Last Train to Paradise (18 page)

The appeal of the Keys as an exotic destination had only been bolstered by their newfound accessibility, so much so that Franklin Roosevelt had thought it a worthy expenditure of WPA funds to complete a highway link between Grassy Key and the Matecumbes, thereby making it even easier for Americans to find a part of paradise for themselves. What effect that highway might have had on an already struggling rail line was a question debated by railroad officials and Middle Keys residents who were somewhat divided on the prospect of a second artery of travel through their midst.

It was an intriguing question, of course, but it would never be answered. Before men could finally address the issue, nature decided the matter by herself.

23

Storm of Storms

Hurricanes, scourge of the Key West Extension during its construction, seemed to lose interest once the line was in place, for a good long while, at least. Even the monster blow of 1926, which struck Miami head-on and virtually destroyed the spanking new suburb of Coral Gables, laid hardly a scratch on the Keys Extension. In one of history’s ironies, George Merrick, another notable Florida visionary and the founder of the city of Coral Gables, was forced into bankruptcy by the 1926 storm, and only managed to survive by cobbling together enough backing to open a fishing camp on—where else—Matecumbe Key, not far from where Flagler’s Long Key Fishing Camp was still operating successfully.

Other hurricanes had pummeled South Florida over the twenty-five years since the last to strike the Keys in 1910, some of them with profound consequences. But if the Key West Extension wasn’t making money, it seemed to have entered a charmed phase of existence, in one regard at least. The line had taken three major strikes during the time it was being built. A person might have been forgiven, then, for thinking that as far as danger from hurricanes went, the railroad across the ocean was out.

A fanciful notion, possibly a comforting one. But hardly a compelling one. Certainly, railroad men who had been around from 1906 to 1910 wouldn’t have bought into it—and a pity there were few of those left on duty in 1935. Joseph Parrott had died shortly after Flagler, and William Krome, who had retired to a farm in Homestead following Parrott’s death, had passed away in 1932. Clarence Coe, the masterful bridge builder, was still alive, but he was long out of railroad work. He’d gone on from the FEC to become the first city manager of Miami, and by 1935 he was serving as chief of that city’s Public Housing Authority.

It is interesting to speculate whether Krome or Coe might have done things differently, had they been involved in the railroad chain of command that fateful Labor Day weekend of 1935. It is possible they might have made a difference, had they known the power of the hurricane that was bearing down upon the Keys—had they been able to foresee Hemingway lurching through the fringes of the storm toward his boat; Bernard Russell watching his sister and her baby being peeled from his arms by the winds; workmen seeing friends impaled by flying timbers and decapitated by flying sheets of tin; railroad engineer J. J. Haycraft staring in disbelief at a wall of water about to swallow his train, along with the very world.

But little had changed in the science of hurricane forecasting between 1910 and 1935, and without the monster staring you in the eye, it is hard to fathom the reality of impending doom.

Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center, has said that when he joined the staff of the organization in the 1970s, forecasters might expect a storm to veer off its projected course by as much as 120 nautical miles within a twenty-four hour period. By the time Frank retired twenty-five years later, and despite the deployment of technically advanced spotter planes, satellite imaging, and sophisticated computer modeling, the standard margin of error still stood at 110 miles.

In other words, a storm predicted to hit Homestead, on the tip of the mainland, might twenty-four hours later actually devastate Key West. Or, one thought to be passing safely between the Yucatán Peninsula and Key West might suddenly change course and batter Key Largo and Marathon instead.

Today such maneuvers can be followed, at least, and some measure of warning flashed ahead to the unfortunate new targets. In 1935, however, while weather experts had access to charts that detailed the workings of previous hurricanes, and they knew when storms were likely to appear, they were ill equipped to say just where a new one might come ashore.

Much of what was known about hurricanes in those days derived from the work of Reverend Benito Vines, a nineteenth-century Jesuit priest who was one of the first meteorologists to specialize in hurricane forecasting. Reverend Vines had established a meteorological observatory at Belén College in Havana, and while he had access to little in the way of instrumentation, his predictions had become so accurate that some in the community regarded him as having supernatural powers.

As to what to do about the menace, Reverend Vines was as perplexed as anyone else of his day, however. If nothing else, he advised appeals to higher authority, albeit in a systematic manner: “Priests in Puerto Rico should recite the prayer
Ad Repellandat Tempestates
during the months of August, September, but not October. In Cuba it should be recited in September and October, but not in August.”

If prayer did not ward off the storm, other options were limited, certainly when one watches its approach from a spot on a tiny island, its landmass barely above sea level on a good day. Even today, experts presume that it would take a minimum of twenty-four hours to evacuate the Keys, and that is with a major highway running from Miami to Key West, two access bridges linking Key Largo to the mainland, and a carefully networked system of civil defense and sophisticated early-warning systems in place, none of which existed on that Labor Day weekend when Ernest Hemingway caught a glance at his evening paper’s headlines.

On Sunday, September 1, as that 1935 storm approached Andros Island in the Bahamas, less than one hundred miles from the U.S. mainland, it was packing winds of seventy-five miles per hour, what would be termed a minimal, or Category 1, storm today. Bulletins issued by the Associated Press suggested that by the following morning the storm was likely to hit Havana, one hundred miles south of Key West, and pass on westward into the Gulf of Mexico.

Cuba’s Carta Blanca weather observatory predicted that the storm was likely to pass through the channel separating Cuba from the Keys. The U.S. Weather Bureau in Jacksonville issued a storm warning at nine-thirty Sunday evening, locating a “tropical disturbance” about 250 miles east of Havana “moving slowly westward, attended by shifting gales and
probably
[emphasis added] winds of hurricane force over small area near center.” The bulletin ended by advising “caution” for vessels in the Florida Straits.

All relatively benign, by hurricane standards. But less than forty hours later, when the storm suddenly veered northward toward the Keys, it had become a Category 5 monster, off the charts in terms of wind speed—two hundred miles per hour and more—and to this day the strongest ever to hit the United States.

Hurricane forecasters are fond of using numbers to try to convey the fearsome potential of the storms: they will say that a hurricane releases as much energy in a single day as would the detonation of four hundred twenty-megaton H-bombs, or enough to provide the electrical needs of the United States for six months.

One of the more interesting statistics has to do with wind force. A “minimal” 75-mile-per-hour storm has the capability of propelling a shard of two-by-four lumber through a four-inch concrete block wall, but they will also tell you that when wind speed doubles, wind
force
actually quadruples. So that a Category 4, 150-mile-per-hour storm carries winds of four times the force of the lowest-level hurricane. And while most people would characterize a day with 20-mile-per-hour breezes as “windy,” a 200-mile-per-hour storm has winds of one hundred times that force.

The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the deadliest in history, with some eight thousand lives claimed, packed winds in the 150-mile-per-hour range; while Andrew, in 1992, the costliest hurricane in history, with $25 billion in damages, was also officially labeled a Category 4, 155-mile-per-hour storm. Given what was coming at them on Labor Day of 1935, then, residents of the Keys could only hunker down and pray for the best.

In the case of Hemingway and his fellow citizens of Key West, the approach seemed to be working. As Hemingway wrote:

. . . a little after two o’clock [the storm] backs into the west and by the law of circular storms you know the storm has passed over the Keys above us. Now the boat [Pilar] is sheltered by the sea wall and the breakwater and at five o’clock, the glass having been steady for an hour, you get back to the house. As you make your way in without a light you find a tree is down across the walk and a strange empty look in the front yard shows the big, old sapodillo tree is down too. You turn in.

That’s what happens when one misses you.

Whether by divine intervention or some lesser force, Key West had escaped the worst of it. But for those thousand or so residents and workers caught in the Middle Keys—including rescue train engineer J. J. Haycraft, the seventy-four members of the extended Russell family, and the six hundred or more veterans working on the Overseas Highway—prayers seemed not to be getting through.

Certainly prayers were not helping seventeen-year-old Bernard Russell, who had been forced to flee the lime-packing shed on Upper Matecumbe, where he and several members of his family had hoped to find shelter from the raging storm. They did not want to venture out into the raging storm, of course, but once the tides had risen to the level of that elevated building’s floorboards, there was no choice—the walls could easily collapse and crush them all.

Once outside, Bernard Russell continued to shout to his twenty-one-year-old sister that, as the stronger, he should be the one to carry her infant child through the maelstrom. But he was arguing with a desperate mother not about to loosen her grip upon her child.

Within moments, Russell had felt a terrific gust of wind sweep over them. Instinctively he had thrown his arms about his sister and her baby, fighting to guide them away from the rising waters.

Scientists still debate whether true tornadoes are spawned within the bands of the most powerful hurricanes. Bernard Russell can tell you that he has no such doubts. For a whirling vortex had snatched him and his sister and her baby off the ground as if they were twigs, and was now spinning them about in an ever-expanding circle.

Russell struggled, but he was up against a force stronger than the fiercest human intent. He felt his hands loosen at his sister’s shoulders and saw the look of panic in her face as she was pulled away, still clutching her baby. Though he strained to reach her, his arms could barely move against the force of the cyclonic winds.

As the vortex turned, she grew farther and farther away, until suddenly she and her baby were gone. In the next moment Russell found himself flying across the waterlogged packing-house grounds, just one more scrap of debris tossed by the indifferent storm.

By the time the winds released him and he could struggle to his feet, there was no trace of his sister or her child. “It was like looking in a bottle of ink,” Russell was to tell
Miami Herald
reporter Nancy Klingener in a 1995 interview. “You could see nothing. The winds are howling. And the rains are pounding. It was chaos. We were raked with trees or big pieces of houses or whatever else was coming by.”

As he reeled about the wind-blasted darkness, searching for his sister and other members of his family, Russell felt his foot plunge into a tangled deadfall. In the next moment the heavy mass shifted in the wind, pinning his ankle, and Russell realized he was trapped. The winds were so strong by this point that he had to turn his back and cup his face in his hands in order to breathe.

“It felt like eternity,” he says. “It could have been thirty minutes. It could have been two hours. Time was nothing then.”

At one point he sensed the waters receding beneath the tangle of brush where he was pinned, and thought that the worst was finally over. Then, suddenly, a chunk of siding torn from a building careened through the darkness and slammed atop the brush pile, driving Russell facedown into the water. He struggled, but the weight was too much. He was gulping seawater now, his arms floundering. It was over, then, he thought. All that was left was to die.

Today’s Saffir-Simpson Scale is a chart developed by hurricane researchers that classifies storms by the level of wind strength and also summarizes the likely effects of each. According to Saffir-Simpson, those who experience a Category 5 storm, the strongest on the scale, can expect the following:

“Complete roof failures on many residences and buildings. Some complete building failures. Major damage to all structures located less than fifteen feet above sea level. . . . Intensive winds continue far into inland areas.”

The threshold wind speed for such a storm is 155 miles per hour, and a tidal surge of eighteen feet can be expected to come ashore in advance of those winds. Only two storms of such intensity have struck the United States in the twentieth century. One was Camille, which came ashore near Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1969, with winds of approximately 175 miles per hour and a final death toll of more than 250. The other was the unnamed Labor Day storm of 1935, with its winds estimated at more than two hundred miles per hour (fewer than 3 percent of
tornadoes
ever generate winds of more than 206 miles per hour, according to experts).

The prospects for those caught on the Matecumbes, in what had become the storm’s crosshairs, were even more grim when the nature of the “shores” being borne down upon were considered. There is no land in all the Keys that rises more than sixteen feet above sea level, and most of it lies far below that, at an average of three or four feet.

As for escape “far inland,” that is a laughable concept in the narrow island chain. For Bernard Russell and his family, escape far inland had meant a dash through driving rains and wind a hundred yards or so to a lime-packing shed near the six-foot-high railroad bed.

And for the men working on the Overseas Highway, the outlook was just as dire. The “vets” as the highway workers had come to be called by the locals, were in truth largely World War I veterans who had marched upon Washington a few years before, demanding payment of bonus monies promised by Congress but never delivered. Although President Hoover had dispersed the “bonus army” encampments about the Capitol with armed troops and tear gas, Franklin Roosevelt had developed a more humane response, or at least that had been his intention when his relief agencies provided them employment in the Keys.