Up until 4 days before Hurricane Maria ravaged the beautiful Isla del Encanto, Puerto Rico, my children and I were happily based in an Eastern town on the island named Fajardo. We had travel plans that had been postponed due to Hurricane Irma coming through and missing her devastation by a hair.
I was planning a trip to the mainland U.S.A. to visit my recently widowed grandmother for early September, 2017. Our scheduled departure date ironically ended up being the exact day Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 Hurricane, decided to touch Puerto Rico after devastating several Caribbean paradises beforehand.
Hurricane Irma didn't seem to concern a lot of the locals on PR despite it's Category 5 designation and the intense damage it had caused on islands prior to reaching PR. I couldn't help but feel unnerved by the approach of Irma myself. I had two minor children in a place where our community of support was quite small and we lived on the Northeast tip of the island the area of the island that the storm was headed straight over the waters towards.
Luckily, Irma's eyewall was a distance from Puerto Rico and though her destructive winds did a considerable amount of damage on the beloved island, it appeared the trees (the beautiful trees), took the hit for the rest of us. I am forever grateful to the trees, many torn up from their roots and laying over electrical lines all over the Northeast of the island.
Post-Irma my children and i had the luxury of access to a generator which offered certain comforts many living in the area of Fajardo we lived in did not have. I remember feeling awkward about turning my lights on at night because we were, at that point, the only household with electricity in the area(my landlord had a generator and lived in his house downstairs which gave us access). We spent the evenings lighting our home with candlelight and shunning this perceived privilege. As outsiders already, we didn't want to draw any kind of attention.
Despite the relief of safely getting through irma, we had previous travel plans and wanted to follow through with them as soon as we could after Irma, especially before the threatening Hurricane Jose had an opportunity to come on the scene. So we moved out of our home with plans to return a couple of months later and find a place near the city of San Juan. As much as I loved living outside of the Capital, i wanted more access to the arts, dance and music scene afforded by the city lifestyle.
We left Fajardo and went to spend time by a friend's home in the town of Toa Baja, ironically the town with the most registered deaths immediately after Hurricane Maria hit less than a week after we left. We got on a flight out of Luis Munoz airport on the 16th of september, 2017. 4 days later, category 4 hurricane maria, a tropical storm and nearly non-issue when i was leaving puerto rico, ramped up energy in a mere few hours, and with hurricane force winds of 150 mph and more came roaring through the island of puerto rico, spiraling it into a scene of chaos and desperation. For four days Puerto Rico was plunged into a complete communication blackout. It was a scary thing to be connected to and to watch from afar as friends and family on the island and on our former home of St. Croix dealt with the aftermath of two powerful hurricanes within less than 2 weeks time.
