With the exception of a few inland brushes with tropical storms Agnes and Floyd, I had never been close to a real hurricane.
That all changed with our impromptu vacation in November on this tiny jewel in the Caribbean. We were staying in the home of Suzanne Gordon, a former Inquirer and Bulletin reporter who came to her senses a few years ago and moved here.
Word that Hurricane Lenny was hundreds of miles over the horizon started to make the rounds of the island, moving from beach chair to beach chair, on Sunday, the third day of our visit.
The report was immediately met with disbelief. The weather was warm and sunny. The shops were busy, and the golf course at the Four Seasons was full. Everyone knew that hurricane season was over and, besides, this storm was west of us. And everyone, even a transplanted Midwesterner, knows that hurricanes come out of the Atlantic and charge westward.
But by Monday, Lenny showed up on the Weather Channel radar as a monster that covered the 600 miles from Jamaica to Venezuela, and he was heading east.
Local news outlets poked fun at Lenny's less-than-frightening name. One local journalist went so far as to craft the headline "Hurricane Lenny not squiggy." All of the trackers had Lenny heading straight for us in the middle of the Leeward Islands. But still, islanders refused to believe it could happen. Tuesday, we were among the very few shoppers at the grocery store in the capital of Charlestown.
My wife, Carol, and I joked that reports of a possibility of a snowflake in Philadelphia sent people panicking to the stores for bread and milk, yet here, there was no sense of impending doom.
A shopkeeper at a harbor-side gallery said, "What storm?" when we asked her if she was making any preparations. Two days later, her shop was washed through by a tidal surge.
