My sister evacuated from Tampa last Thursday to avoid Hurricane Charley. She was down in Miami for the weekend, where, my mom reports, “we didn’t even get rain.” The storm turns out to have bypassed Tampa altogether and has devastated areas that didn’t expect it, people who didn’t have time to evacuate. I have heard most of this second hand because I can’t seem to want to read much news about it. Hurricane Andrew was almost exactly twelve years ago and feels far away, but it’s amazing what little pockets of weird feelings can be unearthed from across the country.
I was on a high school youth group mission trip in Jamaica when we heard, two days before we were supposed to come home, that a hurricane was heading for Miami. It had already been a very weird and emotional trip and the news that our houses were about to be flattened and we were going to lose all our stuff was just sort of icing on the cake. We had to stay an extra couple of days and managed to get a flight back to South Florida due to the influence of someone we knew who knew someone at Air Jamaica, or something. We got in in the middle of the night in some tiny airport in Palm Beach and none of us knew where our parents were…we got stopped in the church van by the National Guard for being out after curfew, which was just as terrifying as you might imagine, what with them sticking assault rifles into the windows of the van and everything.
Somehow I got in touch with my mom and she and her best friend made the two hour drive from where they’d evacuated to and came to get me. You have to understand that immediately after the hurricane Miami looked like a war zone. People were getting severely hurt by the downed power lines and there was rubble everywhere. No street lights or anything, not a tree standing. None of the highways had collapsed, thank goodness, but on the surface streets you never knew how far you were going to be able to go before you were stopped by a downed palm tree or something. Somehow Mom found me and we managed not to get stopped on the way back up north.
We got back on the island a couple of days later and discovered that the house had had about a foot and a half of saltwater in it. Everything smelled like the dead fish that were left in the streets and all the grass was dead. No electricity, obviously, and most of our stuff was ruined. That’s the thing about a hurricane, in contrast to say, an earthquake: not only do you have a lot of time to obsess over what you might lose, but you also have the chance to come home, assuming your house made it through, and slog through it all and shrug your shoulders. We spent weeks cleaning up and getting rid of our stuff, trying to get the power back on, filling garbage bag after garbage bag with our destroyed things. There go my books. There goes my one sweater for when it hits a low of seventy. There go my old Cabbage Patch Kids. There go my shoes, my posters, my blankets and sheets, my tapes, my Dirty Dancing cut-off jean shorts, a couple of yearbooks. Thankfully, thankfully, my mom had saved all my paper journals (at that time there were only five years’ worth) and I still have those to this day. We had to get rid of most of our furniture and the wood floors. I think we had to get a new air conditioner and replace part of the roof. We had to go to some tile store somewhere way out in West Florida; I was so bitchy about having to go on the trip that I chose, for my bedroom floor, bright pink tile. My mom didn’t blink an eye and ordered that for me and had it installed, and there it is to this day, shining pinkly as the guest room floor, reminding me of the drudgery of disaster cleanup.
We couldn’t start school for several weeks…if I recall correctly, I think there was something like an entire banyan tree that was partially blocking the entrance of the school among other problems. I slept at the church a lot, because there was air conditioning there and because I was wanting to spend a lot of time with the people who’d gone to Jamaica. At one point some of the youth group kids formed a sad little work team…we would bring our hammers and a bunch of garbage bags with us and sort of walk around the island, offering our well-meaning services to people standing in their lawns, wondering what they were going to do next. Some people had lost all their things (as opposed to just half of them) and others hadn’t been touched at all. It was very strange that way. There was no way to predict what would be affected and what would be all right.
Eventually we got the power back and the water running and didn’t have to pay $10 for a bag of ice or $50 for a sheet of plywood anymore. I wore my blue skirt to school and was in a play about a beauty pageant. The pink tile was installed and after a while we stopped saying “Before the hurricane” and the grass finally grew back. I moved across the country to a place where they have earthquakes but no hurricane season and exhibited none of the signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Except when I was talking to my mom about what her experience had been during the hurricane itself, how she’d had to say goodbye to her garden before hustling my sister and the cats into the car and getting the hell off the island, I got a little shaky. “Yeah, “ said my mom. “I never think about it anymore, but I noticed that while I was waiting for your sister to get in I ate an entire cheesecake.”
I am, obviously, very grateful that neither my mom nor my sister nor anyone else I know was in Hurricane Charley. It’s awful to feel far away from your family during something like this, knowing there’s nothing you can do. Waiting for the storm to hit while you’re actually there is bad too. Not to mention cleaning up after it and trying to live your life without having bad scary storm dreams. If you’ve ever been through something like this or know someone who has, you might feel like making a donation to the Red Cross, which is mobilizing the disaster relief response. My heart goes out to all the storm victims in Central Florida who have lost their homes and are trying to begin the process of picking up the pieces.