Get outta town

The first time we had to deal with an evacuation order was with Hurricane Michelle -- 2001? -- when we were renting and our agent told us that if we stayed through the storm all bets were off.

No water? Smashed car? No power? Medical emergency? Tough.

So, with cops blaring through loudspeakers that non-residents had to leave, and with memories of Andrew firmly in mind, we went to the mainland, to a hotel in walking distance of the Miami airport, on the theory that the airport would be among the first things to reopen in the event of a horrible problem.

We had a nice dinner and came back the next day.

I thought about that little trip when I saw the miles-long column of cars, trucks, vans, buses, campers and other things on wheels creeping north this afternoon as I was sailing south.

The skies were boring one minute, joyously startling the next as the storm edges started to pass over the bumper-to-bumper line of fleeing sheet metal from Florida City to Marathon or so. (But meanwhile for me: First time over the new Jewfish Creek bridge! Ye gods, it took an entire committee to settle on that median-barrier color? Bahama Blue? Erm. But the view from the apex! . . .)

At any rate, given one lane out and one lane in, the phased evacuation plan orders tourists out first when a major storm approaches within, say, 72 hours. The next day, trailer-park folk and nursing-home residents have to go. And the final day, if it's really serious, locals are ordered out. (Lotta good that can do. In Andrew, the storm missed the Keys but tore the roof off the mainland shelter where our evacuees were hunkered down.)

All of this was bouncing through my head when I passed Mile Marker 81-some- thing, where the ashes of a hundred, a thousand, WPA men killed in the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 are buried. There were too many to count or identify, and the hot weather wasn't helping, so pyres were the only answer.

That immense storm of '35 crossed my mind, too, as I felt the wind rock the car in the middle of one of the 42 bridges on our necklace of islands. In that same horrid storm, the aunt of a guy I know was driving across a bridge with her boyfriend, and their car was blown into the water. He was found submerged in the car. Her body was eventually found hundreds of feet inland on Cape Sable, all the way up on the mainland.

And as I stopped to give the WPA guys my thoughts, as I do almost every time I go through Islamorada, an endless stream of traffic headed north.