninhabited, and the sound of singing or prayers echoing in the distance from a source unseen.

After the sun dipped in the West and my eyes could no longer make out the words or pictures in the magazine, I rolled over and dozed off on the rooftop.

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Sunday morning, 6am, a second band of rain swept over us, dousing me awake from the rooftop in cold, fat, chubby raindrops.

I climbed off the roof into a window, and quickly ran around the house, closing all the rest of the windows before our carpet took water damage. After washing off and towel drying, I went to find a clean set of clothes only to find that the shower curtains we nailed to our roof did not hold.

The ceiling above my closet had collapsed under the weight of rainwater that had leaked through the roof. My entire wardrobe was covered in dirty rainwater and damp sheetrock debris. I would go the rest of the weekend without a clean pair of underwear.

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We spent the next seven hours trapped indoors, unable to open windows or doors due to the heavy rain, and without electricity to power an air conditioning unit.

In the late afternoon, when things dried up a bit more, the family and I ventured out and about in the city to find an air conditioned restaurant. I commandoed a pair of basketball shorts and a polo shirt I found in my brother's old closet.

We found electricity in the western parts of the city, where the hurricane had done the least damage, and settled into a deli. Even there, they had just regained electricity, and they served stale bread on their sandwiches and cold soup.

We stalled for a few hours after eating just to bask in the wonders of air conditioning.

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Came home in the early evening, power had been restored, and I could begin running loads of water-damaged clothes through the washer.