It has been awhile!
A short story about a long adventure.
Looking back into the time machine, with the Anniversary of Hurricane Hugo at the door, September 18, 1989. This story is about survival. Survival of the devastating measures of Mother Nature, the Eye of the Storm in more than one aspect. How Communities can come together and fall apart in the name of disaster. It was a defining factor in my life, of who I was, who I wanted to be and who I became.

It was 1989, I had been living in the Virgin Islands for about four years. I came down to the Islands from a solicitation of an old boyfriend, with promises of Paradise, Sailing, Surfing and Love! I was on the next plane and instantly living the dream! It went pretty well for a time, but as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. The boyfriend that I was convinced was "the one!", wasn't!! We had grown apart, I was pursuing my art and created a business and it did not fit into his Errol Flynn life of sailing the high Seas with Movie Stars and Corporate Ass-hats. Meanwhile, we had "acquired" a custom built houseboat that was originally intended to be a restaurant, called "the Floating Hilton". It was Gianormous, and lived comfortably back in the Mangrove Lagoon in Red Hook, St. Thomas. It was PERFECT!! Eight 12v batteries under the living room couch, a wind generator on the roof, the roof was a rain catch for a 6000 gallon fresh water cistern under the boat. A true "flushing" head and a Galley that was set up for a Restaurant!! A wrap around porch with a 100 gallon propane tank and a draw bridge dinghy dock!! What the Hell else could you ask for??? So, the said boyfriend, gets a call to work on a private Yacht in Florida. He leaves and I have the Floating Hilton to myself!!! Oh Hell Yeah!!! It immediately is turned into my floating Sign Shop with living quarters. I have a 12ft dinghy that works most of the time and Horse Feathers Bar is about a 2 minute dinghy ride away!!! What's NOT to love???

I had Boats lining up to be lettered!! I had the largest office in the world! I couldn't go anywhere with out someone, coming up and throwing down a piece of scrap paper or a bar napkin and asking me for a "quick design"! I was on top of the world! There was little competition in my field on the Islands. I was feeling pretty good about my "spot" in society. I was successful, I was in demand and people had a genuine respectful attitude towards me. What an awesome feeling!

Then came September, 1989...
Weather systems started in June of that year. It was no big deal. There were 15 Tropical Depressions, 11 Storms and 7 Hurricanes, and only 1 Hurricane categorized at a 3+ until Hurricane Hugo. Starting September 9th, 1989, the Weather Stations on VHF radio started their normal chatter. I had just finished a large contract for a Real Estate Company on St. John. I was tired, feeling like things were level in my life and it was just another "Storm Watch" that I would probably have a couple rum drinks in its honor with! September 10, 1989! Hugo was now a Tropical Storm, picking up speed and nothing to be scoffed at. The Eye of the Storm was small and the width of the Storm was widening. When the Eye of a Storm is small, that is an indication of it holding together, packing a punch and nothing to take lightly. Okay, now the weather station has my attention!! By September 14th, Hugo had officially strengthened into a Hurricane. On September 15th, Hugo turned West- NorthWestward and quickly turned into a Category 5 Hurricane! Somewhat rare, it was holding at 160 mph sustained winds and heading right for our beautiful Islands and my comfy world of bliss! NO, NO, NO!!! Not suppose to play out like this!!!

By this time, the Islands were in panic mode. The Stores were out of water, batteries, canned food and Ice. The gas stations were selling out of fuel and only open for a few hours a day, the lines were insane! Flights off the Island were WAY over sold. Hugo's tracking was taking him right at us!! I have been in quite a few Hurricanes in my life, but never a Category 5 and usually on land, in a nice safe dwelling??? I started to investigate other options to wait out the Storm. My houseboat was awesome, but could not leave the Lagoon to a safe haven on it's own. I started to "Batten down the Hatches"! Thank God I had a profession that made me stock up on tape!! I taped up all the sliding glass doors, there were only little spy holes to look out of. I lashed down the propane tank with tons of rope. I opened up the holds for the water tank so I didn't sink myself. I ferried a ton of stuff off the houseboat, (just in case?!). I borrowed at least six anchors from a Charter Co. that I did business with and just threw anchors off all side of the houseboat.

September 16th, 1989, AM
I made the decision to leave the houseboat. I called some friends that said I could come stay at their efficiency condo! I packed my generator, some clothes and my African Grey Parrot up and we literally surfed off the houseboat to the dock. I tied the dinghy up, said a couple "Hale Marry's" over it and drove my jeep to the Condo. Well, it was going to be cozy!! Six people, two dogs, a cat and my Parrot! Of course everyone welcomed me with open arms as they liberated me of my generator!! Awesome!! By now it was getting dark, I had pretty much resigned the fact that I would never see my Jeep again either and settled in with a warm rum drink. We were the unfortunate ones to have missed the run on the ice and by now the power failures were longer and more often. We did manage to re-wire the ceiling fan switch into my generator, so we had the ceiling fan and a small tv that we ran our one and only video through, Batman! The first one with Jack Nicholson as the Joker!!

September 16th, 1989, PM
So being drunk was all of the sudden, not an option for this girl!! Everyone was useless and complacent! I threw all the alcohol out over the balcony! I was public enemy #1 within a 3 second time span!! The Hurricane was now raging at full force!! There were no communications, no radio, no info on what was going on at all!! It was pitch black and the noise from outside was deafening inside. We had taped up the sliding glass doors that was the whole East wall of the Condo, but the windows were bending in, with at least a four inch convex flex that was luring tons of water into the Condo floor. It was soaking the floor and the floor was sagging so bad, I thought it was going to collapse. We cut the rug out and threw it over the balcony. While we were wrestling the rug over the side of the balcony, a huge industrial size dumpster went flying by us and a few cars!! We were on the Fourth floor of the Condos!! That was a big bowl of Holy Shit! We bailed the excess water off the floor, took the beds apart and shoved them up against the windows. We pulled all available furniture up against the bedding for more support and took refuge in the bathroom, where there were no windows. Yes! Six people (who were now sober, you're welcome), two dogs, a cat and my Parrot! Henny Penny (my Parrot) hung out on the shower rod, while we took turns, two at a time snoozing in the tub full of pillows. It stunk, it was hot and I was never more grateful in my life to have a safe stinky place with friends!

September 17th, 1989 AM
Sore, miserably hot and smelly, we emerged from the bathroom. It was an unsettling type of quiet. There was a strange light in the sky, like a dreamsicle orange-pinkish hue. There was a humming in the air, a whirling low pressure noise??? Oh Shit!!! It was The Eye!! The Eye of Hugo was over us!! It wasn't over!! It was a strange type of beautiful awareness that overcame us. We took the animals outside for a potty walk (except for Henny) and then put them back in the Condo while we went for a bit of a walk about in this amazing tube of confining weather!! There, to my amazement was my Jeep!! How fortuitous was THAT?! We wanted to see what had happened to the Island so far. We knew that once it started to get dark again and the winds came up, it was time to get back inside, but for now.... Let's go check it out? See if anyone needs help?? We jumped in the Jeep and headed for the Marina, but we were quickly turned around by too much debris in the road. Back towards the middle Island road to town! I shoved the Jeep into 4X4 wheel drive and off we went! We were slow and go for quite some time. We were in a small town before Charlotte Amalie
Capital of United States Virgin Islands, when we realized, maybe this was NOT a good idea?! There was absolute Mayhem and Civil Disorder! Looting, gun fire and chaos!! We turned that bad-boy Jeep around and headed back to the Condo. The sky went from sherbet orange to a deep magenta, then purples! The humming in the air went from a dull pulsating whir, to a slightly higher pitch and more persistent sound. I stepped on the gas a little more, but in 4x4 mode, there is some what of a constricted speed! The rain was more persistent, the sound of the wind got higher and higher and the sky drew darker. Shit, we stayed out too long!! The dirty side of Hugo was upon us and we still had about five miles to get back to the Condo at about 5mph! We were in a Jeep CJ-7, no top! The wind came up so fast, it was incredible!! We got back to the Condo's, everyone jumped out like clowns out of a Circus car!! We were running for the corridor of the Condo, for the stairs. I was the last one out of the Jeep, running for the corridor, when one of my friends yells, "heads up!!!!" So I look up and a huge piece of debris is flying at me and I put my arm up. BLAM!! Hits me straight on!! If I had not put my arm up, it would have hit me straight in the forehead and probably killed me. It took a huge piece of bone out of my left forearm! My Ulna bone was separated by a pie shaped chunk. I was numb, in shock and just knew I had to get inside. We all ran inside the bathroom with all the animals. Someone said something about my arm, I passed out. I don't remember much until a couple days later.

September, 19th, 1989.
It was raining and raining and raining! My arm hurt, I was in and out of consciousness, someone gave me rum.

September 23rd, 1989, AM
Someone found a radio station that was sending, there was a hospital open in Charotte Amalie and the roads were open!! To everyone's amazement, my Jeep was still there in the parking lot!! Someone put me in my Jeep and said they were driving me to the Hospital, but first I said I needed to go see if the Floating Hilton was still there. We drove to the Marina. We stood at the shores edge, there was nothing but mangled docks, power boats and sailboats up on the roadside and the Lagoon where the Floating Hilton used to live was a tangled mess of debris and sunken boats and piles of boats. We found the Floating Hilton, it was deep in the mangroves. We counted 26 boats under it, on top of it and through it. It was totally mangled and twisted. One of my mooring neighbors was rummaging through his pile of rubble, in his underwear. He saw me and started screaming wildly that "my houseboat was what started it all!!" WTF??? Right?! My houseboat summoned Hugo to our Harbor?! He was totally in shock still and just loosing it!! Time to get to the Hospital, I was feeling queasy, lightheaded and in a lot of pain.

There was still so much Civil Unrest, the person that drove me to the Hospital abandoned me there. (I hold no ill regard, it was insanity down town and all over the Island! Thank and bless their souls for the one that got me there to the Hospital!) I had some internal bleeding and a huge pie shaped wedge piece of bone chunked out of my left arm. I was given some pain killers, put on antibiotics and put in an arm cast. As I started to walk out of "Emergency", my cast fell off my arm??? The Hospital had nothing but unqualified volunteers and I was an experiment! Back in, I go, and I talk the "technician" into "how to apply a cast, (lab #101!")

September 23rd, 1989, PM
I can't remember how I got back to the Condo or who the Hell was even there? But my generator was gone, along with four out of the six people that were there. My Parrot was in bad shape, but at least I found her. The dogs and the cat were abandoned, those people actually left the Island without their fur babies??? Who the fuck does that??? The Condo that we had been in, had been flooded and had collapsed floors from the 13"s of rain that added insult to injury of the storm. There was NO housing, nothing....if it withstood the wind, it flooded from the rain. Everything......GONE!! Hhhmmmm, interesting situation, what do you do???

September 23rd, 1989 LATE PM
Grab my Parrot, what's left of the bottled water and a couple of blankets, LEAVE the Condo!! Drunk, stupid assholes!! I took the dogs and the cat too! Now Me with a broken arm and four are trooping down the road in the trusty Jeep. I have NO idea where I am going, but I know I need to be next to the water, never mind that it is raining so hard, I can hardly see?! A car pulls up, "hey! That's so and so's dogs! They had an emergency! We can take the dogs for you!" Cool!!! That's awesome!! Lightens my load, off to the beach we go! Me, Henny and a belligerent cat!! I know that the Resort I used to Charter out of had a bunch of Hobie Cats that were stored on the beach?! Possibly a little cover for us?! Yessssss!! A conglomerate of Hobie's, a hot mess, was there waiting for us! Henny was so happy!! I put her in the mangled rigging, only after I pushed two Hobies together and made us a little hut. The Cat hung with us for about two days, but after that, I never saw him again. Henny and I hung out for almost three months under the Hobies. There was very minimal anxiety. Henny was an amazing "watch parrot" and people actually came down and hung out with us and brought us stuff. We ate out of food lines for almost four months. There was a curfew, initially at 6pm for at least a month, then it went to 8pm for another 2-3 months and then to 10pm and a year later... There was still a curfew by midnight! People were just getting phones back, after a whole year later! I finally found a room to rent! It was actually a really "posh" place in the day, but after the ravaging of Hugo, it was "just a place". What made it exceptional, was the guys that gave me a room there, were phone technicians from Georgia and there for Hugo relief. Cool phone guys!! A year after Hugo, I still had to climb a telephone pole and clip into a line 20' in the air to talk to the States??? WTH???

Side bar;
There was always that ONE boat that was in the harbor, while you were chartering that just pissed you off!! Loud, obnoxious, with loose behavior on board, paid hussy's..... Really just put a kink in your Chartering world, because there was always that deviate guest that polarized to the Smut boat!! Being a behavioral monitor of adult substance can really be exhausting!!! But, I'm a "safety girl"!! So, yay me?? I grew to literally HATE this boat :(

September 26th, 1989.
Learned that the Charter Boat I "hated", was feeding the Eastside of the Island! Wow!! Who knew?! I stood in their food lines and when I was handed a plate of gourmet fixings!!!! Not only was I humbled, but thanked them profusely and confessed that I was a judgmental asshole! They were so nice! People are people, the hardest times, bring out the real and good! Thank you M/Y "Solid Gold"!!!

September, 1st-ish, 1990...
A year later, still wearing a cast on my left arm, I had enough of Paradise and packed up my Parrot and said goodbye to my awesome roommate's and the Islands! I knew my arm was never going to get better until I went back to the States and saw a specialist. There is a lot more to this story, but just writing this much, makes me tired. Perhaps another time. I do know that I was a different person coming home, than that girl that went down there five years before.

Somewhere in the bottom of a large trunk, probably in storage, there are some pictures that I took of that time in the Condo and when we were walking around while the Eye of Hugo was over us. I want to find those and post them at some point...but for now, I just have technical pictures.

So!! Found some Pre/during & post Hugo pictures!! Go to the photo gallery! There was nothing like that era in the 80's, in the Virgin Islands!!