On October 28, Tropical Storm Noel crossed through the island of Hispaniola, the second-largest and most populous island of the Antilles. It wasn’t a friendly visit. In its wake, it left at least 84 dead.
And it wasn’t done yet. In Haiti, at least 57 deaths were blamed on Noel. This wasn't the noel of Christmas. It was the deadliest storm of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season.
On October 29, a Monday, I was tracking this killer storm by Internet radar and The Weather Channel with more than just a passing interest. In forty-eight hours, I would be flying south, to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where I’d be getting into the driver’s seat of a rental car and driving 177 miles due south until the road comes to an end in Key West.
I was unnerved. Noel was barreling down on Cuba, which lies just 90 miles south of Key West, roughly the distance between Chicago and Milwaukee. Although forecasters didn’t expect a direct hit on the U.S. mainland, Noel’s intensity had already fooled them. Could they be wrong about its destructive path, too?
My travel mate Jimmy “J.D.” Gordon and I had been e-mailing back-and-forth all day long, as we both watched the storm developments on our computers and TVs.
Randy and Jimmy (left to right) at the Smallest Bar in Key WestIt was Jimmy who’d set up the whole trip. Jimmy shares some of my characteristics. We're both authors and fathers (he's got two little ones to my one). But the resemblances pretty much end there. With his baldhead and beefy build, he looks every bit the firefighter he once was. When I stand next to him, I look every bit the Social Security attorney that I still am: a runt with blow-dried hair.
Jimmy now writes the tropical adventure series featuring Chicago firefighter (what else?) Eddie Gilbert. A few months back, Jimmy asked me if I’d like to join him at a book signing gig at "Meeting of the Minds," the annual convention of Parrotheads (the nickname given to fans of musician Jimmy Buffett). Now unlike Jimmy’s books (“Island Bound,” “Caribbean Calling” and “Pirate’s Fall”), my book, "Lost in the Ivy," isn’t written with Parrotheads in mind. While Jimmy's readers sip on pina coladas and sport grass skirts and coconut shell bikinis, mine favor Old Style beer and baseball jerseys with names like Santo, Banks or Sandberg stitched on the back. I had no good business reason to join Jimmy on his adventure. Besides, after two years of promoting my book, I felt like it was time to put it aside and move on.
So, I just told Jimmy no. It doesn't make sense for me, it's too much time and money, and, besides, my wife would never sign off on it.
You know that's not the way it happened, right? This would not be a story if I'd declined that invite.
Here's where I make a confession: I am part Parrothead. Not the hard-core kind. I don't wear my parrot on my sleeves, meaning that I've never donned a grass skirt or a coconut shell bikini – at least not in public. But I am a Parrothead at heart. Just about every summer I find my way to a Jimmy Buffett concert. I like his music and love his books. Like many other Midwesterners, I often daydream of trading in the long, cold winters and the hustle-and-bustle of everyday life for a hammock hanging between two palm trees.
I also can't deny that the thought of escaping my job, writing and, yes, family obligations, even just for a few days, was more than a little enticing. In the four years since the birth of my son, I’ve rarely gone away anywhere, not even on business, without the wife and the little one in tow. Not that there’s anything wrong with family vacations. There’s not. We’ve had some truly memorable, and even enjoyable, ones (see here and here). But there’s always that piece of us that craves – needs – that space that is all our own.
"You should go," encouraged my wife. Now you see it wasn't just beauty and brains that nine years ago attracted me to her and convinced me she was the one.
It was difficult to contain my glee. Inside me, fireworks were going off. But I played it cool and didn't overplay my hand. "Really? You think so?"
"Yeah, it sounds like it would be fun. You should go."
First thing next morning I booked the round-trip flight between Chicago and Ft. Lauderdale, which is why a few months later I was more than a casual observer of the goings on in the Caribbean. As it turns out, Noel wasn't the only worry.
Thirty-six hours before my 6 a.m. flight on Halloween, I got an e-mail in my inbox with the ominous subject heading: "Bad news from Jimmy."
A sinking feeling hit me in the gut as I read on. The lid from a can of tomato soup had lacerated a tendon on Jimmy's right hand. He was to have surgery the next morning, less than 24 hours before our flight out of Chicago. It was doubtful that he'd be able to make the trip.
Sometimes you get a sense of doom about certain things, and that was the sense that now overcame me. A deadly storm and a bloodied hand had come together like in a B horror flick and put a stranglehold on my spirit. I struggled to breathe, as I debated with myself over whether I still should go. Perhaps these were signs telling me to stay put.
The argument over whether I should stay or I should go consumed most of my thinking over the next 24 hours. In the words of B.B. King, the thrill was gone, replaced mostly by dread.
A ray of hope came in an email update from Jimmy about 18 hours before our scheduled departure. Doctors couldn't do the surgery that day and wouldn't be able to do it until the next Tuesday, after we would be back in Chicago. He was in dreadful pain, but he was going.
The morning of the flight, I still had an uneasy feeling. Noel had stalled over Cuba, but predictions were still that it would turn out toward the Bahamas and away from Florida. Still, even though Florida would be spared a direct hit, strong, gusty winds and thunderstorms were forecast, Noel's side effects. Would our plane even fly and, if so, would conditions allow us to complete the four-hour drive down to Key West?
Jimmy's salute to the worldJimmy showed at the gate about 30 minutes before boarding, his right hand wrapped in gauze with a splint supporting his middle finger so that it extended apart from the other fingers in such a way that it looked like he was giving everyone, or everything, well, you know, the bird. A modern-day pirate, Captain Hook without the hook, flipping off the world.
That middle finger of Jimmy's must have done the trick, because fortune turned in our favor. We dodged that Noel bullet, which had turned just enough to bypass Key West and left us alone aside for a few brief showers on the ride down.
The first night in Key West we turned into true buccaneers, over-indulging in rum drinks that we both figured we'd earned and Jimmy needed to kill the pain in his throbbing right hand.
When the wake-up call rang at six the next morning, it took me a moment to figure out where I was. Apparently, I'd passed out, because I wore the same clothes I'd worn the night before.
In true pirate fashion, we fought through the hangovers and survived our four-hour book-signing gig at the convention that morning.
Jimmy and Randy at the "Meeting of the Minds" Meet the Authors tableOver the course of three days, Jimmy's books out-sold mine by at least a 3-to-1 margin. But I didn't mind. I was just pleased as rum punch for having even made it down there at all.
On the last day in Key West, Jimmy came back up to the room red as a lobster after roasting in the sun all afternoon and told me that there had been a woman sitting by the pool reading my book. "She should have been reading mine," he kidded.
Probably since the day my book came out, I've fantasized about one day spotting somebody reading my book – either on the train, or in a coffee shop, or poolside. While I didn't witness it with my own eyes, so that technically my fantasy is still just that, Jimmy assures me it is true.
On the flight home, as I looked once more at Jimmy's extended middle finger, I wondered about his poolside story. Could he have made it up? He is a storyteller after all. And a good one, at that. I almost like to think that he did. It would be a fitting ending to our own tropical adventure story.
View a photo journal of our journey here.
Saturday, December 29, 2007 at 09:04AM 
