Last Train to Paradise (20 page)

There was a great lurch as the wave toppled the remainder of the eleven cars attached behind the engine. The linked cars went over sideways like toys, the windows of the passenger cars smashing inward under the tremendous force of the wave, the interiors filling almost instantaneously with water.

Inside, scores of men, women, and children who had thought themselves safe only moments before now found themselves trapped in water-filled coffins. In the surging darkness, there was no way to tell up, down, or sideways. Life had been reduced to the amount of time one might hold a single breath against the press of suffocating water.

Desperate parents groped madly for children torn from their grasp. Panicked men flailed blindly, their limbs tangling with those of others clawing just as wildly in return. As best we know, no one drowns with dignity.

A few did manage to escape the toppled cars through the shattered windows. Ironically, most of those “lucky” ones were swept out into the storm-tossed seas to die.

Engine 447, however, proved too heavy for even that monster wave to overturn. Miraculously, Haycraft and the crewmen in the engine’s cab—among them conductor Gamble and fireman Will Walker—came up from the battering of the waves to discover that they were saved.

But for forty miles flanking that single, sixty-foot stretch of track upon which 447 still sat, the roadbed of the Key West Extension had been obliterated, as had everything else in the path of the storm: the station house where so many had fled to find shelter, solidly built Conch homes where others had cowered, even the trees that some had lashed themselves to in desperation. For forty miles, including the spot where the Long Key Fishing Camp had stood—and that where fellow visionary George Merrick had planted his last hopeful development, the Caribee Club—the earth had been scoured clean.

“The Florida East Coast Railway is a total wreck . . . tracks have been picked up and tossed aside, sometimes fifty yards from the roadbed,” wrote one stunned reporter who had made his way to the site by boat.

“The trestles through the cuts are ruined. The hospital building at Camp No. 1 was swept so completely that not a splinter except the concrete base remains. Not a building stands there. . . . The foliage literally has vanished . . . everywhere one sees bedding, clothing and other bits of household necessities clinging to the brush, almost as if laid out to dry. Always it is high in the bushes, almost above a man’s head. . . . The entire mass of lumber used in construction of all the homes and cottages along the east coast of the islands lies high in the underbrush fully 300 yards inland. You’ll go a long way before you see such wreckage again.”

From a distance, there seemed nothing left but tumbled rock, shattered stumps, and, here and there, a pile of rubble or a twisted rail. One had to look more closely to find the bodies.

Trying to paint a picture of hurricane devastation for those who have not seen such a landscape firsthand is a traditionally elusive task. In 1909, when Key West tobacco company executives were finally able to send telegraph accounts to their New York counterparts, describing the catastrophic effects the storm had had on their holdings, most executives dismissed the cables as “impossible canards.”

Following Hurricane Andrew’s assault on South Miami– Dade County in 1992, then-president George Bush flew over Homestead and its environs, and, even after that bird’s-eye view of things, returned to Washington, still undecided whether federal relief funds were truly necessary. Outraged community leaders demanded that Bush return for a street-level assessment. Following a few hours of picking his way through the devastation that often required military half-tracks to traverse, a pale and chastened Bush vowed to set every mechanism of aid at the government’s disposal into motion.

Following the 1935 storm, the first doctor to arrive in the Matecumbes was G. C. Franklin of Coconut Grove. He discovered the bodies of thirty-nine men in the first tangle of debris he encountered on shore, but even such statistics could not convey the feeling of despair that enveloped the islands in a palpable shroud.

“I saw a man, big powerful man, sitting upright on the road,” wrote Jack Bell, a reporter covering the storm’s aftermath for the
Miami News.
“He wore a blue denim jacket and overalls, nothing else. Beside him sat a little boy of about five, his head wrapped in a great ungainly bandage, a shirt ripped open.

“The man sat staring into space. ‘What is your name?’ I asked. He lifted his head and stared at me.

“ ‘Don’t you remember your name?’ I asked, trying to help him. Still he stared vacantly at me, saying nothing.”

Ernest Hemingway, pinned in Key West by residual winds until the second morning after the storm, joined one of the first rescue parties to reach the Middle Keys and did his best to evoke the horrors he encountered. “When we reached Lower Matecumbe, there were bodies floating in the ferry slip,” he writes in
New Masses.
“The brush was all brown as though autumn had come . . . but that was because the leaves had all been blown away. There was two feet of sand over the island where the sea had carried it and all the heavy bridge-building machines were on their sides. The island looked like the abandoned bed of a river where the sea had swept it.”

Soon enough, he encountered even worse: “The railroad embankment was gone and the men who had cowered behind it . . . were all gone with it. You could find them face down and face up in the mangroves. . . . Then further on you found them high in the trees where the water had swept them . . . beginning to be too big for their blue jeans and jackets that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry.”

There were anomalies, as there always are in a storm’s aftermath, oddities that one wants to fasten on as evidence of a more benign universe, but rarely can. “On the other hand,” Hemingway notes, “there are no buzzards. Absolutely no buzzards. How’s that? Would you believe it? The wind killed all the buzzards and all the big winged birds like pelicans too. You can find them in the grass that’s washed along the fill.”

Another mind-boggling account is to be found in
Florida’s Hurricane History
: One victim was found the day after the storm, impaled by a piece of two-by-four that had passed completely through him, just beneath his ribs and somehow missing his kidneys. The man was still living and appeared calm as a doctor prepared to remove the length of timber. The doctor offered the man a shot of morphine to dull the pain of the procedure, but the man refused, opining that the operation was sure to kill him. That being the case, the man reasoned, he would rather have two beers instead. He was given the beers, which he drank, and then said to the doctor, “Now pull.” The doctor pulled the timber out. And the man died.

In a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway presents the most disturbing images of all, in terms that would have made it impossible for any publication of the day to print:

Max, you can’t imagine it, two women, naked, tossed up into the trees by the water, swollen and stinking, their breasts as big as balloons, flies between their legs. Then, by figuring, you located where it is and recognize them as the two very nice girls who ran a sandwich place and filling-station three miles from the ferry. We located sixty-nine bodies where no one had been able to get in. Indian Key absolutely swept clean, not a blade of grass, and over the high center of it were scattered live conchs that came in with the sea, crawfish, and dead morays. The whole bottom of the sea blew over it . . . we made five trips with provisions for survivors to different places and nothing but dead men to eat the grub. . . .

The official Red Cross death toll was 408, but most agreed that the official count was low, that the final tally would never be known, owing to an uncertain Keys census and a general laxity in FERA’s record keeping. The Islamorada coroner put the figure at 423, but many informed estimates quickly suggested the total was over 600, for many bodies of the missing were never found, and there was no way to know just how many of the vets were in the camp that day.

Whatever the final count, it is generally agreed that more than half of the thousand or so residents and workers caught on the Matecumbes that day lost their lives. (One measure of the storm’s ferocity comes from the dire observations of present-day weather experts who try to attune coastal residents and visitors to the magnitude of hurricane threats: were a storm as powerful as the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 to strike Key West today, they say, the 22,000-person island would likely be wiped as clean of life and property as the Matecumbes were years ago. Were such a storm to strike a major population center such as Miami, property damage would likely outstrip Andrew one hundred times over.)

In any case, the full extent of the devastation will likely never be known. Some twenty years later, an Islamorada developer digging fill out of a rock pit unearthed three automobiles bearing out-of-state license plates dated 1935, the skeletons of their occupants still resting inside. And to this day, those poking about one of the hundreds of tiny, uninhabited islands dotting Florida Bay will sometimes uncover remains suspected to be victims of the Labor Day storm.

Stunned by the magnitude of the losses, and eager to appear compassionate, Roosevelt’s government issued initial orders that all of the bodies of the veterans would be removed to Arlington National Cemetery for interment. But it soon became clear that the great numbers of the dead made such a plan impractical. The bodies would be given proper burial in Miami, came the next decree.

One hundred sixteen bodies were taken to Miami, as it turned out. But even that undertaking would prove impossible to carry to conclusion, for the tropical heat and humidity were causing an unexpectedly rapid decomposition of the victims’ flesh. State health officials, fearing the outbreak of an epidemic, ordered the bodies burned by the attending national guardsmen, and several clashes ensued when local residents tried to pull the bodies of relatives out of the funeral pyres—fed by burning tires and upturned railroad ties—for private ceremonies.

Here and there had been pockets of survivors, though, given the context of these lives, “survival” might put too positive a spin on the matter.

Thirteen of the vets who had taken leave of the camp for the Labor Day holiday were discovered AWOL in Key West, the Tuesday following the storm. They had traveled down to the city as part of a group of fifty, and had decided to stay on, despite the fact that they were due back at work on Monday. Their dereliction would likely have cost them their jobs; but unlike the thirty-seven dutiful colleagues who had returned to camp on Monday, the thirteen AWOL still had their lives.

One newspaper account told of a ten-year-old girl found lying alongside the ruined highway in Islamorada, critically injured. The girl’s clothing had been entirely ripped away by the winds, her body still bleeding from wounds she’d suffered from the unending barrage of debris that had darkened the skies a day before. As rescuers loaded her onto a launch for transfer to a hospital, she begged them to search for her family, who lived in a house nearby. No one had the heart to tell her that her mother and father had died, along with her four brothers and sisters, one of them seventeen months old.

Elsewhere, rescuers found three men wedged amid an outcropping of boulders, all of them apparently drowned. The workers were about to turn away, when one of the “dead” men stirred. As the man was revived, he recounted the tale of being flung into the rocks during the storm. A blow to his head had incapacitated him, and he had awakened to find his face only inches away from those of his two dead companions. He’d been staring back at their sightless eyes for nearly a day before his rescue.

And not far away, Bernard Russell had awakened atop that tangled deadfall where he’d been pinned, to realize he had not drowned after all. The waters had receded a bit and the winds had died back, enough for him to breathe, at least. In the dim early light, he was able to work his foot free and climb down from the uprooted mass of trees that had saved him.

Then he heard a voice nearby—it was someone who’d been injured, now calling out for help, he realized. Trying to orient himself in the still-powerful storm, Bernard Russell fought his way toward the sound. He’d gone only a few feet when he bumped into a man staggering in the opposite direction. The two backed off to stare at each other through the gale—and Bernard Russell felt his knees weaken in relief. Just as he was about to give up hope, he found himself staring at his father, alive.

John Russell had lost his shoes in the storm and had cut his feet terribly as he scrambled over wreckage in his own desperate search for his family. Bernard sat him down on the trunk of a fallen tree, then scavenged some sheeting and sponges from one of the wind-whipped piles of debris that lay everywhere. By now the skies were beginning to lighten, and the two could make out a railroad car tumbled on its side not far away. Bernard bound up his father’s feet as best he could, and then helped him toward the fallen car.

The two men climbed through a window of the train, where they stayed until light came and the winds finally began to lessen. The moment it seemed practicable, Bernard pulled himself up and out, and began the search for others of their family.

The first body he stumbled over was that of his six-year-old cousin. His mother, Louise, had been drowned, as had the sister he had tried to protect, along with her child. Bernard’s uncle Clifton had survived, but he had also lost his wife and four of his five children, including a daughter whose body was discovered forty miles away, on a scrub island near Cape Sable, where the railroad had once planned to launch itself off the coast. Still clutched in the young woman’s arms was the body of her dead baby.

“No way she could have held on to that baby if they’d been in the water all that distance,” Bernard Russell says. “They’d been lifted up and blown there by the wind.”

In all, sixty-three members of the Russell family died that night. Only eleven lived to remember its horrors.