On Saturday Awed by nature’s power, sickened by war

DESTRUCTION, devastation, demolition… Strange how many doom-words begin with the letter D.

I was pondering this rather downin-the-dumps theme this week as I observed a great deal of destruction and devastation – and, no, in this case it wasn’t inspired by war footage on TV. The far more unlikely source was the lovely tropical island where I am spending the second week of our first post-Covid holiday.

We’ve been sailing with an old friend, helping to celebrate his 70th birthday, but this week we went ashore to hire a car and tour the Caribbean island of St Martin, which I last visited in 2015.

That was before Hurricane Irma struck, but her extraordinary levels of devastation are still plain to see five long years after her 180 mile-anhour winds came howling through.

Last time we were here we stayed at a place called Oyster Pond, a horseshoe-shaped inlet protected by steep surrounding hills. It had been highly developed, with hotels and restaurants sprouting up all around the natural harbour, which was covered in marina pontoons and floating eateries and bars. Now, five years after that single 24-hour storm, hardly a twig of any of it remains. It is, quite simply, a scene of devastation. A warm, sunny, tropical one, but utter devastation nevertheless.

And as you tour around St Martin, seeing township after township still half in ruins after this single night of hell in September 2017, you find yourself firstly being awed by the power of nature, and then for some reason you begin to realise how pathetic and futile it is for humankind to be emulating nature and meting out mass-destruction on our own selfish terms.

How utterly bonkers! As if we don’t have enough to put up with on this lump of rock spinning through space.

All around the globe there are people suffering the results of nature’s occasional or ongoing bouts of devastation, and what does humankind do? Add a bit more to the misery and to the death toll for good measure.

I say “humankind”, but in this instance I ought to use the more oldfashioned “mankind” because I really don’t think women suffer from the kind of “little man syndrome” which prompts guys like Putin to start willywaving. What is so evident on this island is that the act of destruction is relatively easy – it is the building back that takes years and years. There are roofless buildings everywhere and scores of wrecked yachts litter the main lagoon.

Even roads – not a thing you associate with damage caused by winds – remain impassable.

Here on the French side of the island in the town of Marigot Bay, there used to be a wonderful restaurant overlooking the harbour.

One remarkable feature was the huge tree which had grown up through the middle of the building up on the terrace under its leafy canopy I once enjoyed an excellent supper with a group of newspaper readers I happened to meet on the island.

One reason I remember it is because the head waiter told me he’d worked for years at Taunton’s Castle Hotel and when he heard I came from Somerset he plied me with free booze for the rest of the evening.

I was looking forward to dinner at the restaurant on my return. But it has gone. Irma took it out as effectively as a nuclear bomb, so that now just a few low walls remain housing a tribe of feral cats which fight and hunt for rats. The only hint that it is the place where we once had dinner is the stump of that large tree in the middle of the wreck.

Standing there looking at the devastation I did wonder if we Brits know just how lucky we are. Yes, we had a couple of recent named storms which made headlines, but here Hurricane Irma’s one-night stand is still the only really big story in town years after she struck.

Of course, the family and friends of the 52 people who died in the storm will never forget that awful 24 hours, nor will those related to the further 82 who perished as an indirect result of the hurricane.

It seems likely that we must learn how to deal with Mother Nature’s increasing wrath but what we should not have to be dealing with – in what is meant to be a sophisticated and civilised world – is mankind’s unique brand of violent stupidity.

Readers last week will recall my friend Sasha and her messages to me from Kyiv. I am relieved to have received a fleeting note that she and her husband have managed to escape the city but what beholds them in future only time can tell.

I have told her they are welcome to come and stay at our cottage if they need to, but who knows?

Why would an ambitious goahead young couple want to come to live in such a quiet corner?

Having asked the question, I imagine they might have every wish to escape the stormier parts of the world.

‘How pathetic and futile for humankind to mete out destruction on our own selfish terms’