From the water, you almost can’t tell anything bad happened to the BVI.
I’m sitting in the cockpit of a rented 45-foot Beneteau, peacefully bobbing around on a mooring while 30 other boats in this Leverick Bay mooring field do the same. I do see lots of construction on land, but if I didn’t know what happened here in September 2017, I wouldn’t be able to tell from the water.
There are some ominous signs here and there. On some slopes, there are a lot of dead trees standing without leaves amid the usual brush; here and there there are a few sailboats blown up on shore where you wouldn’t expect. But all in all it doesn’t look like a major event happened here.
The reality is of course much harsher. My father in law lost the entire roof on his house, as I mentioned at the time in my post on roofs. Many other BVI residents with far less means suffered much worse.
What strikes me today though is not the devastation, or the inadequate response, or the awful corruption that goes along with it. Rather it’s the bizarre unpredictability of life. Devastating things happen all the time to people, regardless of their standing or virtue or whether they had it coming or not. Religion offers no useful succor, to me at least. So how is one to explain the wonderful, stunning beauty of the Caribbean islands, of life in general, when it is punctured randomly by such horror?
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