Life will return to normal for us, but not for others

He cowered inside his kitchen, the rain moving sideways outside, the wind pounding on his home like a bongo drum. He saw his neighbor’s roof blow away. He prayed for the first time in years.

“All of us were scared,’’ the man said Monday on radio. Not all of us. All of them. All those directly in Hurricane Irma’s path. Cuba, in this man’s case. Cudjoe Key took a direct hit. Marathon sounds underwater. The Navy is sending an aircraft carrier to Key West. People are scared. Deaths are feared.

“A humanitarian crisis,’’ said Martin Senterfitt, the emergency management director for Monroe County. Not ours. Theirs. Here, there’s this odd feeling. Relief is part of it. We have no electricity, no phones and trees blocking roads in many cases. We have power lines down, intersection lights not working across Broward and Miami-Dade and often no easy way to contact family and friends.

So relief, even gratefulness, are words that fit our feelings but don’t fit them fully. In fact, I work with words for a living, but can’t come up with one for feeling blessed at being spared the brunt of this beast while simultaneously scared for those who took it.

Everything changed for us overnight.

Everything changed for them forever.

What was the difference between us searching for power and their sending in search-and-rescue teams? A degree of turn in Irma’s path? Two degrees? A low-pressure system nudging against a high-pressure system, or some such technical weather idea that we binge-watched for the past five days?

All we know is what it meant in terms of Irma’s punch. We lost power, not lives. We lost internet access, not homes. We’ve spent the past day wondering in many cases if a plant can be saved instead of how we’ll rebuild.

“It’s not as bad as what we thought the storm surge would do,’’ Florida Gov. Rick Scott said Monday afternoon in talking of South Florida. “Now when we get to the Keys …”

For the Keys, he used the words like “devastation” and “horrible.”

“I just hope everyone survived,’’ Scott said.

For so long, our fear was their reality. For so long, South Florida was in the cross-hairs. We were going to be the man in Cuba fearing for his life. We were going to be Cudjoe Key, 20 miles north of Key West, in taking the hurricane’s direct strike.

None of this is to dismiss what happened in South Florida. We’ve got problems, issues and damage we’ll be digging out for a while in South Florida. But we’ve also got the perspective as stories come from elsewhere of what could have happened.

“It could’ve been a lot worse,’’ is the most-repeated phrase in South Florida right now. It could’ve been the lower Keys. “Best word I can describe is it’s a war zone,’’ CBS reporter David Sutta wrote on Twitter from there.

It’s late Monday afternoon now, and I’m writing this column from a computer plugged into a neighbor’s generator. I couldn’t find any place with electricity. But the question now isn’t what’s closed in South Florida. It’s what’s open.

The radio stations aren’t simul-