Andrew

By Christopher Alan

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew passed over the city of Homestead, Florida, and changed the lives of the residents that lived there. Wayne Stover, a thirtysomething single man, was caught up in the category 5 hurricane. Thankful for his life being spared, Wayne wants to give back to the community. He also wants the change in the air to bring change to him. His life's pattern is as a journeyman philosopher, he is unable to focus his desire and talents to achieve anything productive. Wayne finds out that there are many lessons and perils to learn on the rooftops repairing the damage from the hurricane. Wayne has a burning feeling inside him that he was meant for something significant. His privileged upbringing and wide experiences as an American youth growing up in Europe should not be wasted. He is tormented by the thoughts of his father's wishes for him. Wayne's father is a great and accomplished man Wayne loves and respects as a mentor. However, he is unable to please his father. It is written in the Bible that Andrew approached Jesus and asked Jesus to teach him. Jesus said, "Come with me, and we will change the world." That is all that Wayne wants, in some small way to change the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781662403026

Book preview

The Story of Andrew

The wind and the rain blew horizontally in the most fearsome weather he had ever experienced. The hurricane was at an angry point. Wayne stuck his head out of the boat’s small cuddy cabin to judge his situation; it was not good, and for the first time, he realized he had made a mistake in not taking the hurricane’s approach more seriously. It was too late to get in his car and head for the mainland of Florida and safely out of the hurricane’s path. Wayne had made a mistake, and he hoped he would not die for his error in judgment. The roaring sound outside the small twenty-four-foot pleasure boat was deafening; it was the sound of a train that just kept coming, and he was afraid of the train—the hurricane that was still to come. How had he gotten himself into this spot? He was smarter than this—at least, he thought he was. Wayne’s life flashed before his eyes because his future survival was in doubt.

It was black outside with only the silver glistening of raindrops flying by at 150 miles an hour, reflecting off his flashlight’s beam. A tree, a small tree, flew by his face as he poked his head back inside the small cabin for safety. It was a mistake to get a peek at the weather outside. He ducked back inside the small shelter and did the only thing he could do to survive. Wayne lay on the single bunk and endured the wrath outside just inches away as it rocked his small fiberglass boat violently, and he prayed. He prayed and cursed at the same time. He did not curse God. God was not the idiot that got himself in this predicament. He cursed himself, his own stupidity. Wayne had many days of warnings of the oncoming hurricane, so why he was not up in the mainland safe, he was befuddled. His mind was numb with all the thinking and rethinking and second-guessing himself in the last couple of days. He felt a crash. Something had hit the boat, and it was looking more and more like Wayne had made the worst of all possible decisions. He was scared, physically scared, to the point of shaking. He went over in his head of everything of the last four days and all the decisions that had ended up to this exact predicament.

No, it did not matter. He was where he was, and he did not have to worry if he would do things differently next time. There probably would not be a next time. But it was his nature, and he could not help himself to revisit his decision. The thought process, he knew, would temporarily distract him from the immediate reality, and that was good. He needed to protect his mind. To him, his mind was all important. He was afraid that he would lose his mind in this all-encompassing situation.

Four days ago, the sun was shining in Islamorada, the jewel of the southern United States. The tranquil breeze gave the appearance that all was paradise. There was a note on the news and a buzz among his friends that there was a hurricane out there in the tropics, and it was heading their way. This was not alarming news. There were many hurricanes each year in the tropics that usually missed but scared South Florida. This one was different though. People were starting to pay attention to it, and the traffic in front of the local grocery store on the main road was increasing as cars headed out of the islands. When hurricanes are near, one turns and watches the old lifetime inhabitants of the Keys for their response. They’re the ones whose skin looks like they’ve been mummified by the sun, and their livers are like hard stones, giving them a yellow sheen.

Wayne was at his marina where he worked for the last eight months as a mate on a tourist sportfishing boat. His captain, Tom Hamilton, an old conch, started directing him to put additional lines on his forty-two-foot Hatteras sportfisher. Their charters had all canceled for the next few days to see what the weather was going to be. If Captain Tom was putting more lines on the boat, that meant to Wayne that it was time to be concerned about the weather. As Wayne looked down the dock, all the commercial fishing captains were making fast to their vessels. Many of the boats were leaving the dock without charters onboard. This was unusual. This meant that the dock was being deserted. Tom explained his game plan to Wayne in his slow Southern drawl. Captain Tom had been through this drill many times, so had his father and his father, so Wayne accepted his judgment.

Well, it’s still three days out, and there is plenty of time. If by tomorrow morning it hasn’t turned or slowed, we will go out into the Everglades and bury her, Tom said in his singsong dialect.

Tom had survived many hurricanes in his forty years. He was a son of the Keys. The old-timers when a hurricane came through, in the days before dry docks would take boats into the Everglades, where the waters were only a few feet deep, and they would find a spot where the mangroves were all encompassing the boat so that one could tie it up in a three-hundred-degree circle. Other captains drove their boats into a narrow residential canal and tied their livelihood up from each side of the canal. Still, other boat owners had agreements with the marinas to have their life’s investment hauled out and set up on dry dock. The old captains had many different solutions to the emergency, but if it was a direct hit by a hurricane, nothing was assured, and no action guaranteed the safety of their boats.

I ’ave just the place to put ’er.

It was a big relief to Wayne not to have the responsibility of the big expensive boat. All of Tom’s money was sunk into his charter boat business, and if anything happened to the boat, he would be devastated. Tom also had a family to care for that Wayne did not. Wayne was single and young with few possessions; all his accumulated wealth could be packed into his car. The only exception he had was a twenty-four-foot fiberglass Spacecraft that he had just purchased for his own fishing and diving trips. Wayne believed that if he had a wife and kids like Tom, that the situation would be different, more serious. Wayne did not have the responsibility of the safety of other people. He just had to be ready to get in the car and drive away to safety, leaving his boat to fend for itself.

So Wayne decided to go back to his apartment after helping Tom secure his boat and pack up the car just in case the storm stayed on track in their direction. That was Wayne’s action plan. In the middle of the night, he was going to abandon his boat and head out of the Keys with a full car heading for safe grounds. The problem was where to go. All of Florida was in the hurricane cone of possibility. The other consideration was that the authorities gave a twenty-four-hour evacuation notice, and it took thirty-six hours to evacuate the Keys. There would be a traffic jam on the Overseas Highway for those that waited for the last minute like himself.

The old residents in the Keys had safe houses. Some called them Red Cross houses. Houses that were built with hurricanes in mind, solid poured-cement bunkers. Wayne’s good friend and fishing buddy’s family had a safe house, and he was invited to ride out the storm with them. Another option was a local bar. The Caribbean Club was having a party during the hurricane where the real locals spent their hurricanes in inebriated bliss, defying reality, shaking their fists at the big bad monster. Wayne weighed his options and felt that his three years of college experience would aid him in making the correct decision.

When Wayne got back to his apartment, he had several messages waiting for him on his answering machine. Family members that lived scattered across the country, no doubt, had heard of the approaching storm and wanted answers. The locals had the habit of calling every hurricane a storm until it actually touched down on land nearby. Wayne was trying to fit in with the second- and third-generation inhabitants of the Keys. They were an untrusting group of hardy, forged, weathered people. They did not like or trust Yankees like Wayne. There was a message from the apartment manager on the answering machine that Wayne did not return until later that night. He did not return the manager’s call since he was busy with returning other calls and packing up his car. When Wayne did return the manager’s call, he was taken off guard and shocked by the conversation. The manager informed him that the rules that he had not read but signed stated that his boat, which was at the apartment’s dock, needed to be moved off the property, since leaving his boat there could damage the dock or the apartments down close to the water in a storm. It was explained to him that the boat could break its lines in a storm and cause damage to the condo’s property. This was something that Wayne had not thought of. He had not planned for moving his boat, and it was too late in the evening to start to call marinas to see if they would take his boat out of the water and store it during the storm. Wayne’s initial plan for his boat was to tie it up with multiple lines and let it ride out the storm right in its slip, but now, he had to change his plans.

Tom, the old captain that looked twenty years older than his actual age, called to tell Wayne that the storm had not veered from their path, and tomorrow morning, they would have to drive it deep into the Florida Bay’s Hurricane Alley and tie it up. The dock would not be safe for his vessel in a direct hit by a large storm. He ordered Wayne to be at the boat at five in the morning. Wayne’s plans were all getting changed for him, and he felt like now there was not enough time to get it done and get out of the Keys. Part of him wanted to just get into his car right away and abandon his responsibilities and head for safe land. Another part of him was intrigued with the experience of his first hurricane.

The hull of his small boat rocked violently on the fifteen lines securing it to the mangrove trees in this small bay. Wayne had found in the daylight before the storm what looked like a perfect spot to ride out a hurricane, but now, he had his doubts. There was no deep water for miles, and the open ocean was ten miles away. Wayne believed that no storm surge could reach this far into the bay nor any large waves. He had picked a spot that was just off the main channel through the bay of Florida connecting Islamorada to Flamingo, ten miles north of Islamorada. His logic he felt was sound, but since he had grown up in Connecticut and Europe, his reasoning was not practical. It was only what he believed to be common sense, but common sense is different for everyone. This was his first experience with a hurricane. He had packed the boat with many supplies and also a battery-operated TV and radio. The previous night when he found this spot, after he tied up the boat for hours and went over everything multiple times, he turned on the TV and watched the local news coverage of the hurricane in his little cocoon-like cabin.

Hurricane Andrew was thirty miles off Homestead’s latitude and was heading basically right in his direction; he felt like it was targeting him. He was taking the storm personally. He remembered reading about the hurricane of 1948 and the four thousand that died. He read many accounts of the great hurricanes of the past that went through the Florida Keys. People holding on to trees for survival in the middle of the storm and, later, after the hurricane passed, dying of their wounds. Wayne’s boat had a small cuddy cabin in the bow with two sleeping bunks in a V pattern. The walls and ceiling were covered with a white carpeting liner. A fiberglass cocoon, but would it protect him? That depended on how near the hurricane hit. He envisioned the small boat flying around in the wind. A direct hit by a major hurricane created complete destruction. Nothing he knew was left undamaged. His mind was playing games with him. A single question came to mind. How had he gone from living in a palace in Milan when he was a young boy to the perilous position he was in now? How had he been at the Grand National steeplechase in England, and now, he was crying for life. He needed to go back over his life and figure out where he had gone wrong.

It was the next morning after Captain Tom called and told him that he had changed his mind, and the two needed to bring the Happy Hooker to Hurricane Alley. Wayne met Tom before daybreak at the near-deserted dock, and as they fired the engines and untied the lines, Captain Tom explained again to Wayne what they did in the old days, a spot that the old captain knew and felt was the safest place for the boat in a great storm. Hurricane Alley was a channel on the back side of the islands in the bay of Florida, a sixty-mile square part of the Everglades between the mainland and the Keys. The channel was deep enough to run the Hatteras but was surrounded by tall mangroves on all sides, and by the time they got there, a two-hour trip from their dock, there were already sportfishers tied fast to either side of the trees’ banks fifty feet apart. Tom explained that for a hundred years, captains have been entrusting this safe haven for their boats’ survival. The location was secluded, and Wayne recognized many of the commercial fishing boats and knew their captains. What scared Wayne was if one of the boats broke their lines that secured them and wiped out the other boats, but Tom was not afraid. He explained that he had grown up with all these captains, and he knew that they were not going to slack off their responsibilities. Captain Tom’s confidence eased Wayne’s mind, and the two spent several hours using five hundred feet of anchor line, three-quarters of an inch thick, to secure the Hatteras. While they were tying up the boat, a friend of Tom’s came to take the two back to Islamorada in a small go-fast. The Happy Hooker was there and would stay there until the storm had passed. If she did sink, the water was only eight feet deep so that raising her off the bottom would not be difficult.

Our Father who art in heaven…, Wayne mouthed the words in a small dark space that he hoped was his saver. He made a mental note never to be in this position again. It was agonizing and humiliating, and he made a pact never to tell anyone about this experience in his life. There was nothing he could do now but wait out the hurricane and wonder if his decision was correct. He felt stupid being at the mercy of this hurricane. He was embarrassed of himself. He thought back on his life if he had ever been in such a precarious position. Did he have some knowledge in his mind that could aid him in getting out of this alive? Why had he not just abandoned his responsibilities and driven to safety? Yes, he thought, he had once had a fishing trip, a canoeing trip that went horribly wrong, and he was mad at himself that he was once again in a life-and-death situation he should not be in. He was not as smart as he thought he should be. Not as smart as his father had taught him.

Wayne’s father was the ultimate American success story, son of an immigrant of working-class upbringing. Larry’s drive and determination delivered him from intercity poverty to Jesuit-educated elite upper middle class in one generation. For all that Wayne could achieve in his lifetime, he would never feel as successful as his father and what his father had achieved.

The following day, after being told to move his boat off the condo’s docks, it was spent with Tom helping his employer secure his boat and his house, and by the time Wayne got home, it was too late to call local marinas to look for safe accommodations for his own boat. He would have to do that the next morning, but he had heard from friends that the marinas were full, and they were buttoning up and heading out of the Keys like everyone else. Wayne still had plenty of options though; it was no time to panic. He could drive out of the islands and leave his boat and deal with the consequences after the hurricane passed. The traffic now was steady out of the Keys, and he knew that tomorrow afternoon, it would be slow if the storm had not changed course. That was what everyone was looking for: a change in direction. Locals watched the news on the television, hoping that the storm had broken up or shifted its course like many storms had done in the past. Islanders had gotten complacent in the last ten years because every year, a few hurricanes had threatened their homes, but they either diverted its course away from them or dissolved.

The boat Wayne cowered in shifted severely, and he believed that some or all the lines were breaking. He turned on the little TV that he had brought and saw the satellite image of the storm. It was a perfect hurricane. It was symmetrical, the classic shape, and it was angrier. The eye of the hurricane was thirty miles across and landing on Homestead, and the rings of clouds were eight hundred miles across, and from Wayne’s perspective, the outer bands were hitting him. If this was how violent the outer bands were, he could only imagine the destruction of the eye wall. Wayne was doing some calculating on the three-inch TV screen. All of a sudden, the small screen turned to static. The picture was gone, and as much as he tried, he could not get it back. Wayne tried the radio he had brought along but had no luck getting reception with that either. He figured that all hell had broken loose and was trying to calculate where the signal was coming from. The signal was coming from Homestead, and that was where the storm was now hitting. Wayne was screwed. He was in the direct path of the hurricane, and he was in a small boat in the middle of the deserted bay, and the hurricane was going to get much worse. There was nothing he could now do but hold on for his life and ride it through. His mind ran back to all the hurricane stories that he had read about in all the local history books. He had read a lot of real horror stories on hurricanes in the Keys. He was now just hoping for luck to save his life.

He had made himself an amateur historian on the Keys’ past by reading many books. He was a number, a statistic like the ones he read about, and he would be moved into one or another column—survivor or fatality. He read about a hurricane in 1968 where they were finding bodies back in the Everglades for years. That hurricane moved through Marathon in the Middle Keys and blew a couple hundred of its inhabitants into the shallow bay and drowned their bodies. Wayne was horrified at the idea of someone finding him dead and decayed and eaten by the crabs. He thought of his family, how they would think that he was stupid for the course he had taken in this storm. Or would the destruction be so great that they would never find his body among the miles of unexplored Everglades? He would just disappear. He thought of all he still wanted to do in life, the girls he wanted to love, and the children he would never have. He was dumb. This was silly that he was here, and he should be driving in his car right now halfway to Colorado and visiting his older brother. He should be playing songs on the radio and singing along to Sheryl Crow, And all I want to do is have some fun… The song now played in his head, and he could not get it out. It was his new favorite anthem. He wished he was in the car driving north now.

Wayne needed earplugs. This was something that he had not planned, for the noise outside was deafening. He put each of his palms over his ears to stop the noise but could not brace himself in the pitch-black cabin and had to hold on to something so he would not fall over. His tiny fiberglass cocoon vibrated the noise of the wind outside like an amplifier.

The day before the storm, the traffic on the coastal highway was stop and go, and Wayne spent the morning calling marinas. The effort was useless. All the marinas were through with taking in boats, and all its employees were busy securing up their own property preparing to leave. Many marinas did not answer the phone, and those that did had a humorous tone to their voices. They were full, and Wayne called his fishing friend, Brian, to see if he could get his hands on a trailer to pull out his boat. Brian was busy shoring up his own possessions and family and told Wayne to abandon his boat and come join him at his family’s safe house. Wayne thought that was a good idea, but he had a feeling. He had a feeling that this storm, like so many, was going to threaten but, at the last minute, turn away or break up. His belief was only based on hope. It is human nature to become complacent or to gamble. Humans casually believe that everything was going to be all right, and they could not be harmed by nature. This false optimism was deeply rooted in human nature, at least in Wayne’s nature, a false optimism. Millions of people have died in the history of mankind still holding on to false optimism. Wayne’s nature was so far removed from the instinct of survival. He had been cared for all his life by loving parents. He had never learned in his twenty-seven years the lesson of survival of the fittest. That night, as he went to bed, he was going to follow Brian’s advice and told him that he would be around the next day, to save him some space.

Wayne shivered in the boat as he calculated in his head that the eye of the storm must be upon him. The sound of the rain hitting the hull at 170 miles an hour made a ferocious sound. In his mind, he made many calculations on storm speed and wind speed and which side of the hurricane was the strongest. He sat there and wondered why. Why had he not decided to abandon his boat and stay with Brian at his safe house and still he was in his boat in the storm? Why had he changed his mind at the last minute and decided to save his boat? This boat cost him a lot of money at his age, but it was a bare minimum as a seaworthy boat; it was expendable. It was not worth him risking his life over. It was a feeling, a last-minute feeling that he needed to protect his possessions, a feeling of responsibility.

He felt that he was doing the responsible thing, but actually, impartial people would say otherwise. He did not realize it, but his sheltered upbringing had dulled his sense of survival. He was weak in the ways of survival instincts. His own neck he had never before felt was in jeopardy while growing up. In his world, in his childhood, everything ended well, every story had a happy ending, and the hero always came out on top. He did not realize that during his childhood, his father had made all the large decisions in his life, and that all the decisions were made for his comfort and protection by his father. His father had sheltered his life. He was scared shitless. This was definitely a story. It was a story like the 1948 hurricane that killed hundreds of people. Wayne was listening for the hurricane to pass and the wind to start to die down, but he did not get it. Every indication, it seemed to him, to be increasing in strength. He was exhausted. It was four in the morning, and he had not slept since the night before. He slept well the last night because he had in his mind settled the decision. He was going to be safe and sound during the hurricane in Brian’s house, sleeping on an inflatable mattress on the floor. But now, with the future unsure, his mind had been worrying and working so hard, he was fatigued. He thought about so much. How was his apartment and his car? Was his car underwater with all his choice possessions in them? Was the Happy Hooker on the bottom, and was the boat that he was in filling with water as he lay there? There was nothing he could do. He could not go outside to check. The winds with the rain were too strong and would sting him, tearing at his skin. Free-flying debris would damage his soft flesh.

Sit tight and pray and never make this mistake again, he told himself. He curled up in a fetal position with his palms on his ears, mumbling to himself. No, not to himself, he was praying to God as the little boat rocked from side to side and front to back violently.

The Story of Norma

The wind blows the hardest where hell and heaven meet.

It is the wind that keeps the two apart.

Nature is always about the extremes.

Up-down, hot-cold, dry-wet, on-off

birth-death, pain-pleasure

the naturalists’ laws forged in practice.

The breaking point in the mind

is where two opposing thoughts meet,

the mind decides.

The mind works on these puzzles for a lifetime,

absorbing information like a sponge

only to stop work upon death.

The heart and the mind work together for a lifetime.

Without their cooperation, life would not be possible.

The being’s purpose is for the existence of thought,

the struggle of ideas.

He was going to make a man whom nothing

could shift off his feet; he was going to alter

the face of the earth in some way that mattered.

The agony and the ecstasy.

The little old man lay on the hospital bed in a large room divided by curtains and with the smell of antiseptic dispersing in the air. The smell of the room masked his scent, which was known to all that worked there as the smell of terminus. There was so little left of him at this time that he hardly made a pile under the blanket on top the bed’s mattress. Dan Waldorf had lived a long and full life at the age of eighty-two, and beside him was his wife of sixty years, Norma. Norma was considered by the conchs of the Keys as one of them, although she was born and lived much of her life in Boston. This was a great honor bestowed on the little old hunchback lady. She had though once been bitten by the Keys’ lifestyle. At thirty, she had moved here and seldom left. Because of her time spent here and love for the Keys, they considered her one of the conchs, a rare compliment for a Northerner. Standing next to Norma, beside Dan’s bed, was a nurse monitoring his blood pressure and vitals. It was well-known six hours ago when Dan was brought into the hospital from their home, that he did not have much time left, and that was why a nurse was by his side at all times. Dan and Norma’s two sons and daughter lived far away in other parts of the country, and since Dan had been on deathbed’s door many times over many years, so his children made their peace and stayed away. Dan and Norma were in conversation, and Dan was heard by the nurse saying, You bitch. It was clear and as plain as day what he said, and the nurse snapped her head around in astonishment.

In an instant, the nurse’s opinion of this cute lifelong couple changed. With those harsh words, Dan lay in the single elevated bed with stainless-steel rails and passed. The end of a full life punctuated by the words, You bitch. The nurse was befuddled what would cause him to say that to the old frail sweet lady that was his wife for sixty years. They appeared like a sweet old couple, the couple that every couple wishes to be when they’re that age. In the last six hours, Jean and the nurses had talked and gotten familiar with the couple. She admired their demeanor and age, and she imagined their rich and fulfilled lives. She was told by Norma that they had good, successful children. She always bragged of her children. What she could not imagine was why Dan had said these words. She was infatuated. But what she did not hear was the full conversation because she was immersed in her duties, and the two elders talked in a low, soft tone. Five minutes earlier, Dan had said to Norma in a tired and weak voice that he had always wondered, that he had one question that had always bothered him and wanted answers before his death.

Norma asked him what that was, and he continued, I always loved figs, and for the last thirty years, I have tried to grow a fig tree at the house, and it had always died. I must have planted five trees, and not one grew despite me watering them and fertilizing them and reading books on their care. All I wanted was a nice, productive tree that I could watch grow and eat its fruit. I just wish that I knew why they wouldn’t grow. Was it the soil or the climate…? Our neighbors had some nice fig trees. All the other trees grew just fine on their property.

The air was quiet for a few moments only with the buzz of the hospital in the background. Then, Norma bent down her old sun-scorched face close to his ear and with moist blue eyes spoke quietly, so no one else could hear and said, Dan, I had heard from a friend that fig trees attracted wild animals, rats, and because I didn’t want any around, I put poison on your fig trees. About once a month, I would pour a cup of bleach on the tree so that it would not survive. That is when Dan uttered his shocking worlds and then passed beyond.

Norma then bowed by his bedside, for she was a hard woman and prayed for the loss of her sixty-year partner. She was not sorry for a deceitful act; she had made peace with that years ago. At Dan’s funeral, much of Islamorada was there. They were not there for Dan because few people actually knew the quiet, invisible man. They were there for Norma and to honor her because she was beloved, and all the locals knew her. The people that came to Dan’s funeral were their neighbors and their children. All of the patriarchs’ families of the Middle Keys were there. Dan and Norma had been in the Keys for so long that the locals could not remember that they were not born there like them. The turnout for this unknown man, quiet, diffident man, was close to the same as if one of their own had died.

Dan was back in his youth, an unprivileged city kid that was quiet and was trying to make the most of himself. He started working after high school for a small manufacturing company of a Boston cannery. He was a timid but prideful young man. He worked his way up to foreman in his twenties while all the time going to night school at a local community college to obtain a degree in business. He made favor of the factory’s owner. The self-made industrialist that had a quiet and little bit off daughter Norma, whom he was having trouble marrying off. Norma was in her midtwenties and scared off all the boys that dated her. Her father was concerned and thought that he was a wiser-than-average self-made man and arranged Norma and Dan’s courtship. A few times while they were courting, it seemed like things had fallen apart in their relationship. The old man, the industrialist, fixed things. He sat them both down separately and explained to them that he, the great man, knew best. They were married, and the old successful industrialist being happy with himself that there was nothing he could not do or fix. Dan and Norma worked to establish a relationship. They were so shy to one another that children almost did not come. When the industrialist died suddenly young, it was established his health was the only thing he could not fix. Norma inherited part of the business along with her three brothers.

The brothers, knowing best, advised Norma and Dan to stay away from the business and collect a check, which they did for their entire lives. The brothers did well with the business, and basically, the couple retired to the Keys at the age of thirty. The old industrialist had always wintered down in the Keys with his family and kept a large manor there. When Norma was grown up, she had fine memories of the islands and her childhood vacations. Dan and Norma went down to her childhood vacation home that she loved and spoke so much about. They decided to stay there and bought a small nondescript house in an old neighborhood of Islamorada beside a canal. The two-story house had land for growing plants and fruit trees and was within a working-class neighborhood. They went about creating their own little utopia by adding all sorts of tropical plants and flowering trees. That was Norma’s life; she cared for the children and gardened and grew her tropical trees and flowers. Many a neighbor passed hours at a time at her house talking plants and foliage. In the middle-class neighborhood, there were no fences or locked doors.

By the time she was in her eighties, she was seen as a great old lady of the Keys, and if you had any troubles growing anything or were new to the Keys and needed advice on what and how to grow, she would spend her time enlightening you with her years of wisdom. Everyone thought of her as the sweet old lady, the matriarch of Islamorada. Few knew her for what she was except her husband. To all her neighbors, she was the sweet old lady Norma, the flower lady always seen outside doing some sort of gardening work in her large floppy hat and cotton-print sundress.

She had built long ago a screen, an overhead gardening canopy, put up to shield her and her precious plants from getting too much of the harsh, direct Florida sun. Her neighbors were working people, commercial fishermen, and small business owners and original residents of the Keys. They were the locals, the old conchs, and she was, after many years, accepted into their filings. No one was alive to wonder why she had scared off all those suitors years ago. All was forgotten of how close she had almost come to being an old spinster. For Dan was a saint, quiet in demeanor, but a saint for having stayed with her all through the years, for it was not known to anyone alive except him and the children that Norma, the cute, harmless little quiet old lady, was a first-class raging bigot. She was magnanimous in her feelings. She hated all people of different races, and the only place she could live would be in the south. Because she was so quiet, no one knew of her religion. The industrialist had sat Dan down and convinced him her harsh opinions were of no consequence. Even her own children could not stand her harsh opinions and kept their distance.

Norma was usually out in her gardening house; actually, it was a roofed-off screened-in area, and often, neighbors stopped for a chat. One neighbor was June, which many called the Orchid Lady, and she was informing her longtime friend that there was a hurricane out there, and it looked favorable to come this way. Norma perked up her attention when her old trusted friend gave her this news. There was much work to do if a hurricane was heading her way. People that live for their plants were exceptionally attentive to the damage hurricanes could inflict on their life’s work and love. There were shutters to put up, which she was too old and frail to do by herself. There were hundreds of plants in pots to bring inside to the second floor, and she needed to pack up the car and run to safer grounds. Norma had been through the drill many times over her life in the Keys, and sometimes, she would go through the drill several times during hurricane season. It was a bother, but she accepted it for what it was. June told Norma that she would be over tomorrow with her husband to help Norma if the storm that had been named Andrew was still coming their way. It had been five years since Dan had died, and all of Norma’s neighbors always took care of her and watched out for her. Hurricanes scared her, and she took no chances with them. If need be, she would load up the car with as much as she could with dog in hand and leave everything for the storm. Her backyard looked like a commercial nursery, and she would leave her life’s work for the safety of her son’s home in Gainesville. Her old small house had survived many hurricanes, and she was not worried about it. It was flooded in 1965, and they had restored their home. The waterline in the house from that hurricane went five feet up the cinder-block walls of the first-floor garage and laundry room.

Norma lived dirty; her clothing looked worn, and her house needed repairs. She drove an old pickup truck and never spent any money on herself. She wore the same dress day after day and looked to the untrained eye as a bag lady of some large inner-city. Some felt that because of her obsessions, she would have been one if she had stayed in the city and had not been from money. Her passion was watching things grow, and she had made no time for housework or for her personal appearance. She was close but not quite there to being that crazy homeless person. Her children had long ago stopped visiting her, not wanting to see her decay. Her house was old and filthy, for she did not care for anything other than flowers. Humans had little interest for her. When her husband died, she gave up on all last attempts of her appearance and social attention. When she came to visit her children and grandchildren each year, they were relieved when her stay was over. They never encouraged her to come or extend her stay.

She was now in her pickup truck, heading through the interior of Florida on her way to her number two son’s house. The traffic was high, and she listened to the radio of the hurricane’s track. The hurricane was two hundred miles from Homestead’s shore and was forecasted to hit land in six hours. Norma was safe and sound. She prided herself on the fact that she always outsmarted the hurricanes by just heading out of town. She did all she could for her beloved plants, spending hours with neighbors carrying them up the stairs of her meager house. Her favorite potted plants were put in the upper floors of her house in case the waters rose on the first floor out of the canal. If anything did not survive, she would be sad, but she would start over. She said a little prayer for her home and her friends and looked forward to seeing how much her grandchildren had grown. She was satisfied with her children’s success and now looked forward to seeing her grandchildren succeed. Like her beloved plants, she liked watching her family grow.

The wind had been screaming now for hours, and in the thin fiberglass cocoon, Wayne was growing tired of it and had not slept. He picked up the flashlight and shined it on his watch. It was four in the morning, and he thought that the hurricane’s eye was close, if not directly on top of him. He had given in to the situation because of exhaustion. He made no more calculations, thought no more of what-ifs. His stomach was in knots, and the small cabin was hot and humid. He had reverted to his happy place and was just waiting for it to be over either way, one way or the other. He laughed to himself. He was a college dropout. Maybe if he would have stayed in school and got a degree, it would have prepared him for this situation better. Maybe he would have made better decisions. Possibly not, but it could not have hurt. This was stupid sitting here in a toy boat in the middle of nowhere in a hurricane. Wayne wondered if there was a college class in any institution on how to survive a hurricane and if there was not, how come.

He said to himself, If I live one day, I’m going to teach a class or write a book on how to survive a hurricane, but I will never tell anyone what happened here today. He felt so stupid. He thought of his fishing friend and his family, what they were doing right now and if they were all safe. He thought of his brother in Olympia, Washington, and what he was doing, and he even thought of his boss, the old bastard of the sea, Tom Hamilton. Wayne never called him captain in his mind. He was a captain, had the license, had the harsher manners and ignorant ways. Yes, there was nothing he could have done in his life other than be a captain except a farmer. Wayne had a theory that fishing captains were the farmers of the sea. Wayne had met many people lately within a subcommunity that made their living off the sea. He found them to be farmers that just happened to be working on the sea. He knew this was stereotyping, but he was confident in his assessment. After all, that was Wayne’s talent, his superpower. This was going to be his ticket to success, he was sure.

He was, by nature, an observer. He studied and observed people, and human nature became apparent to him. He was not sure right now how to make it into a living, but somehow, he knew that he would one day. He first learned of his superpowers in college. If he was