I covered two hurricanes for National Geographic as part of teams putting together an extensive article about the storms, and each time I felt very wrong-headed, morose and dark of spirit—uncharacteristically so for setting out on a fresh assignment, which was usually one of life's great moments—when I found myself headed toward them. On a gloomy afternoon driving west from Houston to intercept Hurricane Allen at Corpus Christi, Texas, in August of 1980, mine was the only car going contrarily against lines of fleeing traffic, an unbroken stream of headlights glaring through my rain-streaked windshield for a hundred miles. Then the parade of packed cars dwindled and the long straight road became empty for as far as I could see, no traffic at all in either direction, except me.
The last sight I saw before entering the city, when I stopped on the lonely coast road already threatened by a rising Gulf of Mexico, was a final shaft of sunlight flooding redly out from under the clouds’ sullen roof of iron as the crimson orb sank into the sea, like a portent of blood to come. I was minded of the scene in Lord of the Rings when the heroes watch the last sunset shine out from under a foul cloud issuing from Mordor, land of the Lord of Death.
Speaking of sudden death, Allen almost bit me when I trifled with him. I found myself frantically fighting a sliding door to a seaward balcony stuck in its tracks by the wind’s force the instant I unwisely pulled it open, the better to observe, I had thought, the approaching storm from five stories up in an evacuated bayside Holiday Inn where ten bucks had persuaded the desk clerk, the only living person I encountered on the waterfront, to give me a key.
Faster than I could blink the wind sprang into the room like an unhinged genie uncorked, holding the curtains straight out horizontally, ripping the bedspread off the bed and hurling it toward the door, until the door slammed shut.
I panicked for a moment, torn between attending the glass door, which was bending inward like a sail and jammed in its tracks, stuck open by wind pressure, and the door to the hallway that was my only escape. I tried the room door. I couldn’t budge it against the suction of the massive vacuum in the hall beyond. If I didn’t get the sliding door shut, it would soon splinter into a million daggers of glass that would spray the room like a shotgun. If I didn’t bleed to death, I’d still never get the other door open, once the room was naked to the wind blowing straight off the ocean. My only chance then would be to cower in the bathroom for the duration of the storm, and hope the hotel’s inner walls didn’t collapse. It was a wretched prospect, and potentially a fatal one—and rather ignominious, when I thought about it, under circumstances no one would ever be able to satisfactorily explain, and most unacceptably leaving my wife and parents forever wondering why I’d died in a bathroom in a chain hotel in an evacuated city.
So I’d try the sliding door again.
It was purely the muscles of deep fright that enabled me to slide the door shut, putting my shoulder to it and moving it along the tracks through main force. Out in the parking lot just as soon as I could get there after leaping down five flights of stairs and tossing the room key to the clerk without pausing in my swift passage, I only noticed when unlocking my car door with a shaking hand that my palm had been gashed to the white gristle as I wrestled with the oh-so-unwisely opened sliding glass door that could have spelled my doom—that, and my own idiocy.