I roped off an area behind The Seaside and spent a couple of hours on Saturday digging the pit. Then I filled it with Georgia fat wood and local kindling. Around two o'clock, Hardware Store Earl and two of his sons picked me up in the family truck to steal some cooking rocks off the shore of Fernandina Beach, near Fort Clinch State Park. To be precise, these were ballast stones from 1800's shipping fleets that had been tossed overboard by crew members in order to make their ships light enough to anchor close to shore. After a few hours of wading, lifting and carrying, we'd gathered enough stones to fill the pit. As we started loading the stones into the truck, the strangest thing happened. The wind that had been blowing from the south shifted slightly to the east, and a chill hit the air for a split second. I looked out to sea and saw a storm gathering on the horizon.
We loaded a few more stones as the wind started whipping the shore, lifting sand crystals into the air and hurling them at everything in its path, including the four of us. I shielded my eyes and chanced looking out to sea. While the sun behind us shone brightly, the sky before us was jet black, above a dark ocean of angry whitecaps and menacing waves.
It was that uneasy moment when one force of nature is about to take on another.
A long, low, distant rumble served as our warning, and another chilling gust of wind hit us from the east. The saw grass around us began bending at a severe angle. Somewhere behind us, a screen door slammed against its casing, threatening to burst its hinges. I'd never seen such a powerful storm appear out of nowhere, but here she was, picking up speed, heading our way. ??Better jump in the truck!" Earl said, so we did, and just as we closed the doors all hell broke loose, and the wind made the most God-awful shrieking and howling noise I'd ever heard. It sounded almost like a child's shrill wail, and I could have sworn I heard cursing in at least three of the four languages I speak. It was so loud we covered our ears with our hands and winced in pain. The sky was dark around us, and the rain pelted our car so hard I could barely see ten feet out the window. I thought of the fragile screen door and looked to see if it had taken flight.
I couldn't see the ground floor of the store, because the rain was hitting the street and bouncing up several feet, making the visibility twice as poor. But something on the roof caught my eye, a shape so incongruous and absurd I hesitate to even mention it. Just to clarify, I've never seen anything like it before or since, and I'm not even sure I saw it then. As I said, the storm was all consuming, and visibility practically nil.
It appeared to be a young woman.
If I had to guess, the shape I saw could have been a teenage girl, with long black hair and eyes that seemed to glow yellow, with a vertical black line in the center, like a jungle cat.
Fine, I know what you're thinking, but guess what: it gets even crazier!
She was laughing.
Right, I know. But if it was a young woman standing on the roof with her arms raised heavenward, she seemed to be looking right at me, and yes, she was laughing. Laughing or howling or wailing…and if I hadn't known better I could have sworn the shrieking sound that I'd believed to be the wind, was actually coming from her! Okay, I've told you what I saw, and now you can haul me away, because when I blinked my eyes and craned my neck, trying to get a better look at her, she disappeared.
Yeah, that's right. She disappeared into thin air.
I was about to ask the others if they'd seen her, but…
But the hail started.
My previous encounters with hail had been small pebbles that grew to larger pebbles, and then back to small as the storms came to an end. These hail storms were loud and fun and sometimes damaged a car's paint job. Earl's truck was several tones of rust, primer, and in a few places, actual paint, so paint damage wouldn't have been an issue in any case.
But the St. Alban's hail didn't work that way. It started huge, the size of cranberries, and quickly escalated to golf balls that hit us so hard and loud it actually drowned out the sound of the shrieking. Or maybe the shrieking had stopped when the hail showed up.
Either way, the pounding was nonstop. Unyielding. The damage to Earl's truck quickly moved beyond a simple paint job, as the windshield cracked in several places and jagged lines were spidering in all directions across the glass. The rear window was faring even worse, with numerous impact points that looked like bullet holes.
Nor was the damage confined to the windows, as hail relentlessly hammered dents into the hood of the truck. From the sound above us, I knew the roof would be even worse. The sound of hail on metal was so intense, it sounded like Blue Man Group was pounding the truck with sledge hammers during a prolonged finale.
"Holy shit!" one of the boys yelled, and the rest of us laughed.
"How you like them apples, city boy?" Earl shouted, though the hail hadn't got quite to apple size, to my knowledge.
"It's amazing the windows are still in tact!" I shouted.
"They won't last much longer," Earl yelled.
Then, as suddenly as it started, it was over.
Except for one delayed crash, where something fell from the sky and struck the truck bed so hard it shook the chassis and buckled the tires.
"The fuck was that?" Earl shouted.
The sudden silence was so strange, we all just sat there a moment. We looked out the windows, then at each other. We'd come through it, whatever it was, and the four of us had a story to tell for the rest of our days.
"Don't get out yet," Earl said. "Whatever that last one was, might not be the last one of 'em."
I agreed. "That wasn't a hailstone," I said.
"What then?"
I thought a minute. "Could be a meteorite, or a piece of a space satellite falling to earth."
"In the middle of a hail storm?"
"Best guess. Of course, we could always just get out of the truck and take a look."
"You first, then," Earl said.
We started laughing. The sun came back out and I climbed out of the truck and the others followed. Then we looked in the back and found what had made the noise.
Not a meteorite.
Not a piece of a space satellite.
It was a cannonball.
"Someone fired a cannonball at us?" I said.
"Never know," one of Earl's kids said. "This used to be a pirate town. Lotta people still think of themselves as pirates."
"Probably just got picked up by the storm, carried awhile, and dropped on the back of my truck when the wind died down," Earl said.
"Looks ancient," I said.
Earl took the ball from me and inspected it carefully. He removed his cap and scratched his head. "Now this here might be worth something," he said. He placed it on the floor of his truck.
We finished loading the ballast rocks into the back of the truck and talked about the storm, comparing it to everything else we'd experienced in nature.
At four the next morning I built a huge fire in the pit and roasted the stones for more than two hours. Then Earl and his sons helped me wrap most of the pig in aluminum foil and carry it out to the pit. We removed a few of the small center stones and stuffed them inside the pig to facilitate the cooking. The hot stones created a lot of smoke and loud sizzling sounds as the pig seared from within. We wrapped the rest of the pig in foil and placed it carefully in the pit, and covered it with banana leaves and hot stones. Then I removed the ropes I'd used to cordon off the area, and raked a couple of feet of sand over the top of the pit. By the time we finished, if you didn't know where the pig was cooking, it would be impossible to tell.