This is my homepage during hurricane season.

As I write this, that website reports: “There are no tropical cyclones in the Atlantic at this time.” Wilma is gone.

She left one hell of a mess. We’re in a building on a corner, and they’ve been working on the traffic lights all day long. Wilma destroyed them. What she couldn’t tear down, she battered. The workers have no idea when the lights will work again, because they depend on the power that is out for almost everyone in the Palm Beach county. Five surrounding counties have similar but less severe problems.

I can write and post this, and our server can serve it, because of the generator that runs night and day behind our building. A couple of the residents on the street behind us have them too. But in that high-density residential district, most people left, either before the storm, or right after. Most of us knew what we were in for.

The guy who runs the liquor store down the block has a generator too. Same make and model as ours, so we compare notes. Before the storm his customers talked about how he was a local hero because he opened and sold liquor long before the chain stores did right after Frances hit, and again when her ugly sister Jeanne hit. After Wilma, he didn’t disappoint.

There is a curfew, so I am living here, with an air mattress that doesn’t hold air, 12 T1s (amazingly 11 of them working), a day old pizza that I’ve only eaten two slices of, a box of Bowl Appetit (Betty Crocker for Meals Ready to Eat), a case of water, the droning generator, and gasoline.

Yes, gasoline. It has become so precious, that most of my day was spent trying to acquire more, We are having it brought in from the next county up, where the damage wasn’t so bad and there are more operating gas stations. We were prepared for this to the point of hoarding, but it wasn’t enough. We got more gas tonight, and we can make it another day.

This is the ugly side of the hurricane. We are truly the great unwashed. Tonight the curfew is at 7. The nights have been black. I’ve seen stars I haven’t seen since the remote Nevada desert or the Alcan Highway. There is the din of generators, and nothing else. No lit storefronts. No lighted parking lots. No streetlights, no stoplights, no traffic. But tonight there is a glow on the horizon. Downtown Palm Beach—Cityplace—has power. There is life out there, even if you can’t quite reach out and touch it.

Cell phone calls are iffy. A mystical experience at this stage of hurricane recovery, is to pick up a phone and get somebody on a cell phone on the first try. That happened an hour ago, when I reached Ray at home. He has no landline, no internet connection, power from generator, and a cell phone whose best service comes from a tower that also serves the main staging area for Palm Beach County hurricane relief.

Last year, we were down almost a month as the treasure coast rebuilt. This time, we were only down a half-day.

I sit in this darkened office, surrounded by people in their homes listening to battery-powered radios or watching television by generator, trying a cell phone call now and again. But I have the whole world before me, a T1 connection, and 15 computers talking with people around the country and around the world, as if nothing has happened.

It is a strange world.