The storm continued its passage northwest across the Keys and into the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico, and what it left behind in the corridor was the absence of everything the corridor had contained.
The back eye wall completed the work the front wall had begun. The wind from the south-southwest drove the ocean surge across every island in the twelve-mile corridor for a second time, the flow direction reversed from the first passage, the water crossing the narrow coral formations from east to west where the first passage had driven it from west to east. The two surges — the bay surge of the first half and the ocean surge of the second half — had now crossed the islands from both directions, scouring the surfaces from both sides, removing from the coral base everything that the first passage had left standing and that the second passage’s reversed flow could dislodge.
The railroad received the final accounting.
The Overseas Railroad had been the highest continuous linear feature in the corridor — the embankment fills running at eight to ten feet above mean high water, the bridges spanning the channels between islands, the viaducts carrying the track across the wider water gaps. The first passage had damaged the embankment from the windward side, the bay surge piling against the western face and overtopping the crest in the weir flow that scoured the leeward ground. The back passage struck the embankment from the opposite direction, the ocean surge piling against the eastern face and overtopping the crest from east to west. The two-directional scour — water pouring over the embankment from both sides in successive passages — removed the fill material from both slopes. The embankment that had been designed to carry the weight of a locomotive and its train was reduced, in the sections where the surge was deepest, to a breached remnant of its original cross-section.
The track — the steel rail and the wooden ties that constituted the railroad’s functional surface — was displaced from the embankment across wide sections of the corridor. The surge that overtopped the fills carried the ties and rail with it, depositing them in the mangroves and the shallow water on the leeward side of each successive passage. The bridges, built of reinforced concrete and steel, survived in most cases — the massive structures that Henry Flagler’s engineers had designed to span the channels between islands had been built to withstand the forces that the Keys’ position in the hurricane belt prescribed. But the approaches — the embankment fills that connected the bridges to the islands — were washed away, leaving the bridges standing as isolated spans with open water where the roadbed had been.
Forty-two miles of the Overseas Railroad were destroyed.
The number represented not merely forty-two miles of track and embankment. It represented the severing of the Keys’ connection to the mainland — the single corridor of steel that had made the island chain an extension of the Florida peninsula rather than an archipelago accessible only by water. The highway under construction beside the railroad was equally destroyed across the corridor — the unfinished roadbed, the partially completed bridges, the construction equipment and materials that had been staged along the right-of-way, all swept from the islands by the same surge that took the railroad.
The Keys were disconnected.
* *
The storm moved northwest into the Gulf of Mexico.
Its central pressure, which had reached 892 millibars at or near its closest approach to the Keys corridor, began to rise as the system crossed the shallow Gulf waters north of the Keys. The warm water of the Gulf extended the storm’s life, but the passage over the Keys had disrupted the circulation’s lowest levels — the friction of the land and the embankment and the surge’s turbulent interaction with the shallow nearshore had introduced asymmetries into the wind field that the system’s compact structure amplified rather than absorbed. The storm was weakening. It would continue northwest across the Gulf, weaken further, and make a second landfall on the Florida panhandle as a diminished but still dangerous system.
The Archivist did not linger on the second landfall. The defining work of this entry had already been done in the Keys.
That was where the pressure, surge, destruction, and death had aligned into something the Council would carry forward.
The storm moved on. The corridor remained.
* * *
Behind the storm, in the darkness of the early morning hours of September 3, the Keys corridor lay in a silence that was the inverse of the violence that had produced it.
The wind had dropped. The surge had receded. The water that had submerged the islands was draining back through the channels and the mangrove margins and the breached embankment fills, returning to the Atlantic and the Bay from which it had come. What the water left behind as it receded was the coral base of the islands — the geological foundation that had existed before Flagler’s railroad, before the fishing camps, before the veterans’ camps, before any human structure had been placed upon the narrow formations.
The coral was clean.
The twelve-mile corridor from Lower Matecumbe to Tavernier, which had contained on Monday morning the camps and the station and the fishing lodges and the year-round residences of the Keys communities and the railroad and the highway and the lives of several hundred people, contained on Tuesday morning the coral and the sand and the mangrove roots and the bodies.
The bodies were in the water. They were in the mangroves. They were against the railroad embankment, lodged in the debris that the surge had deposited on both sides of the fill. They were in the channels between islands, carried by the surge’s retreat into the deeper water that surrounded the chain. They were on the coral surface of the islands, in the open, where the receding water had left them.
The storm had passed.
The corridor held what the convergence had left.
The Archivist began the accounting.