The Story of Dolly - Part II

By the second day, it was all anyone could talk about.

"Did you hear about Dolly?" people in the elevator would speak to each other as if trading privileged information.

"Yeah, I hear she's heading straight for us."

"What are you going to do?"

"Well stay, of course. I've weathered storms before. It won't be that bad."

But it was that bad.  

We had all hoped that Dolly - which had begun as a small Caribbean tropical storm hardly worth mentioning when we arrived in South Padre - would swing upward in the Gulf, slamming into oft hurricane-pummeled Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama and leaving Texas with some wind and rain, but otherwise intact.  By mid-afternoon, however, the storm path projections had put South Padre Island squarely in Dolly's sights; she would hit us directly sometime in the early morning hours. And worse still, she had gathered speed in the Gulf and had worked herself into a Category 3 Hurricane, gyrating through the shallow waters with winds of close to 100 m.p.h.

Yeah, we were f*****.

In a preemptive strike to try and prevent people from being stuck on the Causeway when the storm hit, the Texas Department of Transportation had closed the only bridge to the mainland - seemingly without warning anyone that they were doing it - thus effectively trapping everyone on the tiny Island while Dolly growled hungrily out somewhere over the horizon, waiting to devour us. It was like some kind of cruel social experiment; I felt like a sailor in the movie Das Boot/U571 when they have to seal up the hatches to prevent losing the whole submarine but condemn me to death by drowning in the process.

It was Utilitarianism - only in this case, our sacrifice saved no one. They were just hanging us out to dry.

The hotel we were staying at - God love em - tried to make the best of the situation. After boarding up the windows and securing the deck chairs, they invited everyone, including children, to the bar for live music, dancing, and $3 Hurricanes. Clever right?

If we're gonna die, we'd prefer to not remember it.

It was a pretty good party, and we all drank and sang and danced as the TV monitors showed the swirling Death Mass encroaching steadily on our location, the broadcasters looking tired and grave. At one point, my Dad leaned in close and said, "Hey, think you could find me a cigarette?" which was a peculiar request since, to my knowledge, Dad did not smoke. "Sure thing, Dad," I said, intoxicated and happy to have been given a top-secret mission to carry out.

Bolstered by liquid courage, I began shotgun asking everyone in the bar if I could bum a couple of smokes - (and actually using this terminology which seemed romantic for some reason) - eventually meeting a Mexican girl named Lemon (or at least, this is how I believe she introduced herself, but it was difficult to wade through her accent with my senses impaired from the gratuitous amount of rum in my system) who worked at the hotel and knew of a kitchen worker who probably had one or two to spare. She vanished and returned in a minute with two Menthol Lights, which I graciously accepted with a "gracias" and a smile, returning to my father covertly with my objective completed.

We stepped outside onto the deck overlooking the pool, and beyond it the beach and then the ocean. The sky was an inky dark like thick black paint, and waves broke ferociously on the shore with loud crashes that seemed amplified in the already formidable wind. It took us a minute to light our cigarettes, our bodies and hands trying without luck to shield the tiny flame from the gale-force gusts.

"You shouldn't start this," my dad said as we looked out into the claws on the storm, the wind bringing salty water to our lips between drags. "Once you start you'll never stop."

I assured him that I could, that a "one cigarette a month" diet had served to satiated my nicotine appetite throughout college. "Addiction has never really been my thing," I replied, smiling, enjoying the feeling of the elements against my skin and the sound of our voices in the night. Since I'd been in college, we hadn't had many chances to talk; it felt both strange and natural, now, to share a moment with my father as an adult instead of as his son.

"Okay," he said, "I'm just telling you from experience."

We finished our smokes and the sparse conversation, then headed back into the hot bar for more drinks and more dancing.

But Dolly beckoned from somewhere in the dark, drawing closer with each passing hour.  The night was far from over.