Travel Book for February 2010
Chasing Dean by Tom Anderson
HURRICANE ME
I was fortunate to meet up with Dean one last time the day he died. In fact, he’d been dead for some time prior to that, but his generosity was so far‐reaching nobody actually noticed.
Our rendezvous took place at the end of Ocean Avenue and Pearl Street in Maine, just south of the city of Portland ‐ on and around Higgins Beach. The morning was deathly calm, except for the pleasant waist‐high waves crackling over a mid‐tide sandbar. The water was deep blue and harshly cold. Higgins beachfront lay postcard‐still, devoid of the summer bustle that had pushed it to near bursting point just weeks earlier.
Dean had got there some time before me. Someone said he’d made it into town three days ago, but hadn’t impressed people as much as he had elsewhere in New England. As a result his passing wasn’t being mourned with quite the same sense of loss as further south along Interstate 95, where he had been considered a kind of saviour to some.
I tried to deny it, to kid myself into thinking he could survive just a little longer, but I knew the thing to do was just accept what had happened. The problem was that now, with Marc gone, my bank empty of funds and Dean dead I was, for the first time on this continent, totally alone. The ride was over, and there was nothing that could be done about it.
But at least I had been able to meet Dean at his best. I’d seen his good side. Others had not, and they were the people I should have really felt for.
Because Dean, for all his virtues, had been much crueller than he had been kind. And some were glad that he, and Erin like him, were both dead.
I had never cared for Erin, but Dean was different ‐ the least I can do is explain what he had meant to me...
A TALE OF TWO SUMMERS
Vale of Glamorgan coastline; Atlantic Ocean. Pressure: Record‐breakingly high.
Tuesday 18 July, 2006; two months prior to the start of El Niño. Heavy air, no sign of thunder clouds.
It’s not often you can feel completely crushed by heat in South Wales, but that July ruthless sunshine was blazing through the sticky atmosphere and the air was so thick you couldn’t even hide in the shade.
I was staring lethargically at the shoreline from the car park at Llantwit Major beach. The sea was feeling it too. A mass of water, the volume of which we mere mortals cannot even begin to comprehend, was completely motionless. Even the mighty Atlantic was unable to muster the energy to move in these conditions.
Behind me, a dog tried to resist going for a walk over the chevron fold cliffs, and an elderly couple sat eating lunch in the front seats of their car (the heat even forcing Mr to take the drastic action of undoing a shirt button). This was South Wales’s Vale of Glamorgan as seldom seen. A July heat wave, an unusual weather system bringing overland winds from the sweltering mid‐summer European mainland ‐ the same system that was causing fires in the Algarve, and placing pompiers in the pine forests of southern France on twenty‐four‐hour call at a time of year when all they wanted to do was sit on the beach. An entire continent had ground to a halt.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in anonymous waters just east of the Caribbean Sea, the second phase of this weather pattern was soon to begin. The stillness, the weight of air on water, the pounding sun and atmospherically retained heat were all building up, until the ocean could take no more, hitting back and restoring the meteorological status quo. Tropical Storm Beryl was, quite literally, warming up. From this stillness would soon come a natural force capable of generating more energy in a few hours than that stored by all the nuclear weapons in the belligerent northern hemisphere combined.
She would, in the course of the following three months, be followed by Chris, Debby, Ernesto, Florence, Gordon, Helene and Isaac ‐ an unusually short but violent season, ending two storms short of ‘K’. For now, Beryl’s payload was still over a week away. She had yet to spin up towards New York, sending an unexpected blip across to the frustratingly calm summer seas. In the meantime, all we could do was wait, and sweat. And wish we lived on Cape Cod, where some of the best waves in recent surfing history were shortly to find their way ashore.
Lost for ways to spend the rest of this sub‐tropical day, I turned back to my ageing Nissan Micra, fired the engine up with a burst of blue smoke, plenty of acceleration and clutching, cursed the car’s lack of air‐conditioning and began to drive home. Maybe there was something in that Cape Cod thought?
For several seasons I had been monitoring hurricanes as a surfer, seeing them in a different light to those who didn’t ride waves for a hobby. I knew about the havoc they could wreak on tin‐roofed Central American towns, but it was hard for me and my fellow surfers to attach ourselves emotionally to these horror stories. For most of us, Atlantic hurricanes meant one thing: surf.
Chasing Dean by Tom Anderson is published by Summersdale (paperback; £7.99). It is also available through amazon.co.uk and all good booksellers.
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