My bad trip - I gave my wife a vacation on a tropical island, with cyclone

My wife is a remarkable woman: cunning, funny, loving, deliciously tolerant of my inability to stack a dishwasher or close a closet door. She is also a nightmare to buy. It's not so much a question of what to give the woman who has everything, but what to give the woman who is completely content with a library book and a cup of tea. Birthdays and Christmas are synonymous with dread, and I wish she were a little less immune to the siren song of late capitalism.

But there are five years, as a milestone loomed, I nailed it: a week on a tropical island, lounging on the beach with our three-year-old, fulfilling a lifelong ambition of snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef. Perfect gift, perfect vacation.

The clue that maybe it wasn't was the arrival of bright sunshine, bright blue skies and a fact sheet happily titled: "Explanation of Situation Regarding Potential Cyclone."

It was alarming. But as the document, the island was built with cyclones in mind, and we might still completely miss it. Leaving never really crossed our minds; the biggest worry was that our trip to the reef would be cancelled. However, we we lay in bottled water and canned food, surprised no one else was filling it up. Obviously, we said, we were the overreacting type.

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The next day, travel to and from the island was suspended. Driving past the supermarket in our golf cart, the main mode of transportation on the island, we witnessed, if we had known, a taste of the great pandemic pasta panic. But still, Debbie (we now knew the name of the cyclone) was not due for two days, and we went to the beach, swam in the pool and visited the koalas. Most people did the same. If the mood was not relaxed, there was no panic. On the lawn outside our building, a toddler played in the rain, wading through huge puddles of hot water.

The after- noon before the storm hit, we went to the highest point on the island to watch the darkness gather in the east. The wind was already as strong as any I had felt. We retreated inside, wondering what the next 24 hours would bring.

Our building looked like it was designed with a nuclear explosion in mind, built at from the thickest concrete slabs and glass materials this side of a presidential limo, but the noise when the force hit at midnight was still amazing. A cyclone is strong on all frequencies at once, and it seems unpleasantly alive. In the midst of one, it's easy to believe in nature as a malevolent force; a cyclone seems to want to hurt you. It was the soundtrack to the next day, as we sat nervously and watched things, sometimes quite important things, pass by the window. Our son, fortunately, was not moved by all this. He would nap and play like it was any other day, even when the wind started to rip a window open; luckily he lost interest after a while and the exterior remained outside.