Front Porch: After experiencing a hurricane, the sound - and lack thereof - sticks with you

I’m happy to report that my family and friends in Florida, who are spread up and down both coasts as well as inland, from Tallahassee to Miami, have come through the late -season hurricanes Helene and Milton reasonably intact.

It’s always a worry every year, even though all of them know the hurricane drill well and aren’t likely to do anything stupid. Still, trees do fall on houses otherwise deemed safe, and a variety of after-the-storm events can cause destruction and death just when those sighs of relief are starting to take place.

We in the Northwest have our own weather issues, in the form of blizzards and volcanic action, largely. I never had greater outreach from my family on the East Coast than when Mount St. Helens blew in 1980.

Still, I follow hurricanes closely, not just because I have so many loved ones in harm’s way, but because they are storms with which I am familiar, and I understand the language and sensations being described in the excellent coverage on television. I know what they feel like.

And I am reminded about the things not discussed about hurricanes so often – the contrast of sounds being primary. Should the eye of the storm pass over your location, it gets very quiet very fast. After hours and hours of roaring noise … nothing.

What I remember isn’t the silence itself, but the kind of silence it brought – absence of sound, which is a different thing.

In 1960, I was at home with my parents in Miami when Hurricane Donna went directly over the city. There was no 24-hour news coverage in those days. And, of course, no computers, no internet, no cellphones. When the electricity went off, we turned on our transistor radios and listened.

The wind had been howling for hours at a volume that’s hard to describe. I had to shout so that my mother, who was seated close to me, could hear what I was saying. Then, suddenly, nothing. I know that reporters during this month’s visit by Milton to the city of Sarasota (where a high school friend lives, near an inlet that feeds into the bay) observed that they could hear birds chirping when the eye passed over. That was not my experience decades earlier.

In 1960, during the time of the eye, people were calling in their intersection coordinates to the radio station we were listening to, and we were able to determine we were fairly central within the eye, so my father and I stepped out the front door for a minute or two. If we had been at the edge of the eye, that would have been a dangerous thing to do.

Incidentally, my mother did not go out. A nonswimmer who was terrified by water that moved, other than out of a faucet, she sat quietly inside, near the inflated air mattress in the living room, with her life jacket on. You have to do what you have to do to feel safe.

There were no calls for evacuation, so we hunkered down in place.

It was dark when Dad and I went outside, so when we looked up, we saw a sky full of stars, normally not visible due to the light pollution of a big city. But when we looked down, it was Armageddon. Palm fronds stuck out of the ground, like swords that had been thrust there. Kids’ toys and coolers and all sorts of people-stuff floated by, down our street, which was overflowing with water that was backing up from drains that normally carried stormwater into nearby Biscayne Bay. Our house, and a small patch of grass near the doorstep, had become a little island fortress – as had all our neighbors’ homes. Not a wisp of a breeze.

But it was the abject stillness of those few minutes that most impressed me. It was like the difference between watching someone who is soundly sleeping and viewing someone in bed who has died. It’s a different kind of quiet. Hard to describe. Also hard to forget.

Interesting to know, even though there have been other bigger and more destructive storms since, Hurricane Donna was famous in its own right. It had been a Category 4, though downgraded in strength when it hit Miami. It took 364 lives along its path from the Lesser Antilles to New England, had a storm surge of 13 feet at Marathon (in the middle Keys) and is the only hurricane that hit every state along the USA’s East Coast with hurricane force winds.

But for me, it was the creepy absence of sound in the eye that has forever stayed with me. So when hurricane season starts every year, I am reminded of what each storm can do, even the “little” ones, and how much can be lost. And that stillness isn’t always such a great thing.

The season runs through the end of November. May everyone stay safe.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.