It was a bittersweet moment when Peter Davey sat on the tiled floor of what was once his kitchen and held his precious pewter tankard out towards the photographer’s lens.
There’s a crooked grin on his tired face as he poses amid the rubble of his Ocean Club apartment.
The image, shot in November 2004, was the culmination of a weeks-long search for a precious family heirloom in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan.
He eventually found it hanging from a piece of black coral that protruded “like a shepherd’s crook” from a bank of sand that had swept through the property. Fewer than 24 hours later, the debris was cleared and the tankard, which had belonged to his father, would have been lost forever.
Davey returned to the property last month to retake the photograph as part of a Cayman Compass project with Courtney Platt, who shot the first and most comprehensive series of images in the aftermath of Ivan.
“Before the storm, I owned unit 227, but after Ivan I only owned the footprint because there was literally nothing left,” Davey said, as we approached the well-kept condo, surrounded by plants and a homemade sundial.
In the weeks after the storm, Davey, who was in the jewellery business, had come to terms with the fact that his home was lost. Like many, he was grateful that his life had been spared and aware that others had suffered worse fates in a storm that demolished much of the south shore.
Still he searched high and low for those items of personal significance. He found part of his coin collection in plastic wallets floating in the standing water. He found his stamp collection intact inside a chest of drawers flung far from his property. Six weeks after the storm, he got a call from someone in George Town who had found a plastic stash bag stuffed with his passport and other essential documents.
But the item that meant the most was the tankard.
“It had great sentimental value because it had been given to my father on his 21st birthday in 1937 by his fellow officers in the British Navy,” he recounted.
“And when he died, I went over to the UK and asked my mother if I could take this tankard as something to remember him by.”
When Ivan took it away, he says, he felt as if he had let his family down or betrayed them in some way.
“I had lost the thing that was most emotionally valuable to the family.”
But this was an Ivan story that had a happy ending.
“What was strange was I found it the very day before they came to clear the entire site. So if I left it one more day, I would never have found it,” he said.
“I just saw a piece of black coral sticking up through the sand about 100 yards away, behind a building. “When I pulled on it, like a little shepherd’s crook, the tankard was hanging like this,” he said, gesturing with the handle on his finger.
“I just couldn’t believe it. Within 30 seconds I was on the phone to my family to say I had found it.”
The crooked smile returns as he tells the story. Even 20 years later, he still remembers the power of the storm and marvels at the recovery.
“I remember going down South Sound and thinking the island can never recover from this. It’s complete demolition, like a nuclear bomb. And, yet, here we are. Quite extraordinary.”
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