Hurricane! Last two days preparing for the worst, battening and re-battening, and then the symbolic eyewall takes a merciful jog on the weather map, forging its way ashore one county to the north. Still we are pummeled, electricity gone, and then, midstorm, a phone call from Elizabeth’s parents’ condominium building—their windows have blown open, could we please come up and do something about it? So we drive up Collins Avenue in a fury of lashing rain and dangling phone lines, lawn chairs tossed from high-rise balconies into the street, and close their windows, and mop out bucket after bucket of rain. At least we have power up here, to follow the storm on the Weather Channel, and watch SpongeBob, and look out from fifteen stories across the eerie, gorgeous, wind-racked ocean, magnesium-blue breaking to sand-scoured alabaster, clouds yawing past and racing out to sea, their gusts knocking the tops from the incoming swells and sending counterwaves pulsing and undulating back across the surface, so the beach is not even eroding too badly, and the coconut palms lay their fronds toward the water like women bending at the waist to wash their hair. Around 7 p.m. we’re watching a DVD—Hellboy—when three surfers show up; they’ve dodged police to risk the big storm only to find a flat and unsurfable sea. The clouds are so low overhead, streaming in banner-thin regiments from the northwest to the southeast. Howl of the windows rattling in their frames. Suddenly the red Coast Guard helicopter zooms past, searchlights bright against the dusk. At the inlet they circle back, and I wonder if they intend to address the surfers, but no, evidently they regard them as hapless, self-endangering kooks, and leave them to their fate. The helicopter turns out to sea. Brave people. Almost dark, colors draining from the retina, the deepening storm extinguishing evening, salt water on coals. Mostly one watches the coconut palms, the pelicans nestled to the water, lights of neighboring condos coming on, penthouse giants dwarfing our sixty-year-old relic. Money is a force more powerful than the wind, humans more likely than hurricanes to wreak havoc upon us; this building will fall to the wrecking ball long before nature claims it.