2019 turned into a bit of a nightmare for us. Nothing to do with photography, sculpture, or even creativity. It was Nature. She got mad.
We love her for her beauty and her ability to nurture and feed us, but we all know she can also have a bit of a temper. Usually, most of us are many miles from those tantrums when they happen and simply end up mindlessly scrolling through the news of the damage she’s caused. Sometimes we might donate to a charity to provide aide; some of us may even rush to give whatever help we can. But in the summer of 2019, although we were in the right place… it was quite definitively at the wrong time.
We’d sold everything with the aim of moving lock stock and barrel to a tropical island. We were in the process of inspecting a few potential locations and had ended up in Eleuthera, in the Bahamas. As lovely as it was, it just didn’t feel quite right, not enough community or infrastructure. So we decided to make one last stop in Great Abaco. While the land itself was no great beauty and the main town Marsh Harbour somewhat industrial, the people were wonderful and they seemed to have everything we would need including a massive US style grocery store, banks, hardware stores and more. Friends of my older brother had heard we were considering re-locating to an island. Coincidentally, my brother’s friends happened to live in a pretty exclusive enclave on a peninsula in that very same town. It had been their home for more than thirty years.
To cut the story very short, the sweet English/Colombian/Bahamian couple told us they’d just decided to move to England for 6 months for the arrival of their first grandchild and would we like to stay in their house, have use of the pool, two cars and center console boat? No prizes for guessing the answer! It was a dream come true. Fast forward one month to June, and we were happily ensconced in one of the most beautiful places either of us has ever landed. We committed to living there for the full six months and were told, ‘Bring your kids to enjoy it too!” So we did. It was the summer from Heaven, and come August we had decided ‘this would be our island’. A few weeks later we had committed to looking for our own place. My wife Wendy had secured a legal job with an entrepreneur and I had been invited to take over managing the VRBO rentals that our friends owned next door.
But one week later, the rug was very firmly pulled from under our tanned, happy feet.
Hurricane Dorian barreled in giving no-one a chance to escape. Looking as if it was going to be a CAT 3, the locals all said, “We’ve been through those before, there’ll be little damage. Nothing to worry about.” To make things worse, our host had just come back for a quick business visit after a major illness. He was still not at all well and had been spending most days on his bed watching TV and sleeping. He was insistent all would be fine, thank you and wasn’t going anywhere. The day before the storm’s arrival I did manage to persuade him to move to another friend’s concrete ‘hurricane proof’ house, pointing out that his own was only built with wood and the storm surge could easily reach the living level. As Dorian approached it very quickly reached CAT 4 and then an unprecedented CAT 5. Weather forecasters were praying for us. That’s how bad it was going to be.
It was absolutely terrifying. Dorian stalled over Marsh Harbour for 24 hours before slowly and destructively idling away. Through the toughened windows we saw wooded areas stripped of limbs and every single leaf. We saw cars toppled on top of one another and a motor boat first blown down the hill, and then up again and all the way down the other side. The house immediately behind us was half destroyed by a tornado, sending bits of wood and masonry powering in all directions at 200mph and piercing a hole in the master bedroom wall and roof. The living room ceiling rose and fell as if it was preparing to sneeze, and the front door it turned out, had been hung to open inwards, so it too was breathing ominously, rain water pouring in horizontally through every crack as everyone leaned on it until I could screw it solidly in place.
It was a couple of days before flood waters receded enough for us get out and see what damage had been wrought. It was almost total destruction. Twenty five to thirty feet of storm surge had literally forced its way over the land and then sucked everything in its grip back out into the sea. Yes, it had wiped the slate clean. Thousands lost their lives and only a handful of empty, mostly roofless buildings were left standing. The matters got worse. Desperate people do desperate things. Armed men stole whatever they could find: TVs, dishwashers, you name it, they tried to carry it away. To where? It was beyond logic. They had no homes to go to, there’s be no electricity for many months and no water at all. Insanity had set in. It was a frightening time, hearing shots fired at night, when we were the most vulnerable, in one of the few houses that still had a roof. Walking to the top of the hill that overlooked Marsh Harbour was absolutely gut wrenching. Everything we had grown to love those past few months was gone. Every shop, every marina, the dive shops, huge steel boats now on land and massive containers floating in the harbour. Everything was upside down. So many lives destroyed. The house we’d spent the summer in, suffered major damage, and the master suite and upstairs office had been ripped off without trace.
Six days later we did eventually escape, by literally running up to the pilot of a small relief plane and asking him if we could hitch a ride back to the States. But it took a day and a half in extreme heat, with minimal water and only snacks for food, plus a night out in the open at Treasure Cay airport that had been totally destroyed, to reach that point.
So that’s part one of why there’s been a bit of a lull at this end. Clearly, part 2 was the arrival of COVID 19, practically on the heels of all of that mental anguish. And then we were on lock down inside in a townhouse taking care of my wife’s aging, legally blind mother for a year and a half.
Taking a deep breath as the fog of it all cleared, we decided to slightly alter our plans for living on a tropical island and buy a boat we could live on instead – our own little island that we could drive away if a storm came our way! We have now been living aboard our Lagoon 43 power catamaran for 20 months and are blissfully happy. We’ve spent the better part of two winters in the Bahamas, including Marsh Harbour where I’m writing this now, and apart from the inevitable endless list of things to fix and maintain (they say, if it’s not broken yet, it soon will be), we are loving this way of life and the endless string of wonderful people we’ve met along the way doing the same thing. And the Bahamian people have been incredible. The rebuilding effort is nothing short of extraordinary and their welcoming smiles and huge hearts seem to have grown even bigger if that’s even possible. And now, I’m coming out of my healing stage.
I’ve never stopped taking pictures, partly because that’s how I cope. But I’ve also been writing a screenplay with an English friend that has already been optioned to be made into a movie, and I’m revisiting a couple of kids’ stories I wrote several years ago. Right now on the photography side, I’m also experimenting with NFTs, more specifically, making what I call Activated versions of some of my photographic work to market on OpenSea and prepping some of my traditional travel images, many of them hi def panoramas, to be added to the website. So creativity has returned! I’m happy to be back and sharing it all once again. Absence does make the heart grow fonder, right?!