Eyeing the hurricane
Sitting out a big storm in Bimini
By John Ryle • 4 October 1998 • City of Words • The Guardian • Expanded with afterword • Posted 2016 • 1,431 wordsI was diving off the reef at Paradise Point with my nephew Tom, ogling the parrotfish and baby sharks, when the 48-hour hurricane warning came. Tom is a zoologist and underwater wildlife cameraman; he’s been working in the Caribbean for the past month; and I’d just flown down to join him on North Bimini, a Bahamian islet in the Gulf Stream, sixty miles from the Florida keys.
US Presidential candidate Gary Hart with Donna Rice in Bimini, April 1987. Photograph by Lynn Armandt
As Hurricane Georges came close we wondered if we should leave the island. The last sea-plane was leaving for Miami that afternoon; it wasn’t due to return till the hurricane had passed. But it seemed a shame to pack up so soon after arriving. So we stayed. We watched as residents of the island secured their boats among the mangroves – redoubtable plants whose aquatic roots break the huge force of the waves – and proceeded to stock up their refrigerators, fill plastic barrels with fresh water and board up their houses. We did our best to emulate their forward planning. And settled in for the storm.
The big wind whirling up from Cuba made compulsive TV watchers of us all. Weather forecasts are gripping if you’re in the path of trouble – like following the course of a yacht race while clinging to a buoy. Listening to the weathermen discussing the direction that Georges was likely to take through the Florida Strait you could understand why meteorologists anthropomorphize these overgrown tropical storms, naming them after their loved ones or their pets. How proud little Georges Forecaster must be of his eponymous hurricane, though it lives only as long as a Tamagotchi.
(Let it be noted that tropical storms and hurricanes are not really named on the whim of meteorologists but follow an alphabetical system starting over each year, beginning with ‘A’. Georges was the seventh-ranking hurricane this year. Although hurricanes are increasing in frequency, there are seldom more than a dozen in a single year, which is why there is no Hurricane Zorba, Hurricane Xerxes, or Hurricane Yves. Or not yet.)
The US television reports we were following presented the weather as though it were a small war. At times like these coast-dwelling thrill-seekers in the United States rush to the beach with surfboards to catch the shore break, while TV crews record their folly and wise folk stay indoors and channel-surf. But not for too long. The satellite pictures on Miami’s Channel Seven were so hypnotic they had to interrupt the broadcast to remind viewers in the Florida Keys to switch the TV off and start packing.
An island in the stream
Bimini has a louche reputation. It’s the setting of Hemingway’s fishing and drinking novel, Islands in the Stream, and it’s where the first black US congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, fled in the 1960s to escape charges of libel and tax evasion (accompanied by an aptly-named companion, Darlene Expose). Twenty years later, another US politician, the presidential hopeful Gary Hart, was photographed here with Donna Rice, a woman-not-his-wife, an affair that ended his hopes of the 1967 Democratic nomination. The compromising picture of Donna Rice and Gary Hart now hangs in the bar at the Compleat Angler, the island’s most celebrated drinking place. The barman remarks – without prejudice, he says – that President Clinton has yet to make a trip to Bimini.
The island still draws the blue marlin crowd, rich rednecks whose idea of fun is a life-and-death struggle with a big fish. (They live; the fish dies.) There’s a scattering of minor showbiz celebrities. And these days Bimini has a novel lure: it’s a global mecca for new-age dolphin lovers. A pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins hangs out in the shallow waters off the north shore, and many tourists, including some whose visit was cut short by Hurricane Georges, visit the island to seek spiritual communion with these wondrous aquatic mammals. For the votaries of oceanic pantheism Bimini has become a sacred site, a place of pilgrimage, the location – though not the first to be so identified – of the lost city of Atlantis.
