On a September night I lay in darkness, listening to the radio. The reporter is telling of the hurricane churning slowly towards us in the ocean south of our island. It is a CAT 3, with sustained winds of over a 110 miles an hour. The experts expect the warm waters of the gulf stream to sustain it. Be prepared for flooding, blocked roads and prolonged power outages, he says. It will make landfall in the morning. We will take a direct hit. I'm going to go through my first hurricane.

My mother told me that I was born in a hurricane but of course I don't remember it, and we have been through two tropical storms in my childhood; Donna and Bonnie, but they were nowhere as severe as this. Our house was built in 1918 and my parents say it has survived many storms, including the great hurricane of 1938. But I take a deep breath, thinking of the warnings of the man on the radio, wondering if the roof over my head will hold this time.

In the morning I wake to hear the house creaking in the gusts. A heavy, windswept rain is splattering on the windows. Looking out, I see the big sycamore trees around the corner bending and waving in the rising wind. They look like they will topple over at any moment, and I begin to worry about driving or walking under them. How will I get to work and back?

Downstairs, the kitchen seems like a storm shelter. My mother has coffee and toast ready for me.

"Do you think we'll lose power?" I ask my parents, as I sit down. I think of losing refrigeration, losing the tv news.

"We might," my mother says inconclusively, shrugging as she looks out of the window at the rain.

"The storm is still a few hours away," my father says. "This isn't the worst of it yet."

I'm getting more anxious. "I have to work today," I say. "How bad do you think the roads will get?"

"They say they'll be a lot of rain," my mother says, "And some of the roads might get blocked by falling trees."

"Maybe I won't be able to drive back," I say, "Even if I get there. I don't want to get stuck somewhere. Maybe I should walk up to the store." The store is about a mile and a half away.

"Be careful," my mother says. "There might be downed power lines too."

I leave the house after breakfast draped in a raincoat. The streets are already ankle deep in water. I watch the wind bending the trees over my head. Already there is a branch down in the road. I have to walk around huge puddles. Somehow I will have to get through this monster of a storm, I tell myself. I will have to do my job, and get back home.

At the supermarket there is an early flurry of nervous shoppers picking up cans of vegetables, bottled water, bread, peanut butter and batteries. There is an air of panic and losing control. Through the front windows of the store we can see great sheets of rain laying down a carpet of water in the parking lot. It is like a lake. I've never seen anything like it. When the truck comes later that morning, we see that the water in the bay is almost up to the loading dock. We ask the driver how the roads are and he shakes his head. "Don't think I'll be able to get back over the bridge. They say they're going to close it down. Too much wind. Probably have to try and get a room somewhere or just stay in the truck."

I look at Frankie, the produce manager, and he shakes his head. "It's a bad one," he says grimly, "The worst I've ever seen. And my mother is in a house a couple of miles from the ocean."

After we get the pallets in the ice box, the lights of the store flicker and the store manager announces he's going to close the store. All this technology, all this infrastructure and brick and mortar seems on the verge of being swept away by something coming from the book of Genesis. It's a news story, it's an event, and I am in the middle of it.

I ask Frankie if he can give me a ride home and reluctantly he agrees. He's worried about getting to his mother's house on the south shore. We're soaked to the skin by the time we get to his car, and there is a tree down, lying in the road just outside the parking lot. The main road is a river as we cross it; the water is up to the hubcaps. Again and again we go through lakes of water worrying if the car will flood, if a tree will fall and block the road. At the corner of my block Frankie lets me out. He can't get any closer to my house in the flooded street and I have to wade through foot high water under the bending trees to get to the steps of my porch. I take my shoes and socks off, the wind shaking me with its ever increasing blasts. There are leaves flying everywhere.

Inside, I find that the power is out. My parents are listening to a battery powered radio.

"The worst of the storm is coming now," my mother says.

This is the moment of truth, I tell myself, whether the roof will hold. I am drawn to the living room window to watch the fury of the storm sweeping over us, this force of nature coming from the depths of the wild sea from thousands of miles away across the globe. Dark, boiling clouds are racing by overhead faster than I have ever seen or thought possible. The trees are pushed to the breaking point. The house is shaking. The street is completely under water; the water is almost up to the steps of the porch, and my father is worrying that it will get into the basement. Still the rain keeps coming.

I wonder what it must be like, to feel that wind. I want to feel it, to see what it is like, this hurricane, this monster from the deep. This is my chance, I think to myself.

"I'm going out on the porch for a minute," I tell my parents, putting on my raincoat.

"I don't think you should go out there now," my mother says. But I ignore her.

I open the front door and the wind rips the storm door from my hand, hurling it against the siding. Another huge gust almost pushes me over against the railing of the porch, as I step out. I have to lean into the wind, bracing against its shoves, to stand up and keep my footing. 'This is a hurricane wind,' I tell myself. 'I'm standing in a hurricane.'

With a crash that shakes the house, a huge tree limb falls from one of the old sycamore trees around the corner. I pull open the storm door in a lull in the wind and duck back into the house.

"That was stupid," my mother says. "You could have gotten hurt."

"You could have broken the storm door," my father admonishes.

But to me in that moment these things sound trivial compared to standing in the wind, of being in that storm, testing its power.

There is a tremendous squall of wind that blows the rain like pebbles against the siding of the house. I look out of the window and am surprised to see an edge to the clouds, and a patch of blue sky widening, beyond it. The clouds are racing around like pieces of paper along this rim.

"It's the eye!" I shout out. "It's going to pass right over us!" How many times does this happen in a lifetime? I can't miss this chance, I tell myself. I put on my jacket over my parents' objections as the rain suddenly lightens into showers, the wind backs off, and the light brightens.

As I step outside, the sun comes out. The water in the street is glittering in the sunlight. The wind goes completely dead, there is a dead calm. Over my head a great patch of clear blue sky, a great donut hole in the storm, is sweeping over me. Around its edge great black clouds are racing like newspapers picked up by a dust devil.

I think to myself: 'I am in the eye of this storm, this huge storm that can be seen by satellites. I am in the middle of this thing that came from the Atlantic, these clouds and rain that came from the coast of Africa. Here I am, standing in the middle of it.'

Another edge is appearing in the sky, a great edge of boiling, black clouds and rain. The other half of the storm is coming. The eye of the storm sweeps over me, going north. The wind hits with another great gust and it starts raining as I go back inside.

But I have stood in the eye of a hurricane.