Poems by Tara Pyfrom

Before Fiona and Ian, there was Dorian

by Tara Pyfrom

From Canary Fall 2024

Tara lives in Atlantic Canada, a short, winding drive from the Bay of Fundy with the highest tidal range in the world. However, Tara was born, raised, and lived for many years on the tiny limestone islands of the Northern Bahamas at the very edge of the vast Atlantic Ocean.

Yet another hurricane season is upon us, forecasted to be record-breaking with up to 39 named storms.¹ The forecast is irrelevant to anyone living in the path of these monsters. Either you are lucky, or you are unlucky. When you live at the water’s edge, by birth or by choice, you just live with the consequences of these storms year after year. As someone who falls into the former category, being born at the water’s edge does very little to make the reality of our warming planet any easier to bear.

For six months out of every year, we watch the ocean and the weather forecasts. Through years of repetitious experience, we’ve learned the best way to shutter a house and exactly how long we can wait to do it. Memories of Andrew, Katrina, Sandy, Floyd, Francis, Jean, and Matthew leave goosebumps on our necks and quickened heartbeats in our chests.

We prepare each time we watch the birth of a storm, so far out into the depths of the ocean that Hurricane Hunter aircraft can’t even reach them. We wait on bated breath as they grow from infancy to toddlerhood to angry teenagers. We know the appearance of an empty hole at the center of the infrared image means a psychopathic adult will be hell-bent on destruction very soon. It’s doomsday, and we have zero control over the where and when.

My doomsday was in 2019 when my wife and I, our then-six-year-old daughter, and our five dogs were living in Freeport, Grand Bahama, the northernmost island in the Bahamas. Having been born and raised in the Bahamas, we had already successfully weathered more hurricanes than we could name.

In 2016, we survived Hurricane Matthew when it made a direct hit on our home, knocking out electricity on the entire island for weeks. In an interview, a Hurricane Ian survivor in South Florida said they were Irma-ready, but not Ian-ready. I know precisely how they feel because my family’s story is the personification of that sentence. We were Matthew-ready. We weren’t Dorian-ready.

When the 185-mph wind reached us, it pushed a monumental storm surge of up-to-25-feet-of-ocean across the island. We knew some flooding might be possible, but our area was never ordered to evacuate. Some reports say more than 50 percent of the island was underwater.

In the early morning hours, water reached the doors of our elevated house, and all hell broke loose. We tried desperately to force the sandbags to keep the water out, but they were useless as the ocean rose even higher. We had a few feet of water inside within a couple of hours. We sat on our kitchen countertops as the furniture in our house began to float. Terror struck, and tunnel vision took over.

What I feared most of all was being trapped inside our home, my wife, our 6-year-old daughter, and five beloved dogs, all drowning with our heads pressed against the ceiling, gasping for air. That image in my mind drove us outside in the middle of the worst hurricane ever recorded in the Bahamas.

Hindsight is always 20/20. We could have prepared for a major flood. We could have purchased life jackets or even a kayak in our storm prep. Instead, we had a pool float and a semi-buoyant cot mattress.

Outside, we struggled to stay afloat as we huddled against our house. All that mattered was keeping our young daughter and the five animals from being swept away and drowned. Ultimately, that idealistic decision to react to what fear told me was coming proved wrong. After 30 minutes of fighting the waves and wind, we were forced back into our flooded home to avoid drowning then and there.

Back inside the house, rapidly filling like a fishbowl, we struggled with the next steps. As we paused, exhausted from hours of battling with fear and the prospect of death, we tried to work out a better plan to stay alive. The attic was our only remaining option. As I transported the last of our five dogs up the ladder into the attic, the water had risen high enough to cover the doorway to the closet where the attic access was located. I had to dive under the water to move from one room to another.

Even from a place of assumed safety, my idealism guided my decisions. We had no drinking water in the attic and only minimal food. I made a solo trip across the dimly lit attic space to our kitchen, thinking I could stomp a hole in the ceiling to retrieve water from a high cabinet there. Once again, the terror spurring me clouded my brain as I misjudged and fell into the flooded kitchen below. I ended up in the exact position I had been trying to avoid all along, as breathing room in the flooded kitchen was minimal.

I made my first attempt at pulling myself back into the attic. Without enough upper body strength, and running dangerously low on mental fortitude, I fell back into the water again, bruising myself as I fell. My fear weighed heavily on me as I realized that I might be stuck until the storm passed, or I drowned, whichever happened first.

With a renewed burst of adrenaline brought on by the fight or flight response, I tried twice more to haul myself out and eventually managed to get my upper body up into the hole. With more twisting, bruises, and scrapes, I managed to claw my way out of my worst nightmare and back into the darkness of the attic.

Unbeknownst to us then, Hurricane Dorian stopped moving and sat over our tiny island. Trapped in the attic, with no contact with the outside world, we were on our own to hold on until the storm passed and rescue could begin. For 24 hours, we sat in inky blackness and waited. We waited for the ocean to rise and drown us in a watery grave above our house. As we waited for death, we repeated the inner mantra “Please let the roof hold” over and over again.

After a full day of waiting in fear for our lives, the flood water receded, and the wind weakened over six hours. When we finally returned to the main part of the house, everything looked like it had been in a washing machine cycle for 24 hours. Almost immediately, rescuers arrived in a dangerous grassroots operation. While the wind speeds continued at hurricane force, we waded through the chest-high ocean to get to the small rescue boat that transported us and our five dogs to a nearby staging area.

We lived, but precious little of our lives remained after Dorian finally decided to vacate the islands. Our home was destroyed. Along with many others, we were homeless. The island’s potable water source was contaminated by the ocean water that penetrated the water table. Many utilities on the island had to be rebuilt or replaced. Retail stores were ruined. Schools were months away from repair. In the immediate aftermath, my family and I were evacuated to Florida. It was only luck that there wasn’t another storm headed in on the heels of Dorian that year.

We gave up on hurricanes and life at the water’s edge after Dorian, choosing to immigrate permanently to Canada to run from the monsters that seem to grow, in size and frequency, with each season. Recovery has been slow. The effects of Dorian are still felt by us personally and by the Bahamas as a whole.

People around the world have seen a documentary or two about the ocean and its connection to all things. Before Dorian, I would watch a film and admire the breathtaking cinematography and be awestruck by the statistics and claims about climate change, though rarely remembering much of what I’d seen within a week. Since Dorian and our firsthand experience with climate change, my eyes have been opened to the reality of our relationship with nature.

Dorian was all over the news in the first few days, but the news coverage dwindled quickly. Retelling the story of our survival and recovery in my upcoming memoir has become a mission and a passion born out of therapy and resilience I did not know I had. My only wish is that our brush with climate change can help others see the truth.

The Bahamas rebuilds after each of these monster storms, though with each direct hit, that rebuilding becomes slower and more costly. Florida rebuilds. New Orleans rebuilds. The entire Eastern Seaboard rebuilds. It is not about if another storm like Fiona, Ian, or Dorian will strike again; it’s when. Global warming and its effect on the weather are real. The United Nations estimates that as much as 40% of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the coast.² As the years go on, the effects of warming oceans and changing weather patterns will impact those living at the water’s edge much more harshly.

It is up to average people to sympathize and understand the connection between how they live to how the earth reacts, in some cases, thousands of miles away. Natural disasters are becoming more and more frequent. It is only a matter of time before climate change unleashes your own personal worst nightmare. Eventually, climate change catastrophe will be on the doorstep of everyone on planet Earth.

¹https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/04/24/record-atlantic-hurricane-season-forecast/

²The Ocean Conference. (2017, May). Factsheet: People and Oceans. UN.org.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Ocean-fact-sheet-package.pdf
Accessed 2022, Oct 13.