St. John

After Inga left us—as definitively as someone leaving a room and slamming the door behind her—we picked up our heads and looked around.

Let’s start with Cruz Bay, our “downtown.” It was…ruined. Wharfside Village lost its roof; the Beach Bar’s dance floor was buried under two-foot drifts of sand; the palm trees along Frank Bay were snapped in half, reminding us of gruesomely broken bones. Someone’s boat, Nell, landed upside down on the deck of High Tide, where so many of us had enjoyed rum punches during happy hour. The Lumberyard building—home to the Barefoot Cowboy, Driftwood Dave’s, the barbershop, and Jake’s—looked like the proverbial cake that someone had left out in the rain; the building simply caved in on itself. Homes were violently torn apart, their contents thrown out into the yard, the street. Who could tell what had been a ceiling or a wall or a bathroom door? There was plaster, glass, metal in heaps and piles everywhere. It looked like a bomb had detonated; the damage was…atomic, nuclear.

Word started rolling in from the North Shore Road, Chocolate Hole, Gifft Hill. One family of six survived by hiding in their laundry room. One man crouched behind a table on its side for three hours as the sliding glass door across the room bowed in and out as though it were breathing. Multiple witnesses saw telephone poles flying through the air like missiles. Cars were flipped. A couch ended up in the neighbor’s front yard; a refrigerator ended up in the bedroom; a hot-tub cover was caught in the high branches of a tree.

What about beyond the stone gates at Caneel Bay? This was, perhaps, what most took us by surprise. The genteel, elegant resort had been ravaged—roofs ripped off, trees uprooted, buildings flooded and filled with sand, the entire place simply annihilated.

The Centerline Road was impassable due to downed trees. The hillside between Maho and Leicester Bays looked like a winter landscape; all of the trees were stripped bare, broken, left a burned-looking brown.

Eventually, we heard from our friends on the “other side of the world,” in Coral Bay. Shipwreck Landing, one of our favorite places to order coconut shrimp and listen to live music, had been decimated. Concordia, which had such delicious breakfasts, was blown away. Boats were dashed against the rocks, or they capsized and sank. The carnage in Hurricane Hole turned our stomachs.

Few of us realized that tornadoes are a common phenomenon when a hurricane hits land. The friction between open ocean and hills can cause spin, especially when the feeder bands roll through. The spot on St. John that saw the most tornado activity was the East End because it has elevation and because it’s so exposed. There were thirteen tornadoes recorded on the East End alone. Unlike a hurricane, a tornado’s path is unpredictable. One villa remains untouched while the villa next door is turned into kindling.