This April, Ivo and I celebrated our 5-year anniversary. We did a whirlwind tour of Cuba and stayed in Miami for a week afterwards. Then hurricanes followed on our heels.
Soon I’ll post vacation blogs about Cuba, maybe cheesy photos of us being nostalgic for our home in Miami Beach. But the hurricane images in my newsfeed lately have led to jarring before/after images. Below are a few of the most striking pairs: Above is our vacation photo. Below is a photo of the hurricane’s power or aftermath.
It’s hard to say anything new about natural disasters: Nature is powerful. The unaffected are lucky. Try to donate. But the photos below feel like a stark reminder of how true all those statements are.
The blue building in the background is a bit closer in the second photo, but it’s still clear how immense the waves were.
In the first photo, a little graffiti fish caught my eye. He seemed to be swimming happily along the blue bar framing the building’s bottom. In the photo below, you can see the fish in the far right. Now he’s just above actual water.
In Key West, Ivo and I spent an hour or two on a pier in Higgs beach. The water was so calm.
Also in Key West, I got the obligatory tourist photo of this immense cement marker announcing that we were as close to Cuba as we could be while still being in the Continental U.S. I remember thinking how immense and solid the marker looked. It remained standing, but Irma still did her worst.
La Colorada 
Nature is just… unstoppable. And sometimes I feel like we are egging her on when she’s angry. But as Jeff Goldblum says, with mystic confidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMjQ3hA9mEA (Never mind that he’s not actually talking about human life.) I can’t help but think these thoughts, coming from the hard-hit industrial Gulf Coast of Texas. The strength and frequency of these “historic” hurricanes is unsettling. Have you seen the footage of the Ophelia storm surge on the Irish coast? They are unaccustomed to such events. I hope everything will be okay for them.
Great, bittersweet post. These are powerful photos. I look forward to more! Thanks again for writing.