Tales of woe by frequent travelers rarely earn sympathy--even from their own breed. But that doesn't stop them from telling their tales anyway: "The caviar in First was okay, but the toast was stale. And they wouldn't give me an aisle seat." Fortunately, I have no tales of travel woe to tell about the Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise earlier this month. Quite the opposite, in fact. But I won't tell those either. Not yet, anyway. Because there's real suffering in the news, much of it in the places we just visited.

Cruising the Caribbean during hurricane season is a bit like dodging slow-moving Frisbees, each one being 300 miles across. Ships can do the dodging, but land can't. That was one of the biggest lessons--about Linux, as well as other natural developments--that I'm still learning right now.

See, as I'm writing this, Hurricane Wilma is wrapping up her own tour of south Florida, the latest stop in her itinerary. Before that it was the northeast Yucatan peninsula, where she paused for several days, destroying much of Cancun, Cozumel and the surrounding resort region with Category 4 winds.

Two weeks earlier, I had been sitting in an Internet cafe on Cozumel, enjoying the first cheap and fast broadband of the cruise, wrapping up my column for the January issue of Linux Journal. It was a convivial experience. When the proprietor's Wi-Fi router--a generic Linksys, with Linux inside--went down, I helped him get it up and running again, the usual way: unplug, wait, replug. He treated me to a Coronita, a small Corona beer, and then to another. It was hot outside, as it had been for the whole trip, so I welcomed the air conditioning that blasted down on the desk I borrowed in the back room there. In the late afternoon, my sister pulled me away from my work so we could have lunch in Plaza del Sol, near the pier where the giant cruise boats dock. Nearby stood a tall flag pole, with a huge flag waving in the breeze. As we headed back to the boat, a passing squall treated us to an evening rainbow over the island.

Here's a report I read this past Monday morning:

There are links a number of wreckage pictures at that same URL, and some can be matched up with pictures my sister and I took during our visit there. I doubt that the Internet cafe is up and running. In fact, I'm guessing it was destroyed. The building was flimsy in the back and sat atop the seawall. If anybody knows its fate, tell us in the comments below. I don't know the name of the place, but the sign in front said NET PHONE, as I recall. It was a very short walk south from the pier.

I also wonder about Costa Maya, which is down the coast from Cozumel and Cancun. On that shore excursion we bypassed the fake town set up for cruise ships and took a taxi a short distance into the little beachfront village of Mahahual, or Mahajual--they spell it both ways). We ate outstanding fresh grilled local fish and shrimp and some of the best ceviche I've ever had. That was at the El Faro restaurant, which is essentially a thatched roof over a grill and a bar, about 20 feet from the water. The extremely friendly waiter told us that the offshore reef offers protection from heavy surf, but that storm surges from hurricanes threaten the town itself, which has an elevation of about one foot above high tide. I haven't found any reports on the Web, except from one local resident (an American ex-pat) eager to return home. Since Wilma angled to the northwest across Cozumel, I think Costa Maya was spared. This time.

Our first port of call on the trip was Georgetown, on Grand Cayman, which was also a stop on the 2002 Geek Cruise. (Here are Part I and Part II of the reports on that trip.) For that shore excursion I joined Greg Haerr, Ted Ts'o and others for a tour of "Hell" and various corners of the island, including the Cracked Conch, an excellent seaside restaurant. Two years later, in September 2004, Grand Cayman was trashed by Hurricane Ivan. On our way out to a rendezvous with tame stingrays, our guide on the bus told how all the trees on the island were poisoned by standing salt water, after Ivan's storm surge swamped everything its Category 5 winds didn't blast to shreds. The island was clearly back in business, but also had a long way to go. Some hotels (such as the Hyatt we passed) are still rebuilding. And whole forests were still bare and brown.

Between Costa Maya and Cozumel, we visited Belize, a country that seems never to have recovered from at least four hurricanes: Hattie in 1961, Mitch in 1998, Keith in 2000 and Inez in 2001.

Hattie was the worst. She hit just past midnight as Halloween began, bringing 160 mph winds (gusts to 200 mph), first to the village of Calabash Caye on Turneffe Atoll, then to Belize City, which was the capital of what was still British Honduras. Calabash Caye was wiped off the island, along with most of its 300 residents. Belize City, the only city worthy of the noun in the whole country, was destroyed. Civilization failed and British troops were called in.

The story of Hattie was told to us on a bus tour of the city, on our way out to the rain forest where we floated on inner tubes for two miles on a narrow river through limestone caverns. (The best shore excursion ever, in my long experience with these kinds of things.) The city never recovered. Now, 44 years after the storm, many empty lots are occupied only by concrete pads. Driveways lead to nowhere. The sense of vulnerability was so complete that a new capital, Belmopan, was built inland on higher ground. (Perspective: Belize City has a population of perhaps 60,000, and Belmopan just 7,000.)

When Hattie struck in '61 I was a novice ham radio operator in New Jersey. I remember the hurricane because I took an interest in Radio Belize, a large (20kW) AM station that broadcast on the unlikely (actually, European-standard) frequency of 834kHz, sandwiched between WCCO/830 in Minneapolis and WHAS/840 in Louisville. I could pull in Radio Belize on a good transistor radio at night (when AM signals bounce off the sky) by turning it so the directional antenna nulled out the U.S. powerhouses to the West, and picked up the signal from Belize to the South. But my main instrument was a Forties-vintage Hammarlund HQ-129X receiver fed by a 40-meter antenna out back (I also had an 80-meter, but oddly it didn't work as well for AM, though it should have worked better). The BBC News was often what allowed me to identify the station. So was its Caribbean-accented English and diverse cultural programming. For a long time, Radio Belize was my favorite (and farthest) DX catch on the AM band.

The station survived Hurricane Hattie, but not the tides of progress. I didn't hear a single local AM signal during our stop in Belize.

Fact is, AM never was very compatible with the tropics. Too many thunderstorms down there, causing too much static. For many years the "Caribbean Band" (low short wave) was used, alongside the AM band, because the higher frequencies were less subject to static from lightning. Radio Belize's signal in that band was at 3.3MHz. (OR "Mc." They still called them "cycles" instead of "Hertz" back then.) At 5kW, it wasn't a bad signal, either. Last night I checked that band with a shortwave radio, and heard little North of WWV's time standard signal at 2.5kHz. The band, and the technology, are obsolete.

Which brings me to the lessons learned.

First, what matters are values that have been familiar to Unix and Linux hackers for generations: durability, resourcefulness, recoverability, reusability. Watching Wilma tear up the tranquil settings where I had passed just a couple weeks earlier, my mind turned to the constructive (and reconstructive) efforts that followed Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which struck the Gulf Coast in September. The efforts I've followed most closely are: 1) the Nola.us blog, which is the latest incarnation of Michael Barnett's Interdictor, which chronicled and facilitated the survival of DirecNIC and its thousands of customers from Ground Zero of Katrina in New Orleans; 2) Brian Oberkirch's Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog, which serves as a virtual newspaper for Brian's hometown, which suffered terribly from Katrina; and 3) Recovery 2.0, a joint effort by many interested individuals. All run on Linux and make use of open source tools. This isn't just coincidence. It's more like evolution in the sternest Darwinian sense of the word. These are survival efforts, in some cases by real survivors.

I watched these efforts grow and mature in a very short time. That would not have been possible without building on a groundwork of long-proven open source development tools and methods, and the values behind them.

In Part I of this report, I said Linux is a species. Watching the wake of Wilma, we get to see how sturdy a species it really is.