Last Train to Paradise Read online

  As anyone who has tried to secure a boat in the face of an advancing hurricane can attest, however, the process is a tedious and frustrating one, complicated by a steady escalation of panic among other owners, many of whom may not have visited their craft in months. And Hemingway, despite his notoriety, found himself no exception. In a piece he wrote for The Masses, a left-leaning publication of the day, he shares a vivid picture of what he was up against.

  Sunday you spend making the boat as safe as you can. When they refuse to haul her out on the ways because there are too many boats ahead, you buy $52 of new heavy hawser and shift her to what seems the safest part of the submarine base and tie her up there.

  With the boat attended to as best he could, Hemingway spent the rest of Sunday evening and the following morning feverishly moving lawn furniture, carrying in plants, and shooing the ever-present horde of cats inside his house, then nailing makeshift wooden shutters over all the windows. By five in the afternoon the storm had not materialized, but the double red and black flags that signified an impending hurricane were snapping over the Key West harbor in a heavy northeast wind. The barometer was falling precipitously, and the streets all over the town resounded with the crack of hammers driving nails into shutters, which nervous owners only hoped would hold.

  With nothing more to do at home, Hemingway left Pauline and returned to the Navy yard where he’d tied up Pilar:

  You go down to the boat and wrap the lines with canvas where they will chafe when the surge starts, and believe that she has a good chance to ride it out . . . provided no other boat smashes into you and sinks you. There is a booze boat seized by the Coast Guard tied next to you and you notice her stern lines are only tied to ringbolts in the stern, and you start bellyaching about that. . . .

  Hemingway was enough of a sailor to know that lines attached to a few bolts drilled into the deck of a poorly maintained boat could never withstand the pressure exerted by the winds of a hurricane, but his complaints had little effect on an already overburdened staff. The harbormaster simply shrugged and told him he had permission to sink the rumrunner if she broke free and threatened to ram Pilar.

  Just how Hemingway was supposed to manage such a feat in the midst of a hurricane was not made clear, but there was nothing else to be done at the basin. He gave one last baleful glance at the precariously tied-off rumrunner, then made his way back to the house on Whitehead Street, left with the very worst thing to do as a hurricane approaches: wait.

  From the last advisory you figure we will not get it until midnight, and at ten o’clock you leave the Weather Bureau and go home to see if you can get two hours’ sleep before it starts, leaving the car in front of the house because you do not trust the rickety garage, putting the barometer and a flashlight by the bed for when the electric lights go. At midnight the wind is howling, the glass is 29.55 and dropping while you watch it, and rain is coming in sheets. You dress, find the car drowned out, make your way to the boat with a flashlight with branches falling and wires going down. The flashlight shorts in the rain, and the wind is now coming in heavy gusts from the northwest. . . . you have to crouch over to make headway against it. You figure if we get the hurricane . . . you will lose the boat and you never will have enough money to get another. You feel like hell.

  Hemingway’s preparations, and his premonitions, were well founded, as it turns out. On Matecumbe Key, some eighty miles to the north and east of Key West, the full force of the storm had already begun to sweep ashore. Residents of Islamorada, the principal settlement on Matecumbe, stared in disbelief as their barometers plunged from a normal 29.92 down to 26.35 inches of mercury, the lowest reading ever recorded in U.S. history.

  Local residents had endured fearsome tropical winds before, and had some idea of what to expect. But this was no ordinary storm, and the situation on Matecumbe at this particular time was especially dire.

  As part of his New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration had put 650 indigent World War I veterans to work on a highway building project near Islamorada, using a route that paralleled what was then the only link across the low-lying islands between Miami and Key West: 153 oceangoing miles of Florida East Coast Railway track, a daunting project completed in 1912 by Henry Morrison Flagler, and often referred to as “the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

  The work camp for the new highway-building project was situated on Matecumbe Key; offices were nothing more than a few hastily constructed outbuildings; the workers, most brought in from Northern cities and lacking any notion of what horrors a hurricane might bring, were housed in flimsy tents.

  And the storm, as if sensing the most vulnerable place to come ashore, had drifted slightly east of Key West. As the monster began to hammer the camps, panic became the order of the day. Winds were already gusting over 155 miles per hour, the contemporary threshold for a Category 5 superstorm. Such categories had not yet been developed in 1935, but as one former resident remarked, “we saw pretty quick this was going to be a son-of-a-bitch.”

  Power was out and tents were shredding away like tissue, leaving men to cling to staves, mangrove roots, even train rails, to keep from being blown off into the rain-lashed darkness. One vet tied himself to a tree with his belt, but his reprieve was short-lived when the wind tore the tree up by its roots and carried it, and him, away.

  Melton Jarrell, one of the camp workmen, described his ordeal in a story carried by the Miami Herald: “I made for the railroad and hung onto it. A heavy sea came along and washed it up and as it settled back down, it pinned my left leg under it. In horrible agony, I decided to cut my foot off but I couldn’t get to my penknife. After that, I passed out.”

  At nearly the same time that Jarrell had been about to hack off his own foot with his pocketknife, a permanent Islamorada resident, Bernard Russell, then seventeen, had run for shelter in a lime-packing shed, along with his parents, three sisters, and an uncle and his five children. The Russells, whose patriarch, John Henry Russell, had emigrated to the Keys from the Bahamas in the middle of the nineteenth century, were part of an extended farming and fishing clan numbering more than sixty that populated Matecumbe and others of the Middle and Lower Keys.

  “We were going to ride it out in the beach house, but my dad saw how it was going and changed his mind. We headed for the packing house, which was close to the railroad, and on higher ground,” Russell recalls.

  The notion of “higher ground” is a relative one, given Keys topography. Most of the Keys are not true islands, but mere outcroppings of reef, calcified remains of sea life, which poke just above the level of the sea. Most of the formations are only a few hundred yards or less wide, enhanced here and there by dredging and other means of artificial fill. By most American standards there is little that resembles a rise, let alone a hill, not in the entire 220-mile stretch of the archipelago that runs from Biscayne Bay, off Miami, to the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles beyond Key West. The highest point in the inhabited keys, which range from Key Largo, fifty miles south of Miami, to Key West, another 110 miles south and west, is barely sixteen feet above sea level.

  The “higher ground” Russell refers to, then, was that created by the mounding of a few feet of crushed limestone marl and gravel riprap to create the bed for the Florida East Coast Railway, a quarter of a century before the hurricane hit. From that vantage point it was possible to glance north and south and see ocean in either direction.

  “We knew when the storm hit—at eight o’clock—because that’s when all the clocks and the watches stopped. That’s when the water started covering everything,” Russell says.

  The wind was so strong by that point that the whole packing shed had begun to throb, each pulse growing stronger, like the chamber of a giant heart about to blow itself apart with its next beat. Russell’s father ordered the boy to stand against the door, which was vibrating like a tuning fork, ready to spring off its hinges. Russell continues:

  This shed was built up on a kind of platform t
o help with the loading and unloading, but while I was trying to lean into the door to keep it from blowing in, I felt something wet and looked down to see water pouring under the sill around my shoes. I thought I knew what that meant, but I put my hand down in it and tasted it just to be sure. It was salt. That meant the water had risen overtop of the whole island. I told my Dad and he shook his head.

  “We’ll have to get out,” he said. “Or drown.”

  He told everybody to grab hold of somebody else and not let go, no matter what. I grabbed my sister, who had her little two-year-old boy in her arms. I told her to let me hold the boy, but she shook her head and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t argue with her. It wasn’t that kind of time. So I held her and him together, as best I could, and out we went.

  The noise and the wind were unbelievable. The minute we were outside, the wind took us, and we began to spin around, all three of us. I tried to hold on to them but I couldn’t. We were in midair as I watched her being pulled away from me. She still had hold of her little boy. And I was trying to reach her, but I just couldn’t. It was like being in a nightmare.

  That railroad embankment where Bernard Russell and his family had run for safety, where the men of the work camps cowered under the force of the storm, constituted the sole lifeline for the thousand or so people stranded on the Matecumbes that night. After all, the workmen had been brought to the Keys to build a highway bridge that would replace the ferryboats linking Islamorada with the mainland. With the bridge unfinished and boat traffic out of the question in such weather, only the railroad remained as an escape route from the tides that now threatened to obliterate the Middle Keys entirely.

  In Miami, officials had earlier that day begun to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and in response to frantic pleas from work camp supervisors, the Florida East Coast Railway had finally dispatched a rescue train from the North Miami yards.

  Because it was a holiday weekend, however, there was some delay in rounding up a train crew and assembling the necessary equipment. It was nearly 4:30 P.M. before a locomotive pulling six passenger cars, two baggage cars, and three boxcars finally left Miami. Scarcely had the train gotten under way when there was another maddening ten-minute delay at the crossing of the Miami River, where a turntable bridge yawned open to allow the passage of Labor Day pleasure craft below.

  By this time the initial storm bands had begun to push ashore as far north and east as Homestead, the jumping-off point at the southern tip of the Florida mainland. As engineer J. J. Haycraft guided Old 447 through the increasingly intense squalls, his misgivings grew, for he was a fourteen-year veteran of the Extension and had seen his share of tropical storms. The otherworldly gray-green cast of the sky before him told Haycraft that this was likely to be the granddaddy of them all.

  Given the intensity of what he sensed coming at him, Haycraft reasoned that it only made sense to shift the big locomotive from the front of the train around to the rear. That way he could back his way down the single-line track that crossed the Keys, and, after he’d piled everyone on board, could pull straight back north, hell-bent for leather, able to use the engine’s headlamp to guide the way through the oncoming darkness. It might have been a prudent decision, but going through the switching process in the Homestead yards took another precious fifteen minutes.

  By now it was nearing five-thirty. The winds had risen beyond the point of exerting mere physical pressure. The force was such that any matter capable of movement—guy wires, stays, eaves, power lines, trees, and timbers—had begun to vibrate, whine, and moan, each element calling out in its own characteristic voice and pitch. The result was a harmony of dread that anyone who has lived through a Category 4 or 5 storm can never forget—they will tell you that in many ways, that unrelenting, awful sound is the very worst part of all.

  “It’s like a freight train roaring forever right over your head.”

  “Like an avalanche that never, ever stops.”

  “Like your head is ready to blow apart.”

  “Like hell on wheels, bud. And it’s got its eye on you.”

  Visibility was near zero, the rain blasting through the open cockpit like needles in Haycraft’s face and eyes. Even on relatively broad Key Largo, the winds had driven the tides hundreds of feet across the flattened landscape to lap at the verge of the rocky right-of-way. Though he’d had to cut his speed back to twenty miles an hour once he’d left Homestead, Haycraft pressed on, mindful that he was the only hope for those trapped by this ungodly storm.

  By the time the train approached Windley Key and the first major span over open water, it was nearly 7:00 P.M., and light was virtually gone, save for the strobelike flashes of greenish lightning. At the approach to Snake Creek Bridge, Haycraft caught sight of a group of refugees crowding up to the track, panicked by the water that now threatened to engulf them.

  Though his primary mission was to reach the work camps and the 650 who were counting on him, Haycraft did not hesitate. He brought the big engine to a halt and waited for the refugees to be loaded on board.

  Haycraft’s instincts might have been understandable, but as certain philosophers have noted, nature is short on understanding. And so are the fates.

  When Haycraft fired up Old 447, the train started forward, then there was an ungodly crash and the engine lurched abruptly to a halt as if a giant hand had seized it. Haycraft worked his throttle frantically, staring about in disbelief at his crew. No wind, no matter how strong, could hold back a roaring locomotive’s thrust. “I didn’t know whether we’d had a wreck, a washout, or what,” the engineer said. “We might have been at a bottomless pit, it was so dark.”

  For a moment the men wondered if they might be in the grip of some force that went beyond reason. Then trainmaster G. R. Branch clambered up from the floor where the impact had thrown him and pulled Haycraft away from the engine’s controls to show him what had happened.

  A thick gravel-pit boom cable, which normally passed high above the tracks, had sagged when one of its supports blew down in the storm. The cable had somehow cleared the tender car behind them, but had swept into the open cab of the engine where Branch had been standing. Had they been going any faster, the cable might well have cut the trainmaster in half. As it was, Branch had been thrown to the floor by the impact, and as the train had rolled on, the cable had tangled in the superstructure of the cab, eventually dragging the engine to a halt.

  When Haycraft realized this, he tried backing up, but the impact had virtually welded the cable to the engine. It took nearly an hour for crewmen to locate the proper tools to cut the thick cable free.

  Less than twenty miles remained between Haycraft and his destination now, but in that short distance, Old 447 was to traverse the great gulf between the known and the never-before-encountered. The full force of the storm had begun to cross the Matecumbes now, the barometer plunging to record lows, crewmen forced to work their jaws against the sudden popping in their ears.

  The winds were approaching an ungodly two hundred miles per hour, far beyond any forecaster’s expectations. The rain was a horizontal force, as painful as a sandblasting, so much moisture aloft that it was difficult to draw a breath.

  A visitor to one of the work camps that day, Charles Van Vechten, recalls seeing the train that was to have rescued him as it passed him by:

  You can’t imagine how awful it was. At noon we were told to expect a storm . . . but that a train would arrive in time to take us out. . . . We packed up in the afternoon, and assembled, ready to leave, but the storm hit before the train got there. When it did, I guess it was about 8:00 P.M., and it was pitch black and blowing like fury. I saw bodies with tree stumps smashed through their chests, heads blown off, twisted arms and legs, torn off by flying timber that cut like big knives. When the train came I dug into the sand to keep from being blown away. I saw the sea creep up the railroad elevation like it was climbing a stairway. The train went on past, heading for the other camps on Lower Matecumbe, I guess.
r />   Haycraft never saw Van Vechten, of course. From his perspective, water covered virtually everything. Over tracks that had once stood seven feet above sea level approaching the Islamorada station, breakers were crashing.

  By all appearances, Haycraft was now piloting a rocking train—at one to two miles an hour—across the surface of the ocean itself, and even he had begun to despair. How could anyone survive? he wondered. For that matter, how could he?

  Then, shouts from his crewmen brought him out of his reverie. As if in a dream, Haycraft caught sight of desperate faces flashing past the engine bays, the hands of men, women, and children clutching toward the train that was passing them by.

  Haycraft brought his engine to a halt some 1,500 feet south of the Islamorada station and watched as the crowd stumbled down the rails toward him: women at the front of the pack, as it should be, many of them clutching children by the hand, others pressing infants to their breasts. Something would come of all this effort, then, he thought. Some precious few lives could be saved, after all.

  He would load up this band of human cargo and steam northward out of a watery hell, and not let himself think about what wretched others might be clustered on down the line. It was time to cut the losses, get out while the getting was good.

  And then he felt the grip of his fireman upon his shoulder, and sensed the panic in the man’s shouts. Haycraft turned to see what had possessed the fireman, then caught sight of it out of the corner of his own disbelieving eye. At the same instant, he felt the rumble rising up from beneath his feet, a growling that overwhelmed even that of 447’s mighty engine.

  A dark wall was rushing toward them, a swath of blackness and evil that seemed to swallow the dim illumination of the locomotive’s headlamps. Nearly twenty feet tall it was, and it stretched across the horizon from end to end like the sweep of doom itself.

  A tidal wave. The worst that had ever struck American shores. Then and now.