The cab picks them up three hours before departure time. Although the airport is normally twenty minutes away, today there will be delays for the demolition equipment and then the ambulances when bodies are found. The two-lane asphalt skirts the central hills to the coastal village of Grand Case. Gendarmes halt the cab at the roundabout where Boulevard de Grand Case, the primary street through the center of town, joins the main highway.
The cab driver talks over his shoulder. “From this point all the way to the airport is one-lane. Roadblocks at every intersection control the flow of traffic. It will be slow, but we will make it in time.”
The driver points up Boulevard de Grand Case past a procession of dump trucks to a backhoe and a front-end loader clearing waist-high rubble from the street. “The town survived the front of the hurricane with only wind damage. When the eye of the storm passed over, the mayor, fortified with rum, ran down the street cheering that the storm was over. When the backside hit, the ocean rebounded with a monster wave that leveled the condos and restaurants fronting the bay. Only the cathedral withstood the pounding.”
The church bell tower, its beige paint sandblasted into splotches, glares down on the shamble like an insulted matriarch.
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After an hour, they drive through Marigot. The cab driver waves out his window at a dingy line three feet up the storefronts marking the height of the floodwaters. “Here, there is no beach in front of the town to lift the waves. The wharf undercut the surge. There was only flooding and wind damage.”
Between the sidewalk restaurants and duty-free stores on their left and the limestone wharf on their right is a public park. When cruise ships are in, the park blossoms with the blue and orange tarps of an open-air market selling fresh coconut juice and island trinkets made in China.
The only permanent structure on the wharf is—was the ferry terminal. The Anguilla ferry sits upright atop the squashed ticket office. In the parking lot, a forty-foot schooner lies awkwardly tilted by its keel onto its gunwale.
“Did you lose much to the storm?” Nicki asks.
“No, my home is at the foot of those hills.” The driver points out his open window at the red-tile-roofed shanties on the slope behind the town center. “The house was flooded, but not washed away like the houses below. I was smart enough to park the cab at an even higher elevation, so there was only slight damage from falling trees.” He points this time to the car’s roof that buckles down above his head. “My wife and daughter have been sleeping in the cab for the last two weeks, but we will move back into the house tomorrow.”
“Can we help in any way?”
“No, no, ma’am. Thank you for the offer. You are the first American who has asked. There are many others more in need than me. I feel ashamed at being so lucky.”
“I’m glad the cab survived and you still have an income.”
“Yes, that is the best part.”
They drive onto the man-made berm with a drawbridge in the middle that bisects Simpson Bay Lagoon. To their left, across several miles of water, hidden behind the mauve mountains at the center of the islands, is Orient Bay where they started. Both sides of the causeway are littered with half-submerged yachts, sometimes jammed into each other in piles of three or four. Farther out, masts stick up like lollypop sticks marking where others sank while still at anchor.
At the roundabout on the Dutch end of the causeway, they enter Airport Road running atop a sliver of land between the lagoon and the ocean. “This stretch is called the Road of Broken Dreams now.” The cab driver looks at Bud through the rearview mirror. “When it became probable that the hurricane would hit the Antilles, all the expensive boats from the other islands came here. This lagoon is considered the safest harbor to weather a storm. There must have been two thousand yachts at anchor when the storm came ashore. If they average a half million Euros each, that’s…more money than I can count.”
“Many can be salvaged.”
“There will be much work for the boat yards, for sure.”
Airport operations have been relocated to a World War II-era Quonset hut across the runway from the mangled terminal building. The east end of the runway was undermined and dips out of sight into Maho Bay. Much of the rest of the runway is buckled, but there’s enough left for the turbo-prop commuter planes that hop between islands. Nicki finds the improvised latrine and then sits on their luggage in the rising humidity without complaint.
A van arrives selling snacks. Bud stuffs bags of peanuts and two plastic bottles of water into his canvas carry-on bag. They also have the local English-language newspaper, which he slips into his back pocket to read during the flight. After takeoff, the plane’s wing dips in a sweeping turn to the northwest. Nicki seeks out his hand as they pass over despoiled memories of Orient Beach.
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