First light over the Upper Keys on Tuesday, September 3, 1935, revealed a geography that did not match the geography that had existed twenty-four hours earlier.
The sun rose into a sky cleared by the storm’s passage — the clouds thinning to the northwest where the system was tracking toward the Gulf, the eastern horizon clean and pale in the way that tropical horizons are clean after a hurricane has scoured the atmosphere of its moisture and its haze. The light fell across the Keys corridor with the impartiality of a lamp turned on in a room where something terrible has happened in the dark.
The twelve-mile corridor from Lower Matecumbe to Tavernier was empty.
Not empty of water or of debris — the tidal channels still ran high with the surge’s retreat, and the debris field that the storm had created was distributed across the islands and the surrounding shallows in quantities that made the distinction between land and refuse academic. Empty of the built environment. The camps, the station, the fishing lodges, the houses, the sheds, the docks, the vehicles, the railroad cars, the highway construction equipment — the accumulated material investment of human presence on the Matecumbe Keys was gone from the surfaces of the islands with a completeness that the light of the morning made difficult to accept as the product of a single night.
The railroad embankment ran through the corridor as a diminished ridge — its fill scoured from both sides by the two-directional surge, its track displaced, its bridges standing in isolation where the approaches had washed away. The embankment was the most recognizable feature remaining in the corridor, and it was recognizable only because its concrete and steel components had resisted the surge that carried away everything else. The fill material that had composed the embankment’s bulk was partially distributed across the islands, partially in the channels, partially in the bay. The railroad’s geometry was still visible in the landscape. The railroad’s function was gone.
The rescue train was visible from the air.
The locomotive and tender stood on the track at Islamorada — the only railroad rolling stock remaining upright in the corridor. Behind the locomotive, the track was bare. The eleven cars that had composed the rescue train were scattered in the mangroves on the bay side of Upper Matecumbe, lying on their sides or inverted, some partially submerged in the shallow water that covered the mangrove roots. The cars were intact enough to be identified as railroad equipment. They were displaced far enough from the track to make the force that had moved them — eighteen feet of surge driven by 160-knot winds — comprehensible in physical terms that the human mind could process only by looking at the result and working backward to the cause.
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The bodies began to appear with the receding water.
They were found in the positions where the surge had deposited them. Against the railroad embankment, lodged in the debris that had collected on both sides of the fill during the two-directional scour. In the mangrove stands that fringed the islands’ bay-side margins, tangled in the root systems that had caught and held what the water carried. On the coral surface of the islands, in the open, where the surge had left them as it drained back to its normal level. In the channels between islands, floating in the tidal current, carried by the water’s retreat toward the deeper passages that connected the bay to the ocean.
The condition of the bodies told the story that the survivors could not yet articulate.
The sand had done its work. The bodies found in exposed positions — in the open, against the embankment, in locations where the wind had reached them directly during the eye wall’s passage — were stripped. The clothing was gone except for the leather: belts, shoes, the items whose material was too dense and too tough for the coral sand to abrade in the duration of the exposure. The skin was abraded on the windward surfaces, the flesh scoured by the sand to the depth of the subcutaneous layer and beyond. The identification of the dead by visual recognition was, in many cases, impossible. The faces were damaged. The features were altered by the combination of water immersion, sand abrasion, and the blunt-force trauma of debris impacts at hurricane velocity.
The count began slowly and would continue for weeks.
The initial survey, conducted by the survivors and by the rescue parties that reached the Keys by boat from the mainland on September 3 and 4, produced a count that was partial and that everyone involved understood was partial. The bodies that were visible and accessible were counted. The bodies that were submerged, buried in debris, carried out to sea by the surge’s retreat, or trapped in locations that the rescue parties could not yet reach were not counted. The count would rise.
The final accounting would record 408 confirmed dead. An additional 165 were listed as missing — people known to have been on the Keys before the storm whose bodies were not recovered and whose survival was not confirmed. The veterans’ camps accounted for 257 of the confirmed dead — more than a third of the camp population, men who had been assigned to the Matecumbe Keys by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and who had not been evacuated before the storm arrived.
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The isolation was total.
No rail. No road. No telephone. No telegraph. The Keys corridor was disconnected from the mainland by the destruction of every communication and transportation link that had connected it. The survivors on the Upper Keys — those who had lived through the passage in the stronger structures, or in the overturned train cars, or by holding on to whatever the storm had not taken — were as isolated as the Keys’ original inhabitants had been before Flagler’s railroad connected the islands to the world beyond the reef.
The gap between Monday morning and Tuesday morning was not measured in hours. It was measured in the distance between a world that contained the camps and the railroad and the highway and the daily commerce of human life on the Matecumbe Keys, and a world that contained coral and sand and mangroves and the dead.
The light continued to rise.
The accounting continued.
At first light the Council no longer needed theory. The islands themselves supplied the evidence.