We just cranked up the kerosene lamp. It’s 5 o’clock and on the verge of being dark. It’s usually dark at 7. The winds have really picked up. The gusts are probably 40 or 50 mph. That’s nothing – they’re supposed to get up to 110. The wind will drive me insane. The sound of the baby chickens is enough to break my heart. I’ve been worried about the chickens for days, ever since we realized that the hurricane would definitely hit us. It was going to be 150 mph winds, and the chickens would definitely die. We had planned on catching the two friendly ones and putting them in a cage in the house, but they have been completely evasive all day long. There are two more babies that I had no hopes of catching, that I thought would surely die. I guess there’s hope for them, along with the beautiful rooster and all the fat and sassy hens, if they would only get under the house, but for now they are huddled over by the gate trying to make it across the drive to their roosting tree. The winds are at a panic stage now. We can keep a side window open for now because the winds are very determined to keep on their track from the north. It’s still light enough, barely, to take video footage. The trees are bending due south, although there’s no sustained high velocity yet. We were outside for a few minutes while it was building. We were trying to catch the scattered baby chickens. The writhing trees and swirling debris were exciting and beautiful to watch. We weren’t in danger then. There’s no way I’d go outside now. They just said on the radio that the winds in Old San Juan are sustained at 40 mph with gusts at 63. Well, the sustained winds don’t feel so bad here yet, but the gusts are worse. It’s supposed to last for several more hours. The weather man is really emphatic about how dangerous this is. He'’ saying that the noise from the hurricane will be one of the most unpleasant experiences of out lives. The top of a tree just snapped off. It twirled around on the electric line before flying off down the hill. It’s 6 p.m. and still twilight. The winds are now steady, maybe 60. Things are hitting the north windows. The chickens are still crying by the gate. Now we’ve discovered that some of them, including the babies, are hunkered down at the base of a shrub. Nope. They just ran down the hill and then back up to the gate. This is what a hurricane looks like. The rain is alive and the wind is furious. The water is coming in through the closed north windows, but not the opened east window, so we’re still able to see what’s going on. This is important. I need to be able to see for as long as possible to keep from going mad, as I know I will when the windows are shut and winds are screaming. So much for that. It’s really getting dark now. The windows are shut. A lady just called in to the radio from Vieques, where the eye just passed, (amazing that she could call at all – incredible. She said that the back wall of the storm was so intense that her metal louvered windows were blown in and she was cowering in the middle room. Another man is describing the windows in a 6 story condo all being blown out. Trees down. Bit trees. There’s no way our chickens are going to live through this. Flash flood warnings are in all the low spots. We won’t have a problem with flooding. Winds, yes. At about 7:15 we went to the back side of the house, the south side, to see how sheltered it was, considering that the winds have been strictly from the north. It was dead calm in the valley and on the hillside behind the house. I hope the chickens are back there. We could hear coquis singing and we could see people moving around in the neighborhood below us. Power is out, but a lot of people have generators, and it’s dark enough to make flashlights obvious. We are waiting for the wind to change direction or for there to be calm from the eye. It’s pretty likely that the eye will pass to the south of us and we’ll only get the shift in direction. The winds did clam down for a few minutes, but it started up full force from the north again. The shift is surely eminent. 8 p.m. – wind from east and south. The reports are that the east side of the storm is much more intense and longer. The chicken’s happy southern haven will soon be lost. Biscuit (the dog) has been insecure all day, but she’s been downright scared since the winds picked up. She’s been on one person’s lap or another and she’s been shaking like a leaf. Our phone just went dead. The winds are howling from the south now. We had big plans of consuming vast quantities of rum in order to calm our nerves, but we’ve been too nervous to drink. John has been steadily mopping. Water is getting in, but we’re not flooded. We have tile floors, anyway. The radio has been reporting all kinds of specific damage reports. Three people dead in Caguas, buildings collapsed, the building where they’re broadcasting from trembling, hurricane shutters being blown away, scores of homes destroyed in Fajardo, etc, etc. The winds are really erratic. They don’t seem to be that strong. They just announced that the eye of the storm veered more to the west, towards Ponce, which means we won’t have the fierce winds of the east wall. Amazing. I bet the people in the south will be surprised. I hope they’re prepared. There are a lot more wooden houses in the south. We ventured outside with flashlights. Man, what a shock!! The trees are stripped. All the trees of the forest around our house are naked. The breadfruit is naked. The big avocado tree is one long skinny thing sticking up. We don’t have any idea how bad things are here, but the damage reports from the rest of the area are really bad. It’s now a little after 8 a.m. What little sleep we managed was horrible. John mopped under the bedroom windows all night, but we woke up to the first dim light to find that the floors were flooded anyway. The winds from the south did not let up. The gusts were strong enough to feel like the shutters really would fly off. The wind on the north side of the house of the house is not as bad, so we opened the door. There were the baby chickens, wet, mad, and waiting to be fed! Insane! The soaked rooster was huddled against the retaining wall. We found the odd chicken cringing amongst the debris, but I can’t account for all of them yet. We walked onto the balcony as soon as the wind would allow it. The rain was still blowing horizontally from the south. The banana trees were all gone. All of them. The big avocado tree that I fell out of a year ago is gone. The trees that screen us from our neighbors at the bottom of the hill are all broken and stripped. The view into the arabal below is unobscured, and it’s not a pretty sight. Many of the houses are roofless and you can see right down into them. As soon as the winds were gone, at about 9 a.m., we went out with saws and machetes and cleared the fallen trees from the road. John repaired the broken telephone line (amazing). He took the motorcycle into town to check on the offices. Amber and I walked to the bottom of the road, tools and dog in hand. It was awful. A big wooden house at the top of the hill is completely obliterated. The people were in it at the time. They’re okay. Every single house along the road has at least a piece of roof missing. We could see a wooden house on top of a neighboring hill that looks like it exploded. Disintegrated. My anticipation and fear of the hurricane had mounted greatly a couple of days before it hit. We were told it would have 150 mph sustained winds and that the noise would be deafening. I had visions of the hillside washing away below our house and the whole thing sliding down the hill. Even after we were told that it had slowed to a category 3, my adrenaline was still pumped up. Well, we survived the night, the house didn’t slide away and dump the concrete roof on our heads, there was no screaming, gnashing terror, all of us huddled in a central room in the house blubbering and weeping in a drunken stupor. It could have been that bad, but it wasn’t. It was a lot worse than I expected in some ways, though. I had no preconceived vision of the aftermath. I thought that pockets of the forest would be destroyed, that the hurricane would graze a part of the island. I knew that things would be different when we opened up the door for the first time, but I wasn’t prepared for how different. Less than 2 days after the storm a group of us from the Forest Service went to check the damage at Bisley. We had to walk about 3 miles over and around and under trees that had fallen across the road. The forest was brown and at least a third shorter than it was before. It looked like it had been burned, without the black and the smoke. The extent of the damage is amazing, as well as the extent of what is still there. Very few trees were actually tumped over. Most of them have been stripped and cropped, but they are still alive. There is no shade in the forest. The walk to the creeks at Bisley was absolutely draining because of the intensity of the sun. It will be a while before there is any respite. Looking at the mountainside from Rt 3, some distance away, all that you see is brown, a brown fuzz covering the mountains. If you didn’t know any better it would be hard to tell what had happened. It looks like a severe drought has struck. The devastation along Rt 3 is more telling. Just about every power pole is cracked, leaning, or down. Along some stretches a series of poles will be leaning heavily to the north, then suddenly the next series will be leaning heavily to the south. In the old days people believed that the hurricane came in, turned around, and went back. El Viracion . Many of the business – car dealers and lumber yards especially – lost their roofs. The little town of Sabana, where the field station is located, was an absolute wreck. Power poles were cracked in half, their lines draped barely a car’s height above the road. Trees were down all along the road, but in Sabana, as well as communities all over the island, the residents were out working furiously with their chain saws and machetes and it is doubtful that the roads were impassible for more than a couple of hours after the storm. The road to Bisley, which links the towns of Sabana and Mameyes, and which we had to walk to reach the sites, was cleared enough for car travel by the time we emerged from the woods in the early afternoon. This was down by the citizens of Sabana. In the three weeks that have passed since the storm most of the power poles in and around San Juan and along the northeast coast have been removed and replaced. It has been amazing to watch the input of effort. The electric company’s linemen work all day and possibly all night. If you measured the actual rate of progress, it might be in inches per day, but the size of the task of replacing or restringing all of the lines in the metropolitan area is unfathomable. Almost all of Greater San Juan is back on line. The prospects for restoration of services in our area are not so optimistic. We are concerned that the fire under the rears of the linemen is going to go out before they ever get to us. It hasn’t faded yet, though. Last weekend we watched a helicopter lifting and carrying line across the hills of our neighborhood. We are in awe that they continue to work, work, work, but we realistically don’t hold out a lot of hope that they will get to us any time soon. There will be no power at the Forest Service for 3 or 4 weeks, and that is smack in the middle of town. Our house in the country will have to be patient. Of course without power the pump station at the bottom of the hill can’t pump water up to our house. That is a little harder to take than no power. We are managing by being very frugal, moderately dirty, short, and restless. We take pint baths, dipped from a large barrel in the shower. We save the rinse water from the dishes for the toilet. We wash out clothes by hand and save that water as well. Knowing that it will be at least another month helps us to adjust our lifestyles, but it can also be depressing. It’s just a stinking lot of trouble. We have set up an elaborate system for catching rainwater, but it just won’t rain on top of our hill. We watch it raining all around. There was a nice lightening storm last night, but the barrel is dry. We’ve gone to the local ‘oasis’ a few times to fill a 55 gallon barrel in the back of the van, then ferried the water up to the roof and into the big storage tank. All of this is a lot of work, and we are not about to pour water down the drain without using it a few times first. Our neighbors don’t have roofs, so we shouldn’t complain. But then our friends all have power and water and are very nearly back to normal. It’s difficult not to be ansy. Within a few days after the storm the cecropia trees put out new leaves from the ends of their broken branches. They are already on their third wave of leaves. Their leaves are huge, too. Most of the broken brown sticks of trees are putting out leaves. Many of them put out leaves right along the trunks under these stressful conditions. Three weeks after the storm you go back to the forest and you still see brown broken sticks as far as the eye can see, but if you look closer you see that all of the trees have a pale green fuzzy look to them as they strain to regenerate. We have gone from verdant green summer to stark winter overnight, and in less than 3 weeks wer quickly passing through spring. It won’t be long before green covers up the evidence of what passed. Maybe before we get power back. Brynne Bryan