“Let’s get you a proper dinner,” Rhonda says. “How do you feel about goat?”

Maybe she’s kidding. Maybe she’s trying to see how tough Margaret is. Well, Margaret drank cow’s blood in Nigeria; she ate rattlesnake in China. She’s tough.

“Love it!” Margaret says.

That night from her cot, Margaret tracks the storm. It’s now 215 miles to the east and has sustained winds of 155 knots. This is going to be devastating. Maybe Margaret isn’t so tough after all. She’s sixty-four years old and the grandmother of eight. What is she doing here? Has she lost her mind?

Both Rhonda and the camerawoman, Linda, are sleeping in the studio basement with her. Margaret bids them good night, and from her little corner, she calls Drake, then she calls her kids in order of age. Patrick is spending the weekend taking his oldest, Barrett, up to look at Colgate, Hamilton, and Skidmore; he doesn’t seem to know there’s a hurricane coming and Margaret decides not to mention where she is. He’s bringing Barrett to the city the following weekend to look at NYU and Columbia. Margaret says, “Can’t wait to see you!” then hangs up, hoping she makes it home in one piece—hoping she makes it home, period. Kevin is consumed with the closing weekend of Quinn’s Surfside Beach Shack. He sounds harried; Arnaud is teething and Genevieve is starting kindergarten. I can’t believe she’s going to school already, Kevin says. It feels like she was just born. Yes, Margaret knows the feeling only too well. Kevin was once that chubby baby who was such a delicacy for the island’s mosquitoes. The years—where do they go?

Finally, Margaret calls Ava, who says, “I stopped by your apartment today, and Drake told me you’re in the Virgin Islands covering that monster hurricane. What were you thinking, Mom?”

The next day dawns calm and still. Rhonda makes a big pot of coffee and produces a beautiful tropical-fruit platter and a bakery box filled with muffins and bagels.

“The café down the street saw you on TV last night,” Rhonda says, “and insisted on sending these.”

They head out to do one more live spot for Dougie back in New York. The wind is picking up. The outer wall of the hurricane will be arriving in a matter of hours.

“Stay safe,” Dougie says. “We’ll see you on the other side.”

Margaret, Rhonda, and Linda go back down to the studio basement.

Margaret traces the storm on her laptop. It’s coming. She hears the wind screaming like a woman in labor (it must be the situation with Dougie’s wife that puts this image in her mind). Then the lights flicker, and the power goes out; the studio’s generator comes on, but the lights in the basement are low and there’s no longer any air-conditioning. Things outside the studio crash, smash, shatter. Margaret can’t see what’s making the noise because the windows are shuttered. Dear Lord, she thinks, please don’t let the windows break. Don’t let the roof blow off. Don’t let the place flood. Please don’t let anyone die. But as the minutes pass and then the hours, as the wind gets so loud that Margaret can’t hear her own voice praying, as her cell signal cuts out, as she lies on her back unable to even read the book she brought, she marvels at how profound the weather is, how mighty, how inexplicable and unpredictable.

Life on these islands is changing right now, right this second, she thinks. Maybe forever.

St. John

After Inga left us—as definitively as someone leaving a room and slamming the door behind her—we picked up our heads and looked around.

Let’s start with Cruz Bay, our “downtown.” It was…ruined. Wharfside Village lost its roof; the Beach Bar’s dance floor was buried under two-foot drifts of sand; the palm trees along Frank Bay were snapped in half, reminding us of gruesomely broken bones. Someone’s boat, Nell, landed upside down on the deck of High Tide, where so many of us had enjoyed rum punches during happy hour. The Lumberyard building—home to the Barefoot Cowboy, Driftwood Dave’s, the barbershop, and Jake’s—looked like the proverbial cake that someone had left out in the rain; the building simply caved in on itself. Homes were violently torn apart, their contents thrown out into the yard, the street. Who could tell what had been a ceiling or a wall or a bathroom door? There was plaster, glass, metal in heaps and piles everywhere. It looked like a bomb had detonated; the damage was…atomic, nuclear.

Word started rolling in from the North Shore Road, Chocolate Hole, Gifft Hill. One family of six survived by hiding in their laundry room. One man crouched behind a table on its side for three hours as the sliding glass door across the room bowed in and out as though it were breathing. Multiple witnesses saw telephone poles flying through the air like missiles. Cars were flipped. A couch ended up in the neighbor’s front yard; a refrigerator ended up in the bedroom; a hot-tub cover was caught in the high branches of a tree.

What about beyond the stone gates at Caneel Bay? This was, perhaps, what most took us by surprise. The genteel, elegant resort had been ravaged—roofs ripped off, trees uprooted, buildings flooded and filled with sand, the entire place simply annihilated.

The Centerline Road was impassable due to downed trees. The hillside between Maho and Leicester Bays looked like a winter landscape; all of the trees were stripped bare, broken, left a burned-looking brown.

Eventually, we heard from our friends on the “other side of the world,” in Coral Bay. Shipwreck Landing, one of our favorite places to order coconut shrimp and listen to live music, had been decimated. Concordia, which had such delicious breakfasts, was blown away. Boats were dashed against the rocks, or they capsized and sank. The carnage in Hurricane Hole turned our stomachs.

Few of us realized that tornadoes are a common phenomenon when a hurricane hits land. The friction between open ocean and hills can cause spin, especially when the feeder bands roll through. The spot on St. John that saw the most tornado activity was the East End because it has elevation and because it’s so exposed. There were thirteen tornadoes recorded on the East End alone. Unlike a hurricane, a tornado’s path is unpredictable. One villa remains untouched while the villa next door is turned into kindling.

The compound belonging to Duncan Huntley was pulverized. When his closest neighbor saw the damage, he said, “It seemed like Inga had a personal vendetta against the place.” A cast-iron planter that must have weighed seventy pounds had smashed through the roof of Dunk’s garage and crushed Dunk’s G-wagon. Every building lost its roof; the 140-inch screen from the home theater ended up in the swimming pool. Nothing was salvageable. The neighbor said that even if Dunk lost his shirt in Vegas, he was still a lucky man. “If he’d stayed in the villa,” the neighbor said, “he’d surely be dead.”

Imagine our relief when, the morning after the hurricane ended, the Singing Dog came sailing into the harbor. Captains Stephen and Kelly had successfully outrun the storm—and not only that, they had a working satellite radio that allowed many of us to contact our relatives back in the States to let them know we were still alive.

At first, that’s all we could claim: We were upright and breathing.