Riding Out Hurricane Kay on The Baja

Riding Out Hurricane Kay on The Baja

– By Ed Kociela –

As far as hurricanes are concerned, Kay was rather timid.

She rolled into San Felipe, Baja California – our little fishing village on the Sea of Cortes – Thursday night rather humbly, tossing a few buckets of rainfall in her wake.

It was nice, you know. We had not had any rain in quite some time, and initially, Kay was lowering some blistering temperatures we have endured all summer long.

Just this side of 11 p.m., however, things got interesting.

Now my wife Cara and I had ridden out a couple of hurricanes when we lived in Los Cabos on The Baja. In comparison, we pretty much were hit by the outer bands of those storms. While it was no picnic, to be sure, it was all pretty much over in a matter of hours as our hurricanes spun out and up the peninsula. There was flooding and some damage, frayed nerves, and such, but there were no long-range hits on our daily lives.

As I sit here writing this, we are some 80 hours from the point when we lost all power here in San Felipe.

Do you realize what that means?

No electricity.

No internet.

Extremely limited or no access to telephone service.

No television.

No radio, not that terrestrial radio is much anyway down here.

No lights except for candles and flashlights.

No refrigerators or freezers.

No microwaves, air fryers, or stovetops unless your stove is fueled by propane.

No air conditioning and, believe me, with soaring humidity and dew point levels, topped off by high temps, it is not only miserable but dangerous, interfering with physical movement and necessities like breathing clearly.

Then there’s the water problem.

Our water is stored in individual cisterns and delivered to the house by a pump, which means without electricity, there is no water except for what you can manually dredge from the cistern to wash your dishes or flush your toilets.

We live in a nice, fairly new home down here. It is sturdy, easy on the eye, and creature comfortable.

Except when hurricane-force wind and rain hit.

The heat sucks all the coolness out of it, the rain finds every seal with an opening, and water rushes everywhere.

Water made its way throughout the house – bedrooms, kitchen, living room, dining area, garage, you name it. Our house was carpeted with towels, rugs, and even pillows to soak up every drop possible as rain found its way through every nook and cranny, even the gaps in our windows.

Depending on which weather service you subscribe to, Kay was either a Category 1 or Category 2, nothing like Katrina, Irma, or, God forbid, Andrew. Still, patio furniture we had tipped onto its side to keep it from flying away, and other items, were tossed like paper in the wind.

We lost power at 11:08 p.m. The brute force of Kay was still hours away on the other side of midnight.

Cara and I settled in the living room for the night, hunkering down on our couch. It seemed the best place to monitor the storm, which was picking up in intensity rather quickly at that point.

Cara’s mom was settled in her room, and our little fur baby Daisy, a gun-shy terrier with a lot of spunk but an aversion to loud noises, sought shelter and comfort between the two of us.

An aging body makes me rather helpless, I guess, in many situations so Cara did yeoman’s duty as we hunkered down.

Now, although we had been hit by outer bands of other, more powerful hurricanes, we had never had one pass directly over us, so it was a new and frightful experience.

There was a constant roar from the wind as it whipped itself into a frenzy. The sound of the pounding rain was deafening at times, beating down on the roof in an angry percussive beat. Then, at one point, it subsided for about five minutes, going very still and quiet. No rain, no wind, until another explosive round of weather beat down upon us again.

In terms of intensity, Kay was a Category 1 or 2, but in terms of size and stability, it was a roiling, boiling mass of liquid combustion about the size of Texas and as dense as a bucket of lead. It left deposits of water three feet high or more downtown near the shoreline.

When the storm passed and the skies finally cleared, all that was left was the sickening smell of stagnant water that lingers as cleanup and repairs continue.

The electric company was out and about as soon as possible, but the wind had tipped too many power poles and snapped too many lines to get us all up and running again quickly. As I write this, it is Monday afternoon, and we still have no power at our house. A house a friend of ours has come back online last night. She is out of town but, charitably, offered us her place for as long as needed to escape the unbearable heat, humidity, and dew point issues that were wearing on us physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

As a diehard news junkie, one of the most difficult parts of this was being cut off from the world for so long. Try it, unplug it all for three or four days – social media, telephone, and all other forms of communication from messenger service to television, radio, and print.

It sounds good until you try it. Suddenly, you are adrift in a world you know nothing about. Suddenly, you are so far out of the loop that your imagination starts playing tricks on you by creating imaginary scenarios.

We are getting through this by the will of our souls and the kindness of our friends and neighbors. Our neighbor next door has a big bag of our meat we have stored in their freezer. They borrowed a generator from another friend to keep their deep freeze going. We have had several other friends stop by, making the rounds to ensure we made it through OK. Plus, there is our friend Sharon, God love her, whose home we appropriated at the most opportune time when we were running out of patience and stamina to combat the oppressive heat. Through a daisy chain of friends and family, we were able to make notifications of our safety to family and friends. Our link was a couple that is totally off the grid, living off solar power and hooked up to the Starlink internet system that links users to satellites based in low-level space orbits.

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