Hurricane memories

It's after midnight, and we've been glued to the television for hours, watching Hurricane Ike as it menaces the Texas coast, and our conversation has predictably segued into reminiscences of our hurricane experiences in the Bahamas. So far this year we've been spared any real damage, but the season is still young.

About eight years ago, Jimmy and I bought a small fifty-year-old cottage in the Abacos called Seagrape House. It had been ravaged in 1999 by what the locals called "da big breeze," otherwise known as the Category 4 Hurricane Floyd, but we had a lot of fun restoring it to a habitable condition.

It's our favorite place in the world: tiny and unprepossessing, and perched high on a peninsula of coral rock, practically IN the ocean: real hurricane bait. But it's surrounded by screened porches so that its five sets of French doors can be latched open to let the cool breezes and the sounds of the lapping waves flow through the house, and there are spectacular turquoise views of the Sea of Abaco from every room. The garden, with its quaint stone walkways, is filled with hibiscus, bougainvillea, oleander, seagrape and palms.

In 2005, Hurricane Frances scuffed us up a bit, but it was Hurricane Jeanne that really got us. She took out the dock and completely swept away the garage, with the car (a 1989 Ford Taurus stationwagon) still in it. The garage was erased, like it had never existed. The Taurus was later discovered where it had floated a couple of hundred yards down the road and parked itself in a neighbor's garage, demolishing the lowered garage door in the process.

This was our favorite car, a 1980 Toyota Corolla that came with the house. Twenty-five years of "big breezes" had left it so rusted out that one time the windshield wipers flew off as we rode along in a rainstorm, and a pair of my Reeboks fell onto the highway through a hole in the trunk.

We finally got so tired of patching up rust holes with Bondo that I just painted a reef scene on it, in an attempt to camouflage its multitude of sins. In the end, Jeanne was the last straw for our ancient Corolla and, alas, it's now in the Great Junkyard in the Sky.