For Sale —American Paradise (33 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

L
EO
R
EARDON SAT DOWN IN A SOGGY, HURRICANE-BATTERED APARTMENT IN
the Everglades Hotel in downtown Miami, determined to record the experience he and his family had just endured. But his bleary mind was as blank as the paper in front of him. What day of the week was it? What was the date?

It was Saturday, September 18, 1926. The horrifying experience of riding out the worst hurricane on record had left him so dazed that he questioned his own lucidity.

“I'm not normal,” he wrote. “I'm not sure that I'm perfectly sane.”

Still, he continued to scribble hastily, wanting to get something on paper before he collapsed from exhaustion—or lost his mind. At the moment, both possibilities seemed likely.

Steadying himself, he continued.

“I must set this down now,” he wrote, “for I'm not sure how long my reason will last. My God, but I'm tired. I'll write it now while every minute's horror of those unforgettable ten hours stands out in my brain like a year in an inferno.”

Until you've been through an intense hurricane, it's impossible to really understand the unearthly power they can unleash and the primal fear they can evoke. Inexperienced human perception and anticipation inevitably tend to underestimate a hurricane's fearsome force.

After you've survived such a storm, you may never be the same again.

Meteorologists in the twenty-first century are still trying to understand these storms and calculate the immense energy they release. Today, their power sometimes is expressed in a measure that did not exist in 1926—atomic bombs. When a hurricane reaches its peak intensity, it may release energy equivalent to 500,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, although that energy is spread over a vast area and is not concentrated as it would be in an atomic bomb explosion.

As Reardon gathered his wits and his strength in a damp hotel room and tried to write about a life-altering experience, thousands of dazed and terrified people crawled and pushed and wormed their way out of the wreckage in Miami and Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Hialeah, and Hollywood and Coconut
Grove. Others, too seriously injured to move, lay helplessly where they'd fallen, waiting, hoping someone would find them soon.

The wail of ambulance sirens replaced the wailing screech of the hurricane's winds. Mothers searched frantically for missing children. Husbands sick with worry, exhausted but driven by dread and determination to find their loved ones, tore at piles of tangled lumber that only a few hours earlier had served as the walls and floors of their dream homes, searching frantically for family members. Children sought missing pets—or their parents.

Some survivors wept over the lifeless bodies of loved ones, or just wandered the streets, thirsty and in a state of shock, looking for water or a familiar face.

The iconic decorative touches of a tropical paradise that had existed a day earlier—Cuban tiles, stucco walls, colorful sun-
bleached awnings—had been turned into mounds of twisted rubble, on top of which lay shreds of clothing, pieces of furniture, fragments of dishes, remains of cherished heirlooms . . . the deeply personal wreckage of private lives. And beneath those piles, and in flood-waters, and in wrecked cars and boats, the dead lay, awaiting discovery and identification. Some had been crushed when buildings had collapsed. Others had been speared or clubbed by debris that became deadly when it was propelled by winds that may have reached 150 miles an hour in the northeast quadrant of the eye wall. Even a coconut, that ubiquitous symbol of the tropics, could knock the life out of someone when it flew through the air at that speed.

Some victims had simply drowned when the ocean surged across Miami Beach and into the streets of downtown Miami.

The raucous, deadly sea had also flung boats and ships of all sizes out of the water. About 550 vessels—modest houseboats, barges, sturdy tugs, sleek yachts, oceangoing freighters, and small rowboats—were wrecked or sunk in the Miami River and Biscayne Bay. The bowsprit of the
Rose Mahoney
, a proud, five-masted schooner washed ashore by the storm, towered over Biscayne Boulevard.

The storm had wrecked and demolished the pleasure spots of Miami Beach. Mixed in with the other wreckage on the western shore of Biscayne Bay were chunks of polished maple boards that had been part of the dance floor of Charley's Grill. Only a few hours earlier, dancers had been doing the Charleston on those boards until cops had come in, closed the place, and told everyone to get off the island. The storm's tides and winds had carried the boards about three miles across Biscayne Bay.

Near the Flagler Street bridge, fifty-four boats had been piled up in the Miami River. An eighteen-
foot pleasure boat rested on its keel near the curb at a street corner, far from any water. It looked as though the owner had left it in a choice parking space and gone shopping.

In downtown Miami, the seventeen-story Meyer-Kiser Building—also known as the Dade Commonwealth Building—was ruined. The building's opening only a few months earlier had prompted Miami's boomers to boast that their skyline of tall buildings reaching for the clouds would soon resemble New York's.

But the Meyer-Kiser's upper stories had been blasted by winds even more powerful than those that had caused so much havoc on the ground. At ground level, a hurricane's winds interact with the ground and are slowed down, but one hundred or more feet in the air, the winds are unimpeded by the ground's drag. This means that the winds that slammed into the Meyer-
Kiser Building could
have exceeded 160 miles an hour.

“Jack Reeves tells me he watched the antics of this seventeen-story building from the door of the Ritz Hotel,” Leo Reardon wrote. “He says it waved its tail like a porpoise and did a sort of Charleston during the gale.”