Emily's Last Day

number fifty

Part three of my experience with Emily: today Hurricane Emily disappeared completely from the map, leaving only aftermath, her toll taken in more flooding and buildings and jobs than in lives. 563 words.

[NL]—The last thing that I did before going to bed last night was to change the towels we’ve had catching the water that has been seeping in around the windows and mopping up the puddles on the floor beneath them. Throughout the night, I was aware of the wind moving around the house, but not so much that the trees were whipped violently around. Just a spooky yawning sound. It rained most of the night. By the time I woke today, Emily was gone, all that was left of her was a sky full of gray streaks and a ghostly purple puff on the satellite images.

Well, and water. Monterrey is flooded in places, and there’s a Catarina River where there is usually merely a Catarina river bed. During the last day or two, all of the sports fields and tents that usually populate the dry bed had been removed, and the river managed to flow, full of not much more than run-off, much the way nature originally intended. Apparently, there are still places in town without power, and several roads are still closed because they are either under water, or too strewn with debris to travel on.

Overall, I have been very impressed with the way México handled the storm. Thousands of people were evacuated along the Mayan Riviera in the Yucatán before the first, category 4, hit; and then thousands more along the fishing villages on the Gulf Coast for the category 3 version that came at Monterrey. Many of these folks were picked up by army trucks as they walked along dragging their luggage. Many were put up for free in inland hotels and makeshift shelters. While a sadly large number of people lost their houses and their means of employment, it seems as if there were no casualties. I can’t stress this enough: none. Nobody died.*

Outside, the thick cloud cover is low enough to completely enshroud the surrounding mountains. The hill that separates San Pedro from Monterrey is completely visible, but the larger la Silla and los Mitras mountains are chopped off at the knees. This would be a striking day to go mountain climbing, if I was certain that I would not need a boat to get across the valley itself. The clouds are a dark color, but thinner areas are allowing light to penetrate in places, giving the environment a bright gray quality occasionally lined with golden sun. It is raining now, but these are gentle showers which are coming and going, totally different from the all day, from lesser- to greater-degree storms of yesterday. By the end of the weekend, I hear, the showers will have subsided, even, and then the occasional pocket of hurricane wreckage will be the only things left of Emily. And construction sites on the coast, of course. And a river.

*A small, sad note. Apparently, after all my lowered evaluation of the danger to the people who live here in San Pedro, the one recorded fatality of this storm, in either incarnation, was reportedly washed away in flood waters right near my house. I have no idea how—I never saw any amount of flooding on our side of the little ridge that separates us from Monterrey. Possibly she was somehow caught on the side of a mountain and was lost in the flash flooding of its sudden watershed.