ANOTHER KIND OF WEATHER
Heather Sellers
Late afternoon on the third day, the hurricane churning in the warm September waters of the Gulf of Mexico unexpectedly increased from a Category 3 to a Category 5. Dire warnings from government officials flooded our phones: Rapid intensification. Rush final preparations to completion. Friends from Oregon, Michigan, and New York sent me texts with screaming emoji and left frantic voice mails.
Tell me you are evacuating!
Get out now. Don’t take the risk.
You can’t stay there!!! Come here, please.
I did not reply. I walked outside and stood in my driveway under the hard grey sky, granite in motion. I felt the wind on my face, a light breeze heavy with humidity, seductively soft. The rains had not yet begun, and would not, for hours, maybe even days, depending on the impossible-to-predict path of the storm. This is the thing about hurricanes. As with any complex system, there are so many layers of uncertainty. While its winds whirled around at 120 miles an hour, the storm itself traipsed across the sea at just 10 or so miles an hour. In traffic, this would be a slow creep, but there was no way to know where the storm would make landfall – the entire coastline was on high alert. Animated images on the news exploited this widespread anticipatory fear, showing a pulsing, jagged, giant red monster nearly as large as the Gulf of Mexico, spinning towards Florida, coming to swallow us whole.
Recently, I’d sold my house two blocks from the Gulf, where I’d lived for years, to move thirty miles inland, solely in order to be safer from the storms. But now, after all the texts and calls, and the weather warnings about the sudden increase in the power of the hurricane, I was second-guessing my decision to remain alone in my house. I was looking up at the uneasy sky, trying to figure out what to do, when across the street Terry came out of his house, walking his dog, Hope. I called out, “You still staying?”
“We are,” he said, as Hope pulled him along. He glanced up at the sky, not breaking stride. I crossed the street, even though it was clear the dog and the man wanted to keep walking. I told Terry originally, I’d planned to stay, but now I was worried, given the latest re-ports about the record size and increased intensity of the hurricane. He said, “I’ve lived here over 30 years, and we’ve always been okay. Never any damage.”
Then I told him our neighbor Sheri had already left with her family earlier that morning, because they are from New Orleans and still traumatized from Katrina. And now that the storm was a Cat 5, people were texting me to get out because my house had so much glass – sliding glass doors in every room. As I said all this to Terry, I was aware I’d been home alone all day and the entire day before and I had not spoken to another human in person during this time. Solitude, which I need and love, is a cloak of protection, an insulation. I always forget how chatty and young and excited I feel when I first talk to someone and the cloak is dropped, after so much time alone. It’s like I am brand new in the world of people. I did not say that part to Terry. Instead, I stated the obvious: It was far too late to evacuate. The airport was already closed, and with so many people fleeing Florida, there would be no available hotel rooms until North Carolina – nowhere to go and no way to get there.
He said, “I think we’ll be okay.” They walked away. The dog looked back at me with her manic panting grin.
“Good luck!” I called, waving with both hands, but he did not seem to hear me. I was aware part of me had been hoping he would invite me to hunker down with him and his wife, a retired nurse, to play cards and drink wine into the night when the storm came, so that I would be distracted from the worry, but we’re just hello-and-wave neighbors, maybe barely even that.
When I lived in the house two blocks from the sea, evacuation was mandatory. To avoid getting stranded in traffic, and perhaps running out of gas, I left well before the warnings came from the government offices. I packed up my things and drove inland, to stay with a friend who lives in the same neighborhood where I live now. This was the first time I would not be evacuating. I wanted to explain to my far-flung frantic friends: I was already in my evacuation. But I was uneasy, as I had not been before, because this was the first time I would be going through a hurricane alone. When Terry turned the corner and disappeared into the warm afternoon, I suddenly felt the lack of human presence in my life as another kind of weather.
This was a strange and unexpected arrival, yearning to shelter with someone. And I was surprised that I felt so ashamed of both my fear of this coming storm and not wanting not to be alone. I saw my-self as utterly independent, thriving in on-her-own-ness. I’d imagined feeling so safe in this new house. Not lonely! Had I miscalibrated everything?
Scientists cannot determine an exact path or accurately predict landfall. I know this. Even so, that afternoon I pored over spaghetti models. The predicted path shifted, shifted again. When I saw that of the fourteen pastel-colored lines of prediction, seven came directly through my house, I went outside. I carried flowerpots, the garden hose, and my kayak into the garage. I felt both strong and weak. I took down wind chimes and laid the bird bath on its side. I placed the wicker garden chairs in a row next to my car and lowered the shuddering old garage door. Inside, I walked through my quiet house. The sliding glass doors that open from each room onto the pool are original to the house, over thirty years old, and the glass is brittle and thin, far out of compliance with current building codes. The glass looked impossibly transparent and flimsy, as though between me and the roiling world there was really nothing definitive at all.
To prepare for hurricane season, every year I purchased the same supplies: cans of beans, individual applesauces, energy bars, gallons of water, batteries, paper towels, an array of wipes. I placed these on the counter in the guest bathroom, the only room without any windows, along with some quilts and a pillow. The laptop and the phone were plugged in on the counter there, the laptop’s tiny green eye showing its calm steady full charge. Then I stood in the dim hall-way, looking around, wondering what else to do, and where would be the safest place to ride out the storm. Which windows might break first, and which parts of the house might suffer most if the great oaks shading the property tipped over or dropped weighty limbs?
At that moment, Sheri texted from the highway that the Gas Daddy app I’d shared with her was directing them to stations that had no gas. She wanted me to know: The app was not being kept up to date. At every exit, they were charging $8.50 a gallon, and long lines stretched out from every station. It had taken them four hours to drive sixty miles, they were still well south of Ocala with just half a tank, and now traffic was at a standstill on the interstate.
I remembered the go bag lodged in the back of my coat closet: a purple suitcase with my birth certificate, my parents’ death certificates, some stray bank statements, an envelope with cash, socks, clothes, underwear, hiking boots, bandages and expired Bactine. I was never sure exactly what was supposed to go in a go bag, even though I’d Googled this many times. I’d first assembled these items in the suitcase when I lived in my previous home, the pink bungalow by the sea. I placed the dusty purple suitcase in my guest bathroom, which I was thinking of as the bunker, where it stood by the toilet, looking lonely and out of place and far too small.
* * *
My previous house was in the city of St. Petersburg, built on a 1920s man-made island situated at the mouth of wide, shallow Tampa Bay, where freshwater pours into the Gulf of Mexico. A little white bridge connects the man-made island to the city proper, and the city is laid out on a grid, covering a slender comma of land, a peninsula that hangs off the west coast of Florida poking out into the gulf. The beach town attracts artists, breweries, bookstores, and music festivals. The pride parade rivals Key West’s. There’s an internationally known glass-blowing school, a world-famous sand sculpture competition, and two massive pink Jazz Age hotels. Some people don’t understand why anyone would ever move from such a vibrant place. Others don’t understand why anyone would ever live there, for any reason, ever. When I moved to St. Pete, I was excited to live near artist friends and a group of writers I’d known since college. They assured me the city hadn’t suffered a direct hit from a hurricane in over 100 years. Something about the way the bay flowed into the Gulf and the unusual topography along this part of the Florida coast had protected them, they said. No one ever spoke of hurricanes. I was the only person I knew with a go bag and a cache of emergency food and water. One friend had attempted to keep a stash of emergency food, but she kept eating it. My other friends gently mocked my preparations.
When the isle officially opened in 1925, only 39 of its 275 acres were above the high tide line. Even so, developers immediately sold over seven million dollars’ worth of lots there. For a century, this was the place where professional athletes, blue and red and purple politicians, and wealthy snowbirds lived in stunning mansions. Mango and pomegranate trees were planted along the isle’s brick streets, and lush bougainvillea and plumeria spilled over terracotta walls. The mansions lined the water, and little 1950s bungalows populated the interior streets. My little two-bedroom house was in the center of the island. Surrounded by pastel bungalows of the same vintage, all with terrazzo floors, and a couple blocks from the sea, I always felt very safe. I walked to my friend’s house, two blocks away, for parties and poetry gatherings. I paddled my kayak to Bird Island. I cycled to church, a stunning cathedral at the water’s edge, overlooking the sea. Because of the wealth and beauty, it seemed as though nothing bad had ever happened on the isle and nothing bad could happen. It was such a beautiful place. Every evening, the sunset turned the sky and the water shocking pink. In the evening, I often walked down to the little white bridge and took photos of the fuchsia sunset and the pink water, and dolphins and ibis and heron, along with many other people.
At that time, I had not heard of Zone A, nor did I know that Zone A had recently been designated an official Special Area of Extreme Hazard. Old friends of mine – we’d gone to graduate school together – had helped me find the house. Together, we’d marveled at the beauty of the little pink bungalow, its original tile in the bathroom, and the banyan tree in the backyard, studded with orchids. Excited at the prospect of living near them, I bought the house. The words “extreme,” “hazard,” and “flood zone” never came up in conversation.
Then, shortly after I moved in, I received in the mail a thick packet from FEMA, with a full-color brochure featuring an image of a two-story house. The home in the picture was overlaid with neat bands of clear blue alongside a kind of ruler in the margin, which showed the visual effect of one foot of blue water, two feet of blue water, three feet of blue water, all the way up to ten feet of sheer blue water, which covered the first story entirely and into the second floor. There were no people depicted in the scene, and no evidence of people, no cars, no death, no damage. The tree by the house was green and healthy, the lawn thriving under the shiny bands of friendly blue and the sky was bluer blue. It was serene. A long letter accompanied the pamphlet, explaining that homeowner’s insurance did not cover water damage. Because it was in Zone A, my house was automatically part of the flood insurance program subsidized by the government. But because my house had been built in 1950, before flood maps were issued, I currently received a discounted and subsidized flood insurance rate that did not reflect the cost of actual flood risk. Soon, the government would no longer be able to afford to provide a flood insurance subsidy large enough to cover true level of risk in Zone A. We homeowners should expect our rates to increase significantly every year, unless we elevated our houses.
Elevate the house? It was all so confusing, and so frightening. I called the real estate agent. “I think we’ll be fine,” she said, assuring me that the state legislature would block this proposal to pull the insurance subsidies, and they would protect our homes. She added, “Your value has already gone up so much!”
Meanwhile, small homes like mine in my neighborhood were being torn down, replaced by sprawling mansions with their first floors fifteen feet up off the ground. These new homes took up the entire lot, with four-car garages and mahoosive driveways, patios and pools, and all this paving over the land furthered the drainage problems on the isle, so even on sunny days now, at high tide, water rushed up from the drains and turned the streets on the isle to rivers. In some spots, water pooled, never draining away at all, and there’d be fish in there, and weeds would sprout, growing knee-high in a matter of weeks.
Soon, I gave up trying to understand the insurance issues and the changing flood zone maps. I threw mailings from FEMA into the trash, unopened. I spent a lot of time standing in the driveway with my phone, staring at the compass app, confirming the lot my house was on was indeed zero feet above sea level and wondering if the altimeter on my phone even knew about below sea level. After heavy rains, now the water in the street out front of my house took days to drain, and at high tide it rose, and sometimes there would be a catfish stranded in my driveway that I had to kick gently down the street into the catch basin at the corner. Sometimes a dog took the fish, or an osprey dove down, and snagged it with those great talons, carrying it away like a silver evening bag.
Whenever I stuck a branch of plumeria into the ground, it seemed to grow overnight, and then all a sudden I had a new tree. Jasmine, the banyan, rosemary, hawthorn, the bougainvillea – everything flourished in my garden. I had so many flowering trees and vines, the garden won a beautification award from the city. During the rainy season – storm season – it seemed like the plants in my garden were sitting in a vase in water, just below the surface and sometimes that water was above the surface, and always everything grew like madness. But after summer thunderstorms, sometimes I’d find a black snake in the house, escaping drowning, no doubt. “A snake signifies good luck,” a poet friend said. “It’s a blessing.”
But it always felt like a curse. It is impossible to fall asleep with a snake in your house.
Each summer, the equinoctial storms came earlier, and every year they were more frequent and stronger. If – when – water came into the house, I feared I would never be able to sell. And if the house flooded, I would have to get a building permit to restore it. To get a building permit, one had to bring the house into compliance with the new elevation requirements. The first floor now had to be fifteen feet above the ground, or I would not be issued a building permit, and without the building permit, I wouldn’t be able to collect on my insurance. I would be stuck with an uninhabitable, unsellable house.
It was impossible to imagine abandoning the frangipani and hibiscus trees I’d planted, the masses of flowers I’d carefully tended over seven years. I did not want to leave my church, my neighbors, my friends, the bookstores and the art galleries. But every year, the water was rising. It slopped over the seawall down by the bridge now, and sometimes I couldn’t get onto the isle, because the streets were flooded, impassable. By now, everyone knew about Zone A, the Florida insurance crisis, and the rising waters. Meanwhile, the little bungalows were being razed faster and faster, and huge mansions clotted the isle, outnumbering the little houses. But I worried I’d waited too long, and no one would buy my house.
When I put it up for sale, I had multiple offers within one hour of listing, and it sold for cash, over asking. The new owner turned around and listed it for double what she paid me.
My new home was 38 feet above sea level. That was my main criteria: no flood zone. I hadn’t considered the number of windows, the age of the glass, the flimsy, original, nonconforming garage door. I’d been so laser focused on escaping the rising water, I’d forgotten about the wind, which is, for most people, the defining feature of a hurricane. I was not at all, as I had assumed, safe. As this massive storm approached, I understood for the first time that I was not fine on my own.
Early evening, the hurricane hurtling directly towards us turned sharply to the north, aiming for the Panhandle. The lines of spaghetti that had been draped over my house now ran up through Tallahassee and into North Carolina. It seemed the storm would remain at least 100 miles from the Florida coast, running north, parallel alongside the state, but keeping its distance. I felt great relief, cancelled out by concern for those in the path. I stopped checking the NOAA site. I did not watch any more news.
The rains and winds began in earnest at six P.M. They came in bands, with periods of weird stillness and wan sunshine in between. During one lull, I stood out in my driveway. It continued to rain between bands, but the intermission rain was silky soft. The street-lights shimmered. Terry’s house had lights on, and all my neighbors’ houses did too, except for Sheri’s. The neighborhood looked cozy, even beautiful, with everything glistening. But I was unspeakably lonely, bereft in a profound way, one I’d never felt before. I had always loved my solitude. Did it no longer fit me? Was I lonely simply be-cause I was so afraid? Or, had I convinced myself, for years, of some-thing that was never true: She loves to be alone. As the storm out in the Gulf crept past my city, it brought my solitary ways into sharp relief. I saw something of how afraid I’d been of people coming too close to me.
That night while I slept, the storm remained out to sea, trundling due north as predicted but as it passed it shoved a massive wall of water towards the west coast of Florida. This wave was at least eight feet high when it surged across the barrier islands with such force, water was pressed inland, up through the mouth of the Tampa Bay and into communities along the rivers. Places that had never flooded were three, four feet underwater. People swam out of their windows.
The surge pushed up into the inland rivers, sending them spilling over their banks far from the coast. It was such a large and powerful hurricane, even 100 miles offshore, the surge drowned this part of the world. On the isle where I used to live, the water didn’t come from one direction, it was enveloping from every direction, and it came so fast, in minutes. People who stayed in their homes and apartments near the coast were stranded now, clambering into attics, and from roof-tops, they watched the water cover their cars and buildings. People kayaked, with dogs and cats, and children, along streets that had be-come rivers. People swam down streets. People drowned in vehicles.
My phone woke me at five in the morning. Former neighbors and friends who’d evacuated from the island where I used to live texted me video from cameras at their houses. The water came so fast. Flooding isn’t the right word. Flooding sounds incremental, a slow rising. This water came as a vertical sheet of seemingly endless wave, a tower of water. When the wave pressed against buildings, the windows fell into the rooms, the water rushed in, and then the cameras went dark, and the video feed cut off. I couldn’t stop replaying the images.
All over the city and along the coastline, saltwater hit electric cars left behind in parking lots and garages, which then burst into flames and the flames lit buildings on fire and fire trucks could not make it through the high water. In the videos, it looked like the water was on fire and the world was ending.
In one video, I saw the house next door to my old house pressed by a four-foot wall of water. Jennifer, my former next-door neighbor and closest friend from the island, still lived there, though she’d evacuated inland. She texted that her house and my house had water over the countertops. Her friend in one of the elevated mansions on our street had stayed behind and was sending her updates and pictures. I could not bear to watch my old house drown.
For hours before dawn, in the darkness I lay in my bed, which now felt like a raft, holding onto my phone, scrolling.
We never had water before, people kept saying. This never flooded before. And it came so fast. Many people posted: It just came so fast.
First just a couple inches. We thought we were okay, and then, up to the chest.
We swam out with the cat in a plastic bin.
Never seen anything like it. We did not expect this.
On news sites, there were photos and videos of the beaches. The storm pressed massive piles of sand into buildings, over cars, completely covering the streets with six- and seven-foot dunes. The sand is “replenishment” sand. Millions of cubic yards are dragged out onto the coastlines every year from other parts of the state to make beaches in front of hotels, so tourists have sand to sit on, and to walk on, so Florida looks like their idea of Florida. Now cars and roads and entire buildings were buried in sand. The beach towns looked like Pompeii.
At daybreak, I walked around my property in Tampa. The sun was shining. My windows had held; the wind wasn’t hurricane force here. The yard hardly had any leaf litter. I saw Terry walking Hope down the street, and the dog was chugging along, panting and grinning.
In a way, it looked like nothing had happened at all. But I was shaken, altered. I felt draped in a new kind of cloak. I felt the awfulness of being alone in a catastrophe, the awfulness of being alone.
In the following days, the schools remained closed because those buildings were the emergency shelters. In the low areas you could not flush your toilet. You could not shower. The lift stations were offline, and sewage continued to back up into people’s showers and tubs; toilets overflowed. Over a million people in Florida had no power, and they had to boil water, which they could do if they had a genera-tor and had stocked bottled water or filled their tubs and vessels. My old isle was still inaccessible. A week later, the bridges opened, and people were able to return to their homes. They posted videos of interiors stripped of drywall, down to the studs, and mile after mile of lawns filled with home goods, sofas, clothes, and water heaters and mattresses and carpeting, junk and grief.
I thought of all the times I evacuated, and then made that trip back to my house, uncertain what I would find. Friends asked me if I had gone out to look at my old house. I never wanted to go back. The coast seemed like a graveyard.
In the days after the storm, on social media, tourists wondered about their upcoming trips to Florida.
We have reservations on Treasure Island next week. Will it be open?
No
We’re coming back. As long as one can buy beer, eat shrimp, and get a
good sunburn, it is still a treasure!
What about the Don Cesar?
I think by the amount of huge dehumidifiers out front for quite a while there must have been some water damage in the upper areas…broken windows? Leaks?
I didn’t know that it was damaged that much. Was the first floor flooded? They lost their electrical and much roof damage.
What about Hula Joe’s? Gone.
The Pier?
Demolished. They left the state.
My brother lives in Gulfport so I know about that damage. 600 houses? I saw some videos of Treasure Island. 🙂
Is the water clearing up or still brown? Water is toxic.
Trying to get news or pics of palm riviera – anyone know how they did? We have a condo there
Any news on sunset chateau??
See you in February! Can’t wait!
Yes let’s stay positive and stop the negativity
WE WILL REBUILD PARADISE!
#floridastrong
* * *
Ten days after the storm, many people around me, on high ground, were still without power, main roads remained covered with water, and inland rivers had still not yet crested. The water was still, unbelievably, rising. But schools opened, classes resumed, and there was much talk of “getting back to normal.”
But at the university’s campus in St. Pete, students were sleeping in the dining hall, because one of the dorms suffered catastrophic damage. Four of my students emailed they would not be returning to finish the semester. They had lost their cars when water deluged parking lots, here, in Tampa – places that had never flooded before, not ever. Students who lived in first floor apartments, here, by campus, thirty miles from the coast, lost all their belongings when the water rose. Many restaurants and hotels were closed because of damage, and the power was still out, and it would be months before many of these establishments reopened, if they did at all. Student after student emailed me: they had lost their job. It was unclear if they could remain enrolled without an income source. Some were moving out of state to stay with family. Unless classes shifted to online, they would have to drop out.
In St. Pete, parts of the city were still on a boil water notice. In Tampa we were told boiling water wasn’t mandatory but recommended. Trees blocked roads, and downed electric wires caused de-tours, and totaled cars lined the streets. Outside of house after house after house were piles of furniture, shards of wet drywall, ruined appliances, and heaps of belongings: mattresses, clothes, all the stuff of lives. On every block, rooftops had blue tarps draped across sections of missing and torn shingles.
Gasoline was still not available at every gas station, and the grocery store shelves had gaps and little signs: We’re sorry, we’re temporarily out of this item. The news cycle had moved on to North Carolina, devastated by the hurricane, with entire towns washed away. In all, two hundred and fifty people were dead, over 100 in North Carolina.
During these days in the aftermath, I continued to struggle with what the storm had ripped open. Was my solitary life indeed a care-fully crafted choice? Or had I been hiding in isolation for all these years out of fear of intimacy, a fear of relationships, with their unpredictable natures, rapid intensifications, and lack of insurance policy?
I hadn’t expected to feel so stranded in the storm; but I remained certain my sense of confidence in my aloneness, this lifestyle I’d crafted, would click back into place when the sun came back out. This hadn’t happened, and I was disturbed, often sleepless, questioning things about my solitude that I’d convinced myself to believe.
Now that classes were back in session, I kept hoping the return to routine would ease my agitations, but being around the students, watching their comfort with each other, limned my loneliness and when I came home at night, sometimes I dreaded entering my house, my house on high ground.
The first hurricane, Helene, was a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 140 mph, at its peak strength when it made landfall on September 26. Twelve days later, Hurricane Milton formed, an even stronger storm, with sustained winds around 180 mph, a Category 5 hurricane. I had finished writing my lecture for that evening’s class, and I was in the kitchen packing my satchel – water bottle, energy bar, hairbrush, and two bags of candy I’d bought to treat the students – when I heard the news. This storm was barreling through the Gulf, headed directly towards Tampa, and this time there would be no turn to the north – that front had long dissipated. We faced a direct hit. Nothing would stop this storm from arriving at or near my house on Wednesday. I stared at the radio in disbelief.
My class was about half full of students, and they were anxious. Locals tried to advise the out-of-state students on what to do. We let out early, so students could evacuate and prepare, and that night, once again, I spent way too much time trying to control my destiny by tracking the new storm. NOAA predicted a storm surge of 15 feet for the Tampa Bay.
Again, all the schools closed for the rest of the week. Radio announcers kept repeating that all city parking garages offered free parking for electric cars: Stop fires! Keep them out of the salt water!
But the pressing concern was that the Cat 5 winds would pick up and scatter the debris from the previous storm, creating a hellish, massive swarm of lethal projectiles. There were thousands of mounds of damp, toxic drywall, sodden furniture, pieces of appliances, pieces of dead cars, all manner of broken signs and yard furniture and pool screens and chunks of gutters, toys and kitchen things, everything people owned, plus the limbs and branches from the first storm, so much natural world debris heaped next to the human world debris. Hurricane-force winds would fling materials into windows, damage cars, block streets, and we were warned to get out, and to prepare well: Many people could die.
The previous hurricane had brought an unexpected and unprecedented storm surge. But because it remained so far out at sea, it had not brought devastatingly high winds. Though I was on higher ground now, safe from water, I was much more vulnerable to wind.
All day Wednesday, I watched the track of the storm bearing down on my city. Then, just before making landfall in Tampa, at 8:30 P.M. the storm jogged ten miles south and hit Siesta Key head on. Heavily populated Tampa was spared the storm surge. In fact, because the storm hit south, water was sucked out of the bay. At nine P.M. that night, I heard the storm begin to tear through the oak trees. The sound grew louder, impossibly, a horrifying wall of freight trains running over the roof of my house. I lay in my bed shivering, more afraid than I have ever been in my adult life. As I huddled under the blankets, I knew I should be in my bunker. But I did not want to leave my bed. At the time, it seemed better to die in the bed than in a small bathroom.
Then, at around three in the morning, I heard what sounded like rain in my bathroom, splashing on the tile. When I turned on the light, I saw water pouring in through the window, but the glass didn’t appear to be broken. Water came in from all around the window frame and spread out across the floor, fast. I placed towel after towel after towel against the window, and instantly each towel was sopping wet.
I wiped the floor, and the drywall, and staunched the flow. I used every towel in my house. It was a bizarre nightmare: The rain just kept flowing in.
And then, as suddenly as though a curtain dropped, the world was quieter than quiet. I slept.
In the morning, I scrolled through the images of destruction. Be-cause the ground was so oversaturated from the previous storm barely two weeks earlier, hundreds of ancient oaks had tipped over onto homes and buildings and lay across streets. The roof of the Tropicana stadium, made of Teflon-coated fiberglass, built to sustain 115-mile-an-hour winds, was almost completely gone, with bits of it hanging in ragged streamers around the edges. Pia’s Restaurant had a floating dock inside of it, which came from the marina, blocks away. The Tiki Hut was a shell, and at the Greek place, only a slab was left. Signs were broken, windows were blown out, branches and limbs covered the ground. My street was impassable due to fallen trees and limbs.
Over in St. Pete, my former neighbor and friend, whose house had taken in five feet of water in the first storm, just like mine, told me it was about the same amount of water again, in her house, and in my old house, and all the houses in that neighborhood. They had all flooded, just as badly, a second time.
The news showed boats pressed into homes, and trees crashed through rooftops, but it did not report the smell. In places that flooded, the stench was of animal death and sewage, rotted meat, and dead fish swirled with toxic chemicals. People walked around in respirators wading through their homes, as soon as they could get in, sifting for anything they might be able to save. Others entered buildings with handkerchiefs over their faces. The sludge the water left behind coated walls and floors and streets and every object. Black mold had already begun flourishing inside the bones of buildings, blooming across walls and ceilings and floors. The television reports did not show this.
The next morning, when the viscous water began to recede, it crept away and also left so much behind. In the wealthy neighborhoods, such as the one I used to live in, it was not yet safe to return because the power lines were not yet secured, and so the entrances were blocked off with cones and police, but the looters came as always. Like water, they pulsed through the cracks, to take things from these homes with no doors, no glass in the windows – cameras no longer working.
Neighbors helped me clear the downed limbs from my garden. My roof was intact. I hired a man to caulk the windows. All I could think about was next year’s storm season, and what changes I would need to make in my life so I would not have to hunker down alone.
In the days after the storm, in my new house on high ground, massive palmetto bugs, pressed up from the sewers in the heavy rains, crawled up into showers, sinks, and soon walked around the house freely, as if smoking cigarettes, hanging out. They were shining and brown, with antlers and horrific long feelers. If you count the feelers, it’s a thing that is at least five inches long, on the move. They can fly. They can swim. I chased them with shoes, rolled magazines and a fierce stream of Raid, but they scuttled under the fridge, and, impossibly, melted under the baseboards.
Online I found photos and reels of my old neighborhood. At my former house, marinated in salt water for too many days, my garden and the lawn were dead, brown. The small trees were stripped of their leaves, also dead. Even the great old banyan, which had survived so many storms, was stripped of its leaves, tilted, and seemed dead. The World Food Kitchen set up near the Peninsula Hotel and people continued to walk around in respirators.
But on the news, we were told we were once again getting back to normal, #floridastrong. We would rebuild paradise, were in fact already rebuilding paradise. We were told which restaurants were open and which would be open soon. We were told to go to the beach, to support the local establishments. Grace’s, in Passe-a-Grille, announced on Facebook they had one sandwich on the menu, open from 2-4 pm; please come, support local businesses.
The water in the bay was brown and the water in the Gulf, as far as the eye could see, was dark grey-brown and this part of the world smelled of sewage and death and insanity.
In November, weeks after the storms, I finally drove out to the coast to witness my old neighborhood, take gifts to friends who’d lost everything, and to see the pink house. Even with the windows up in my car, when I pulled into town, I smelled the terrible raw sewage smell.
St. Petersburg still looked like a war zone, with so many dam-aged buildings and the yard debris piles still lining the streets, and huge chunks of tree stacked in the median and the mountains of ruin heaped along the streets, topped with their now-blackening mat-tresses. The piles couldn’t be removed, even if there was enough man-power, because if you were filing an insurance claim, you could not allow anything to be taken away. Nothing could be removed until your adjustor had completed the “scope.” I knew this from reading the letters from FEMA, years earlier.
The traffic lights out on the busy boulevard were still not working. Two bright streetlights at the entrance to my subdivision had been mortally stricken, and they flashed on and off, strobes, constantly, as though sending a distress signal to the heavens. Trees entwined with chunks of concrete – old foundations from long ago, or pieces of side-walk – could not be cut into, so some remained across fences and alleys and driveways. Other trees remained fallen because their roots had entwined with plumbing pipes, and they couldn’t be removed without taking out the water supply for an entire neighborhood. Trees fallen across both private property and city property could not be touched until things were settled in terms of whose responsibility was which part of each tree. In many ways, it looked like the storm was still happening, even though the sky was bright blue, and cool and cloudless and endless.
I drove past my old house, where all the debris had been removed, which was not the case at the neighbors’ houses. I saw Jennifer’s beautiful dining room table from Mexico, Chris’s writing desk, art-work from Cecilia’s home – all these objects I knew well – piled at the street. With my car packed with books and dishes, some lamps and linens, to take to my friends, I saw, as I drove past these ruined objects so familiar to me, I saw I was not alone. I had not ever been all alone.
I didn’t live with a person, in my house, but I lived in the world of people, and I did well in this way.
But in front of every house were heaps of clothes and mattresses and appliances and drywall, the larger the home, the greater the pile filling the front yard. And I did not see any people. And I was worried about breathing that air.
Weeks after the storm, we still talked, every day, about the storms. How did you do? Did you have damage? At school, at stores, everyone still asked some version of these two questions: How did you make out? When did you get your power back on? We asked because we wanted to tell.
In many cases, the questions were about water – how much water came into your house? We got two, a person might say. Or, We got four or five. This used to mean inches of water. Now it almost always meant feet.
How many feet do you live above sea level?
How high was the surge where you are?
I’m at eight. We got six. Which meant they lived eight feet above sea level and the water came up six feet. This was how we located each other, and connected to each other, by this new apocalyptic calculus.
Maybe I’ve never felt so connected to everyone else in this place where I live, as in the days and weeks and months after the storms.
When we were allowed back on campus, faculty found their labs destroyed from water damage, years of research ruined from the long loss of power. My third-floor office at the university has floor to ceiling windows, original to 1958, and there was a jagged waterline across the carpeting, as though a wave had come ashore. The legs of my desk were delaminating. Books I’d left in a stack on the floor were dry, but wrinkled and badly warped, as though they’d been soaked in the sea. The room smelled of mold, mildew. I held office hours outside the building, on a bench under the live oak that remained standing.
In late November, the debris piles on my street – limbs and leaf litter and fronds – got picked up. That was the same day I slaughtered the last palmetto bug in a brutal hand-to-hand combat scenario in my closet.
The Employment Fair was moved to spring. The AI Summit was rescheduled. Job candidates withdrew applications and those events were all cancelled. More and more students stopped coming to class. The length of the semester was extended, then not extended. Grocery stores remained low on produce, low on water and beer, low on toilet paper and batteries. My friend who lived in Jungle Prada, near the sea, had rebuilt her chicken coop for a second time, but months later, the hens still weren’t yet back to laying eggs, so disruptive was the tumult.
Well into spring, when I drove around on errands, I saw so many homes with RVs parked out front – friends and family who’d lost everything, living now in someone’s front yard.
* * *
I was born in a hospital an hour’s drive from where I live now, and sixty feet above sea level. I grew up in Florida and I’ve lived in Florida for more years than I’ve lived anywhere else. My connection to this place is six decades deep, and it is like one’s connection to a family – complex, the ground constantly shifting, a system impossible to predict, and mostly defying narration. I am of this place.
Months after the two major hurricanes, it’s as though the storms are still happening. Each time we get together, my friends describe the events still unfolding from the storms: the aftermaths of heart at-tacks, strokes, chronic mold-exposure illnesses, amputations, and at least seventeen deaths from flesh-eating bacteria.
Not on the news: One friend’s husband waded through water to get to his house. In October, after the storm, he lost his leg, because of the necrotized flesh. A week after that, he died of blood poisoning – sepsis. All it takes is a hangnail, a mosquito bite. You cannot walk through that water-which-is-not-water. But to save your life, you wade through, or to go back for the paperwork you must recover, or to rescue the pets, you wade through.
Months later, there is still much complaining about the debris piles still lining the streets. And every day on social media, images of sun-sets and comments from snowbirds and tourists about how nice it is to have the beach pretty much all to themselves.
And then, one morning I was working in my study. Seemingly out of the air, some kind of animal appeared on the patio. A racoon, I thought at first, but it was too shiny, and darker than a possum, and so much larger. My animal brain told me this was not a creature I had ever seen before. It looked like a seal, sort of, not a friendly seal, but a seal from a frightening dream. It turned back as though it knew I was at the window, and it saw me there, and I saw the face, a weasel’s face, and the webbed feet, and it just seemed like an impossible apparition, some fantastical being from another planet altogether, as though the storms had made this a new and other place inhabited by its own creatures, creatures of the storm’s design. I understood as it sinewed across my yard, not slow and not fast either: Otter.
Rarely, I’d seen otters while kayaking in the rivers, but this was the biggest otter I’d ever seen, with its long beaver-like tail dragging across my grass like a paddle. He dissolved into the swamp. I assumed his home, too, was damaged in the storms, and his food sup-plies were also disrupted. He had not meant to be seen in this state. It was as though a dark part of self, the deepest lone-est part, had been seen, in order to be acknowledged, and then melted away. I knew I’d never forget the sight, or this understanding that dark desperate presence, almost always unseen, is always out there in the swamp.
To reset myself, I went outside, and around front, where I stood barefoot in the driveway to survey the bright world.
Terry trudged past, gave a nod, and Hope, the dog, grinned at me in her unhinged manner, panting and wagging the whole back half of her body, urgently, as they passed by. The sun was cool on my arms, and warm on the top of my head. In this way, I found myself alone, lonesome, and awash in the wake of peaceful, necessary solitude, all at once, and holding a strong yearning to not be alone for next year’s storm season. Alone was no longer normal.
The streets were shining and clean now, the lawns all tidy and cleared, and the sky was blue with billowing white towers of clouds.
We call it paradise.
Heather Sellers is the author of the story collection Georgia Under Water (Sarabande, 2011), and four poetry collections, most recently Field Notes from the Flood Zone (BOA Editions, 2022). Her memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know (Penguin, 2011), about prosopagnosia (face blindness), grew from an essay first published in Alaska Quarterly Review that received wide recognition, including a citation by Oliver Sacks in The Mind’s Eye. Her essays have also appeared in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Good House-keeping, The Sun, O, The Oprah Magazine, and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays anthologies.