2.33 Come Hell or High Water

Nov 29, 1957 • Honolulu ~ I remember the Friday afternoon the hurricane hit. I was walking home with a girl from school who’d invited me to her house, me doing a small skip alongside her, happy to have made a friend. I heard it before I saw it. I turned my face to the sky and felt the insistent air against my skin, lifting the hair on my face and arms.

“I can’t come over,” I nervously told her. “I have to go home.”

I’d traveled only a short distance off my memorized path, a few heartbeats, a dozen steps, but when I turned I had no idea where I was.

The northeasterly trades, the Kona winds, and heat from the sea powered the ferocious energy, and within minutes the edge of Hurricane Nina slammed Oahu. Palm trees bent to the ground, praying not to split. Roofs sheared off like box tops, piercing the air. The gale tore at my hair and shrieked in my ears, ramming me broadside, flinging me around like tossed litter. My slight frame was sucked into the vortex of the wind and heavy rain that seemed to have split heaven wide open. The streets flash-flooded and I could barely stagger in the surging water now above my ankles. What road do I take? Which way do I turn? How do I find my way home?

As I remember, I was more confused than afraid, but the noise was more than I could stand. Few houses facing the streets were visible behind lush foliage, and I slogged along until I came to one that opened to the lane I was on. I saw a woman watching me through her picture window. I stumbled my way up her stepping stones lined with tattered hibiscus and a swamped lawn. I may not have been long on math, but I knew enough to get in out of the rain. When she opened her door, I flung myself through her entrance. She calmed me down, got me out of my clothes, dried me off, and fixed me a cup of warm tea. Wrapped in towels, I hovered on the edge of a chair just inside her entry, the teacup and saucer rattling in my fingers, my teeth and brain clacking in my head. I waited, for the noise to stop, for the hurricane to pass, for my mother to come for me. 

Bishop Street, Honolulu 1957

Hours later Mom arrived in a cab. The woman had reached her at the store where she worked on Bishop Street and the hurricane had passed enough to let her through. Sitting at opposite ends in the back seat of the yellow taxi, I sat as my mother sat, my lips pursed, my hands folded in my lap, each of us looking silently out our windows at the exhausted sky.

“Some hurricane,” the driver said into the silence. “Island’s upside down.”

The bulk of the tempest had passed, the wind now demoted to a tropical storm. With the skies still coming down, the taxi waded slowly through the muck and debris. The road was a swollen shamble of roof chunks, palm fronds, downed trees, telephone poles, and mangled TV antennas strewn like corpses in our path. I wished for my life to be different. I wished things were the way they used to be, when we lived in Sonora in our white house, when our family was still a family before our lives were turned upside down. And still, it rained.

to be continued…

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
All rights reserved.

*****

Hurricane Nina was a large, late-season tropical cyclone that brought wind gusts in excess of 80 mph to Oahu.

Hawaii’s Hurricane History
On November 29, 1957, a late-season tropical cyclone developed only a few hundred miles north of the equator. A weather station on Palmyra Island recorded a peak gust of 70 mph as the storm passed over the area and tracked to the north. On November 30th, a reconnaissance flight determined that the system was of hurricane intensity and centered 500 miles north of Palmyra Island, where squally weather was still occurring. The storm, which was given the name Nina, was forecast to continue northward towards the Hawaiian Islands. Gale warnings were issued for the islands of Niihau, Kauai and Oahu.

Hurricane Nina began curving away from the islands and made an abrupt turn to the west while centered 120 miles east-southeast of Kauai. Reconnaissance flights found that Hurricane Nina had a cloud-filled eye and massive seas that were so large, according to one pilot, that “nothing but a huge ship could live in that wild stuff” (Star Bulletin, 1957). Despite never making landfall, the category 1 storm brought hurricane force wind gusts and heavy rain to the islands of Kauai and Oahu. Oahu was farther from the center of the storm but still experienced damaging winds. Hundreds of homes and businesses were damaged by winds across the island, including more than a dozen homes that were unroofed. Gusts of 70 mph buffeted the southern half of the island, and Honolulu International Airport experienced a record gust of 82 mph (Star Bulletin, 1957). Four concrete light posts in Waikiki were knocked down onto Ala Wai Boulevard and several show-windows in downtown Honolulu were blown out (Star Bulletin, 1957). Hurricane Nina traveled westward and away from the state on December 3rd, leaving behind three direct fatalities and at least $4 million (2012 dollars) in damage.
Sep 20, 2013, by Max
Extremeplanet.me