Beyond our best calculations lies a force over which
we have no control
By John
Kaminski skylax@comcast.net
8-15-04
I
live in a mobile home. It leaks. The ants really own it and I
just rent it from them.
In many
ways it suits a messy bachelor like myself. It's kind of like
a little boat, but because it's jammed with so many books and
things, I'm tired of bumping into stuff. Maybe someday I'll
move into a yurt.
Low
maintenance living allows me to spend virtually all my time
reading and writing on the Internet. It's such an honor for me
to have made so many genuine friends because of that. And I
dearly appreciate all those recent inquiries about my
well-being that my sudden unscheduled absence from the e-mail
circuit has triggered.
Probably the major drawback about living in a mobile
home is its fragility, especially in regard to heavy weather.
Florida is hurricane country, and I always watch the weather
forecasts with a keen interest. The 70-foot-tall pine tree
that shelters my lanai with scented boughs and numerous
sapling offspring is, in high winds, a potential
bomb.
So when
the Weather Channel tells me five days in advance that a
tropical depression named Charley somewhere down around St.
Kitts is on track to arrive in my hometown, I do take
notice.
We in
South Florida were more than adequately warned that a major
disaster could befall us on Friday the 13th. The forecasters
were soothsayers, in this instance.
Trouble
is, everybody in this neighborhood has been lulled into a
false sense of security. Hurricanes never come here. They
sometimes fake like they’re going to, but always veer off or
vaporize before they actually hit. Many people suspect some
kind of geomagnetic magic protects this region from
harm.
It was
probably this kind of thinking that cost a good many people
their lives in Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte on this savage
Friday the 13th, August 2004.
I’ve
experienced numerous hurricanes, as a child in Massachusetts,
as a young adult in Texas, and more recently in Florida, with
the dreadful Andrew. So they scare me. I know what the power
of those winds is like. Like an airplane taking off, when it
shifts into second gear, is what.
I
packed my car with books, papers, mementos and my computer,
and by mid-Thursday evening was ready to roll on out of here,
not far, just to higher ground and stronger walls, my sister’s
house, just up the road in western Port
Charlotte.
I
watched the local news station until 1 a.m. (Channel 2 in Fort
Myers, excellent weather guys), and noticed that the leading
edge of thunderstorms was about a half hour south of Marco
Island, more than a hundred miles to the south of me. Time to
get some sleep.
A
series of loud thunder salvos woke me at 3 a.m. and I bolted
upright. Visons of Armageddon danced in my brain. Visions of
drowning.
The
leading edge was moving fast, but it passed, and a grim calm
followed. I obsessed about storm surge as Charley churned
closer, and at 4 a.m. called my sister and told her we had
about a two-hour window to get the hell out of here and bolt
across the state to West Palm Beach.
Then,
the TV guys reported the storm had moved a tenth of a degree
of longitude to the west, and I calmed down a little. It was a
good indication. After packing my computer and the last of my
things, I headed to my sister’s at 6 a.m. She was riveted to
the TV. We talked it over, decided the storm would pass to the
west of us about 60 miles out to sea, and decided to
stay.
I slept
for three hours. When I awoke, neighbors were chatting, and
everyone seemed calm. Tense hours passed with edgy banter. At
2 p.m., as Charley’s eye came careening over Captiva Island
(created a new island as it did by cutting the existing island
in half), the forecast changed radically. The fairly
threatening Category Two storm had been upgraded to a monster
Category Four, with winds of 145 mph (on TV tonight they say
the killer winds that hit Punta Gorda might have been 155).
The fairly threatening storm surge prediction of 7-10 feet had
been boosted to 10-15 feet (elevation of my sister’s house is
13 feet, about a mile from the Myakka River, which near its
mouth is the western half of Charlotte Harbor; she lives about
a mile from the water).
And
worse — the new predicted track had it aimed right at
us.
I was
panicking. Repetitive calculations flitted through my brain
like a jukebox gone mad. I had serious visions of being up to
my chest in water — in her kitchen! — by 8 p.m. Then my sister
came up with a great idea. Her office. It was on the fifth
floor in the solidest building in Port Charlotte, a five-story
cement behemoth on the main drag, Route 41.
So off
we went, armed with peanut butter sandwiches and a weather
radio (but not a flashlight) as the storm cycled
closer.
For
awhile we were content, if nervous. At least we were safe from
the storm surge (which never actually happened). But as the
day wore on — second by second — we began to realize that even
the most rational, well-considered decision ultimately meant
nothing when arrayed against the unfathomable and momentous
caprice of Nature, which forever moves at her own speed, in
her own direction, for reasons no one can ever
anticipate.
We knew
we were in real trouble when we noticed the pictures hanging
on the wall of this formidably solid concrete building
swinging back and forth like a pendulum. Looking out the
windows we soon tired of the random debris amongst white foam
flitting spastically across our field of
vision.
The
came the giant crunches. Roof blowing off. And the creaks and
groans and the building rocking so hard that we had to hang
onto something. More slams from the roof, and my sister
saying, “We’ve got to go down a floor, in case the whole roof
goes.” It was still dry at that point, but when we made our
way down the stairwell, water was dripping down the middle all
the way from the roof to the ground, the wind whistled like
that groaning man in the Munsch painting, and an occasional
crunch from above rattled the fillings in my teeth. We hid in
a fourth floor men’s room, but only for a few moments, as
water seeped through the ceiling, and we heard the distant
sounds of heavy crashes.
“Let’s
keep heading down,” my sister urged. “We can’t stay here.” I
had to agree, and once again we were back in the leaky
stairwell, negotiating the treacherous steps. At some point
the fire alarm began its incessant blaring as we made it down
to the second floor.
My
sister was so brave. Hobbled by sciatica, wielding my metal
baseball bat as a crutch, she plodded forth through pain in
every step and suppressed panic in every step. We made it to
the second floor, and thankfully found a family comfortably
ensconced in the regional headquarters of a delicatessen chain
— Obee’s — and they welcomed us in.
Blissfully, we could barely hear the fire alarm, which
filled the rest of the building with the banshee howl of the
apocalypse. We kicked back a bit and got on the cellphones to
assorted relatives and friends, all of whom were safe in
unmolested locations.
Even
more blissfully, it was at this point that the winds began to
subside. We wouldn’t learn until much later that we were only
three miles from where literally dozens of mobile parks, close
to the edge of lower Charlotte Harbor, were reduced to rubble
by 120-mile-per-hour winds. TV reports said rescuers couldn’t
even get in to find the bodies.
With
the winds lessening, I chanced a return to the fifth floor to
retrieve our gear. My sister had been right. The floor was
covered with water and most of the ceiling tiles had fallen.
Two of the Obee’s teens helped me cart our stuff back down to
our second-floor sanctuary.
As time
passed and the winds lessened, I poked my head outside from
the ground floor, checked out my sister’s car and saw that an
Airborne delivery box had bashed out the back window. The box
lay nearby. I tried to move it. It weighed about 300 pounds.
Finally with the help of a muscular teenager also seeking
shelter in the building, we managed to move it out of the
way.
About
that time the fire department arrived. I tried to tell them
what I knew but they stoically didn’t want to hear it. They
had their own procedures. But the lead firefighter ordered me
not to go back in the building. Yeah right, with my hobbled
sister in there. I snuck around to another door, used her key,
and found my way back to her before the fireguys found her in
our comfortable sanctuary at Obee’s. We gathered up our stuff
and crept down the watery stairwell. Then the firefighters
helped us down, and we got the hell out of
there.
We
speculated that the building would be condemned, for all the
swaying it had undergone surely had destroyed its structural
integrity. My sister, a Realtor, kvetched about all the real
estate records and personal items she would have liked to
retrieve from her office, now likely unobtainable if the
building were to be condemned.
So we
drove through lots of broken glass, shattered tree limbs and
downed traffic lights back to her house, which was undamaged
but without power. My nephew, who had been safely ensconced
with his girlfriend up in North Port, arrived, and we went out
and cut some brush that blocked the entrance to my sister’s
subdivision.
Finally, he stood guard at my sister’s while I reloaded
my car and drove off to check the status of my humble abode.
It was a relief to see virtually no damage and only scrambled
tree branches in my driveway. The fact that my power was still
out was a very minor irritant. Even though I was sweating like
a pig with no A/C, I had no trouble falling
asleep.
Due to
the medical needs of my sister, I wasn’t able to re-hook-up my
computer for another 24 hours, and then when I did it took me
another four hours to start it. But start it did. And here I
am.
Even
though Hurricane Charley scared the living feces out of us,
our ordeal seems trivial compared to the shocking savagery of
nature that cost at least 15 people their lives in
circumstances we could totally relate to only a few miles from
where we were doing our crazy dance with the
elements.
It’s
easy to second-guess these kinds of panicky decisions. Stay or
go. Fight or flight. But with a hurricane, the right decision
can still be wrong, and vice versa.
I am
still in a placid kind of shock, as I dash off this diary to
reassure my friends that I am safe. Two immediate reflections
come to mind.
The
first was shared by both me and my sister — but not spoken —
while we were stuck on that fifth floor, feeling that building
sway back and forth like some amusement park ride from hell.
The thought was like we would soon be riding the building down
to the ground, just like some towering inferno or — and I say
this meaning no disrespect — a World Trade Center
tower.
The
second was the last look I took out the fifth floor window as
we headed toward the stairwell on our journey toward safety —
and sanity. What I saw was a kind of ethereal washing machine,
a white churning mist, not unlike surf, flecked with fragments
of flying rubble, tree limbs, pieces of signs, debris. It was
a vision of hell I hope I never see again.
We were
lucky. Others, not so far away from us and just as innocent,
were not.
Let us
now say a little prayer for all those who surely made
logistical decisions as well-considered as mine, but who,
opposed by the cold impartiality of ever-inscrutable nature,
were unable to escape the vicious twist of meteorological fate
that will forever be known as Hurricane
Charley.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the west
coast of Florida, which normally is very pleasant place to
live. His new book, “The Perfect Enemy,” will hopefully be
available in a few weeks.
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