The eye wall crossed the Upper Keys at approximately nine o’clock in the evening and the world went beyond what language could follow in real time.
The wind was at 160 knots. The number did not describe the experience. The experience was a wall of air moving at nearly two hundred miles per hour across coral islands at five feet above sea level, carrying in its mass everything the islands had placed upon their surfaces — sand, shell, coral rock, timber, metal roofing, glass, concrete fragments, the disassembled material of human habitation accelerated to velocities that turned every object into ordnance. The wind did not blow. It occupied. It filled the space between the water and the sky with a density of force and debris that eliminated the possibility of standing, of breathing, of seeing, of any human action except holding on to whatever the body was pressed against and enduring what the wind brought.
The surge came with the eye wall.
When the Atlantic side came over the eastern shore, it met the bay surge on islands too low and too narrow to resist either one. The railroad embankment held briefly, then overtopped and spilled water across the leeward side with the force of a dam break.
The islands were submerged.
The word was precise. The islands were not flooded — not partially covered by water that left the higher features above the surface, as a mainland coast is flooded when the surge rises a few feet above grade. The islands were submerged — entirely covered by water that exceeded the height of every natural feature and most of the built features on their surfaces, the water continuous from the Atlantic to Florida Bay, the islands existing as obstructions within the surge field rather than as land above it.
In this water, in this wind, the men of the Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys experienced the passage of the eye wall.
* * *
Then the wind stopped.
At approximately nine-thirty the eye passed over the Upper Keys. The transition was abrupt — the wind decreasing from lethal to calm in the space of minutes as the eye wall’s inner edge crossed the observer’s position and the clear center of the storm settled over the corridor. The barometric pressure reached its minimum. Duane at Long Key recorded 26.35 inches — 892 millibars.
The calm was disorienting.
After hours of sustained violence — the wind noise so continuous and so intense that it had ceased to be noise and had become the medium in which all other sensations occurred — the silence of the eye fell across the islands with a weight that was its own kind of shock. The survivors who had held on through the first eye wall’s passage emerged from whatever they had been clinging to — the railroad embankment, the wreckage of structures, the trunks of trees that had survived, each other — and found themselves in a landscape they did not recognize.
The water was still high. The surge from the first passage had not fully receded. But the wind was gone, and without the wind the water was still, and in the stillness the survivors could see, for the first time since the eye wall struck, what had happened to the world they had inhabited that morning.
The structures were gone. Not damaged. Gone. The camps on Lower Matecumbe — Camp 3, Camp 5 — were reduced to foundations. The barracks, the mess halls, the administrative buildings, the supply sheds — the entire built environment of the veterans’ work camps had been removed from the islands as completely as if it had never been constructed. The railroad embankment was breached in places where the surge had scoured through the fill. The track was displaced — rails and ties lifted from the roadbed and deposited in the mangroves. The trees that remained standing were stripped of leaves and bark, standing as bare trunks against the sky that was visible to the north through the break in the overcast where the eye opened.
Stars were visible.
The stars were visible to the north, above the eye’s clear center, while the wall clouds of the back eye wall circled to the south and west, a ring of darkness lit from within by continuous lightning that illuminated the churning convective towers with a light that was not daylight and not moonlight but the storm’s own luminescence. The survivors who looked up saw the stars and the wall clouds simultaneously and understood, if they understood anything in the exhaustion and the shock of what they had already survived, that the stars were not the end. The wall clouds were coming. The back eye wall would arrive from the south-southwest, and when it arrived it would bring with it the ocean-side surge from the new windward direction — the “walls of water” that Duane was noting in his log, the final passage that would cross the corridor from the opposite direction and complete the destruction the first passage had begun.
Duane recorded the calm’s duration at fifty-five minutes.
Fifty-five minutes of quiet in which the survivors could see the damage, could find each other in the water and the wreckage, could attempt to move to whatever shelter remained — a concrete building, a section of embankment, the overturned hull of a boat — before the back wall arrived.
Fifty-five minutes was not enough time to evacuate. It was not enough time to treat the injured. It was barely enough time to comprehend what had happened. It was an interval — a pause in the storm’s passage that existed because the storm had an eye and the eye had a diameter and the diameter at seven knots translational speed took fifty-five minutes to cross the corridor.
The interval was not mercy. It was geometry.
* * *
The back eye wall was visible to the south-southwest, a wall of cloud and rain advancing across the water toward the corridor with the slow certainty of something that had already demonstrated what it could do and was now returning to do it again from the opposite direction.
The survivors who could move moved toward shelter.
The survivors who could not move remained in the water.
The wind began to rise from the south-southwest.
The ocean was coming.