I didn’t see one rare, world famous blue lizard in Grand Cayman, mainly because I was staring straight down into the bottom of the ocean. I did see what looked like a 4-foot barracuda, grinning a mouthful of sharp teeth up through the distilled-clear water. Snorkeling is big here. Everyone is snorkeling over wrecks and reefs and colorful fish and each other. Look in those aquariums at PetSmart and imagine those colorful fish about a hundred times bigger and loose in the ocean.
I have an odd theory that holds water and wind but precious little actual scientific credence. It involves the dots between hurricanes and the people they visit along their random paths.
That thought soaks my brain as I am standing on the docks of Georgetown marveling at the color of the water in the pier-less harbor. Cruise ships are anchored and tender boats ferry hundreds of burnt tourists back and forth. Everything looks new here because Hurricane Ivan visited Grand Cayman in 2004 and damaged or destroyed more than 80% of the buildings. The winds here were 180 mph and topped out with 200 mph gusts. That’s Camille numbers where I come from.
After Ivan plowed Grand Cayman into gull fodder, he headed north through the Gulf of Mexico, surged the through the Florida Panhandle and destroyed my wife’s parent’s home in South Alabama. They had to move and it took them over a year to rebuild the crushed structure.
Strangely, standing here, I feel the Ivan connection between the two places. Over the miles and the time that has passed, it collects in my sternum like a gentle sadness. I feel the same thing when I walk down Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and look up into the hills and down that infamous stretch of asphalt and think about all of the ruined and damaged lives that have seen that very same view.
It smells and looks like Florida down here. I hear Bob Marley music from the Jamaicans who run the snorkeling excursions. I have never been to Grand Cayman before, but a piece of it has been to me and those I love in the winds of Ivan.
It is the only place on our trip where I didn’t write in my journal. It felt like I had written it years ago and was déjà vu-ing it back to mind.
Maybe that sounds strange and irrational and ethereally disconnected. But “strange and irrational and ethereally disconnected” is written on a hurricane’s calling card in 40-point type, right under it’s given name, san serif, because the corners were blown off the letters.
Like a violent concert tour, Ivan played Grand Cayman then my hometown. He played the exact same tunes in both places. Many of the people around me had lost their homes as well and even though we’d never met, we were connected by those winds with a name much too small to carry the implications of its actions.
I thought about this irony as we pulled away from this flat island and pushed toward Cozumel. No matter who we choose to hate and fight and see as different than we are, nature sees us all as exactly the same. Ivan was an equal opportunity destroyer. He saw no color, no politics or socioeconomic or demographic or educational separation between human beings. Ivan invited everyone to the party. Katrina may be the brand name storm since Andrew and Camille, but Ivan turned Grand Cayman and a small town in Alabama into the same little neighborhood for a while in 2004 and both places bares the exact same scars.
