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The Day History Changed
Tuesday, September 19 evening and sunset painted with bright colors the sky. It was a magical display, an iridescent spectacle. Beautiful as it was, the oranges, greens, purples, yellows, reds and blues only confirmed the terrible outcome. I was nineteen when with awe I contemplated how Georges turned the evening firmament those same tones, that predicted the tragedy that followed its path over the Island exactly nineteen years ago.
That night everything seemed to pay an awkward homage to nature. A frightening calm enveloped us. Outside, nocturnal critters silenced with reverence. The cicadas stopped chirping and the coquí didn't sing that night. Not a single leaf moved as clouds veiled the sky, turning off the stars that blinked us a farewell.
It was eleven o'clock when we watched with resignation the last report in the news. The weather lady repeated those last coordinates with heaviness in her tone. Her eyes, opaque spheres of sadness, spoke more than her words did. "Que Dios nos proteja", was her last phrase, and I felt I'd been thrown to the wolves by the inquisitors.
The wind howls, the metaphor reads, but Maria never did. She cried. She screamed. There was no gentle knocking on the door asking to let in. The she-demon broke through and did as she pleased. A strong gust gushed with gray claws snapping up the first tree branches while the night skies tore in rain that not poured, not even showered, they crashed down, as heavy as a hammer plummets on wood.
Two thirty-seven in the wee hours and the last satellite image showed the eye, an uncommon double eye that formed in the center of the storm that meant only one thing, the witch was strengthening even more. Brushing south La Isla Nena, Vieques was the las stockade to all Puertorricans. The so hoped turn to the north, that last switch of path that had happened so many times before, would not come this time.
With wind gusts that reached the two hundred miles per hour, Hurricane Maria swept with unmerciful force through cities and towns; over mountains, valleys, lakes and rivers. Communications fell around three o'clock in the morning, an hour later of that dreaded Wednesday morning, electricity gave us light for the last time. At six o'clock, September 20, Maria made landfall officially. That was the day our history changed forever.
The sun rose but we never saw it. Day light hid behind that dense barrier of swirling clouds and raging winds that only served to let us see with clarity the fury of a monster dragging it's enormous cloak over us for twenty four hours. Like a colossal lumberjack, it chopped branches, snapping and even taking from their roots out the thickest trees. Maria, like a banshee, cried out loud, making all living things to fear and tremble as it made it's way through and out so easily... so easily.
Maria had no mercy as she came in the name of Mother Nature, an emissary to take what belonged to hers. She'd emitted her verdict and charged us guilty, sentencing us humans to extermination for all what we'd done to her. And I, sitting on a chair behind the window watched and feared, cried and prayed while my eyes hardly believed what they saw. All kind of stuff, carried in the air by the extreme winds. A fully grown up lemon tree landed right in front of my porch, while huge tree branches landed on top of our roof, none of those belonged to any of the trees planted in my yard.
Devastation. As if victims of a nuclear attack is was the best way to describe the scenery the next day. Under a cold and gray sky, houses built of wood were reduced to rubble, roofs had flown away leaving zinc or aluminum panels knotted in trees as if done by the hands of a mythological giant, or thrown all over the place. Electric posts were on the ground, snapped like toothpicks. Cars left parked on the road were hauled by flooding waters and piled up against buildings streets away.
With awe we contemplated the effect of tons of ocean water mixed and sprayed by two hundred miles per hour winds, burning all vegetation turning the once coated in shamrocks and emerald fields and hills into barren soil covered in mud and rocks, twigs and debris.
