52 Weeks — #39

Navigating a hurricane, plus a series of random images

Empty chair, early Sunday morning — San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 2019

Earlier this week, my wife and I boarded a plane for a combination four-day business/pleasure trip to Puerto Rico. The trip has been in the works for some time and represents another chance for us to spend good empty nest time together.

All we had to do was miss a hurricane.

In the “BC” era prior to March 2020, Jill and I both traveled quite a bit for work and for fun. The kids were out of the house, we had moved to Alexandria, and it was a chance to see places we had never imagined possible when we met in North Carolina almost 30 years ago.

In 2019 alone, I spent time in 28 cities in different states and territories. One of those trips was to San Juan, where Jill had a work function that was held the week of her birthday. Eighteen months before, in September 2017, Puerto Rico had been leveled by Hurricane Maria, one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history.

As our plane approached the airport in San Juan, we could still see blue tarps on the tops of houses in the flight path. Walking around the city, a resilient community that had been wounded deeply was still struggling in fits and starts to recover.

Having grown up on the Texas Gulf Coast, hurricanes and tropical storms are a fact of life for me. Jill was raised in the North Carolina mountains, and when we first met she did not understand why I tense up and intensely follow the paths of these storms.

Sadly, and especially after this week, she does now.

Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida, bringing horrific flooding to Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. As of this writing, at least 44 people have died in five states, and the death toll is expected to increase dramatically. Boone, my wife’s hometown, was in the path of the devastation — something she never thought would occur in her lifetime.

Watching the developments unfold, I couldn’t help but flash back to 2017. It was just a month before Maria struck Puerto Rico that Hurricane Harvey devastated the Greater Houston region. Ironically, as that storm approached San Juan, I was in Texas, following school districts trying to reopen and recover from Harvey’s flooding that decimated large swaths of the state and the fourth largest city in the nation.

To read my coverage of Hurricane Harvey and its impact on Texas’ schools, click on this link.

As this week’s trip approached, we worried about potential cancellations or delays due to Helene’s impending arrival. But the island of Puerto Rico, often the victim of Mother Nature’s increasingly volatile mood swings, thankfully was spared this time.

One of the many appealing reasons to go was to see San Juan’s recovery five years after our previous trip. To the naked eye, you would never know that Maria — or any of the other storms that have occurred since — happened. But from talking to locals, it’s obvious the memories linger in people’s minds.

How could they not?

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Now, onto the rest of this week’s photos…

19th century cemetery — Baltimore, Md., February 2020

Staying cool — Dickinson, Texas, January 2023

Alleyway — Naples, Italy, May 2024

On a pilgrimage to Abe Lincoln’s birthplace — Hodgenville, Ky., September 2019

Entrance to the National Archives — Washington, D.C., May 2021

View from the top floor of the Pilgrim Monument — Provincetown, Mass., October 2018

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