~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The weirdest thing – everything I watched about Hurricane Ian the Terrible I saw clearly. I was not in the way of Ian, I was a thousand miles away, mesmerized by the devastation, my behavior similar to slowing down on the freeway to see the dead bodies – something I never do, so why was I doing it now? The real problem was that when I looked away from the flickering screen, I was bewildered because it was not gray skies. And where was the locomotive noise pounding relentlessly in my ears? Why was the sun shining?
I was emotionally involved and unable to do a thing about it.
I diagnosed myself with something that isn’t real, but I don’t know what else to call it other than a case of “eyeballs that are accustomed to seeing something and therefore insist on seeing it even when it is not there.” In other circumstances, it’s called “Don’t believe your lyin’ eyes.”
Every time I looked up from the TV screen of crashing waves hitting southwest Florida with a fierceness that shocked me – it was a storm with a kind name and a raging anger – I saw blue skies and the calm oak outside my daughter’s door. Where was the hurricane? Why wasn’t rain slashing windows? Would I come out of this alive?
Another blink and I was back where I really was, which was far from southwest Florida. I remembered that I had escaped on the last plane out. I left my little house in Punta Gorda to its own luck on a river rising by the minute, knowing I’d never see it again: a storm surge of 5 to 18 feet was expected on the waterway 30 feet from my front door. I had driven my car to a friend’s carport miles from the little river, figuring that like millions of other Americans in dire straits, I might be living in it soon.
Meanwhile, I was safe in a big river town in Ohio, watching on the tube the obliteration of a swath of Florida I knew well. When I return there soon, there will be vast miles of no buildings, no streets, no trees. Only rubble.
Then back to the scenes from my TV – water rising to the third floor of a hotel on the beach; switching to an entire Florida live oak floating past a street kind of like mine – a rushing river.
Then back to the scene outside my door in the Midwest – the still oak, the blue sky – complete lies to my brain.
My personality was splitting. Soon I’d be a schizophrenic. Too much hurricane. Too much Live NEWS from WKRP. Like the fickle hurricane, I was scarily changeable.
This is the weirdest situation, sensation, silliness – what do I call it? I’ve never been this suggestible before. I’m relatively stable and on an even keel. I’m not a drama diva. I’m low-key; simple maintenance satisfies me. I’ve never had hallucinations (whoops, that’s not true; I did have COVID-19). I have a fit if I spill the coffee grounds, but I am level and all business in matters that I have no control over.
I have finally returned to where the damage was done: I am calm as a cracksman viewing the scene of the safe door swinging open. As my plane’s flaps go down, I float closer and closer to a scene of increasing dishabille where it should be pin-neat but is awry – sagging roofs, see-through buildings, poles holding up nothing. But my plane lands smoothly on the tarmac that I can tell has been swept of nails and debris. From the very first hurricane I knew 20 years ago, after it blows through like an invading army bent on havoc, the biggest problem while looking for bits and pieces of your house is avoiding nails and screws. Every other person will get a flat tire.
The scene as I walk down the steps of the plane is lopsided hangars and roofless aluminum buildings, yellow tape everywhere. It is a sloppy patchwork of plastic in beigey, lemony, pinkish hues. It is dozens of 20 or 30 feet of white aluminum siding twisted like a bread wrapper twist tie.
On the ride home, it is a barbecue grill and a pool cage in an industrial district; two upside-down cars and maybe a dishwasher pushed aside at an intersection with no traffic lights working. It is irredeemable junk because it is injured unto unidentifiable.
Into my neighborhood, I ID familiar houses sitting awkwardly like so many drunks from last night’s party. Roof gables hang in trees, a slash pine is upside down through a roof and a spotless pontoon boat sits in another neighbor’s screen room. The debris collected from yards and along the street is in piles – branches and sticks, siding and aluminum in every imaginable condition – the neighborhood has been busy cleaning up. It will be weeks before the trash will be picked up.
And we’re not even in the bad part of southwest Florida where Ian vented most of his rage. We were a last spit in the face as he swept across the bridge, tangled two 100-foot-tall cranes before moving on to take a roof off my friend’s place, land a tree on another friend’s legs when she walked out at just the wrong second, empty swimming pools of blue water, living rooms filled three feet deep in it.
My misbehaving eye problem has vanished now that I’m in my own backyard in the thick of cleaning up rubble that just the other day was a garden plot of painted sticks and an especially weird flowerpot that is now shards. I think briefly of archeological sites and imagine the scientists questioning why these near-Neanderthals built such flimsy abodes in such an unpleasant climate that every five years or so dined on every other house.
Under the gable of my pancaked shed lies my two-wheeler, folded back on itself, the tires side by side, companionable-like. I want my rake, but I can’t see if it’s in there; it could have blown away, you know. I want my flowers, which I can see; I don’t have the strength to pick up the stacks of things smashing the life out of them.
This is only day one of pick-up for me. I bend, pick, toss in a bag, bend, pick, toss. I’ll be old by the time I finish the side yard.
