Late August in Flagstaff. Outside it rains cold, fat and purposeful drops. I’m inside, and reminded by NPR about the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew. In a shimmering flash I am back in Miami Beach, back in Florida, back enfolded in the landscape that forged me. The water and salt. The crippling humidity and hot weather mania. A tribe of beloveds remains there, a tribe that includes my mother and two brothers. It still feels like home to me. And so does Flagstaff.
Standing in my apartment at 7,000 feet in this little mountain town surrounded by a pine forest, I remember Hurricane Andrew and its soggy, shattering destruction. Miami Beach was evacuated for the storm, so my friends and I crossed the causeway bridge into Miami and hunkered down at my brother and sister-in-law’s house.
Hurricanes let you know they are coming, and we had a day to prepare. We stockpiled water, unearthed our candle supplies, nailed plywood over the plate glass windows that fronted Vincent’s restaurant. We pulled my brother’s boat out of Biscayne Bay and hauled it into someone’s shop. I stashed my patio furniture and the potted plants lining my balcony.
That night as the storm lumbered in, about 10 of us huddled on mattresses strewn across the living room floor of my brother’s house. We had take-out Chinese, scraped shins, battery-powered radios and a blasé attitude. We all had been through hurricanes. And here we were again. Winds blew more than 150 mph; Hurricane Andrew thundered like a train just outside our door.
We survived the storm and spent the next weeks helping the city regain its face and spirit and systems. It feels now like something lived in another lifetime. And perhaps it was. Seven years ago I set sail for these shores of northern Arizona: a flatland fugitive; a disciple of the humid tropics. A woman most realized and released in water.
I’ve been seven years here and remain reverent and mystified by new vocabularies: altitude, the Colorado River, desert smells, snow, the rez, epic parades of red rocks. This place of magnificence and wideness and being alone in big places. This place that smells like spices for Thanksgiving dinner. This place where it is cold water if there is water at all.
In my bayside Miami Beach apartment I used to hear airplanes silver above as they descended into the Miami International Airport. From my bedroom window I watched boats putter along the Intracoastal Waterway. The air was laced with salt; seagulls screeched as they swooped.
From my bedroom windows in Flagstaff I hear the thick rotation of helicopter blades as ambulances alight from the Flagstaff Medical Center. I am lulled by the distant chug of trains. I see the beacon of the peaks. In Miami Beach life was blue and wet. Here it is clear and peppery with the scent of pinions. I behold night skies that seem to bleed stars.
When I first moved to Flag, I taught high school English. One day it began to rain. My students moved toward the windows in what is best described as a zombie state. They earnestly pressed their little fingertips onto the windows, looking as if they believed they tried hard enough, they would be able to touch the falling water through the glass. Rain, one of them said, in an astonished and papery whisper. They stood transfixed and unselfconscious. I was incredulous at their response, their open and aching awe for the benediction of rain. Here rain is worshipped; in Miami it was tolerated.
And so I ponder the alphabets of Florida and Flagstaff, the monsoons and mountains overlaying 20-year-old memories of a hurricane.
A good, long patch after the howling started, the winds quieted, and we knew that the eye of the hurricane was upon us. Reluctantly we opened the door and waded toward the street, stepping over fallen palm fronds, coconuts, uprooted trees. The skies were low and the same color grey everywhere you looked. A light rain fell, and after an hour or so it began to come down more insistently. The drops were warm and smelled like fertile earth. They telegraphed to us that more was on its way. And so we turned toward home.
