~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The aftermath of natural disasters is not believable. I’d left town as Hurricane Ian approached; he did his job over a couple of days and moseyed north, bent on more destruction. I came home then, turned onto my street, and there it was – my house.
But not my house. The photos that friends had sent barely touched the reality; it looked so much worse – the center of a war zone…Ukraine… a scene from a WWII film.
My carport was gone (it rested in my back neighbor’s driveway) except for ragged pieces of aluminum dangling from the roof of my house that looked naked, exposed and guilty. The shed had pancaked neatly, showing off parts of ruined items in layers – flowerpot shards, the skeleton of a beach umbrella, boxes squished with unknown items in them, a hose lying snake-like all over the junk, uncountable unidentifiables and a set of six Manhattan glasses, unharmed.
I could see into other people’s bedrooms, the wall gone with the wind. When you know the people, there’s a slight twinge of embarrassment, like I shouldn’t be looking.
The trees were leafless, the bushes bedraggled. Angled pieces of houses intimately entwined in the bloomin’ hibiscus added a touch of improbablility. There was something –Styrofoam, aluminum, windows, roof gables, plastic siding – covering every square inch of grass and lining the river 30 feet away, idling calmly midday, between tides.
The streets had been cleared somewhat; all junk pushed into peoples’ yards. A woman walked slowly down the middle of the street, head down, She was picking up nails and screws. By noon, she said, she’d removed 137, rescuing automobile tires right and left. Branches from oaks and fronds from palms lay crumbled along the blacktop like sawdust. A weatherman said all vegetation removed by Ian from its normal life would be nutrient for what’s left.
This is true. In Florida, plants grow quickly because of the high volume of rain and the outrageous humidity that will nourish anything that might possibly look like it wants to live. By next summer, the denuded, sagging branches of the Florida Live Oaks will be green and healthy; they are sturdy, willful trees, repairing themselves even if they’re bent in half or resting across the lawn. Unless uprooted, the cabbage palms are the same; even if they were trimmed by Ian into a lawn dart, they will survive and flourish.
But right now, newcomers to Florida unfamiliar with the native flora, want to cut things out of the way because they look dead. Our two messiest trees – the cabbage palm and the Live Oak – are recognized by the authorities as our state trees. People from elsewhere, which is most of Florida’s population, think they’re too messy, too much trouble when trying to keep a neat lawn. Why they don’t realize and what is beyond me that they don’t is that like with most trees, these two species are busy – falling leaves and nuts, noisy messy fronds. But they make a plain house, a mobile house, a tiny house or a mansion look good. I live in a trailer park; trailer parks just plain need camouflage.
The atmosphere is hive-like, everyone busy busy busy picking up junk, raking leaves, sawing tree limbs and 20-foot swaths of house siding and aluminum trim blown from the next block. Piles of parts of houses from a once neat and pretty community lie along the streets tangled and scrunched like paper. Eventually, big trucks from the city and county will come through and haul away the debris to the landfill outside of town. Last time there was a big hurricane in this area (2004), the city dump was nicknamed “Mt. Alcoa.” The clean-up seemed endless, and for years we found Styrofoam in the lawn. Here we go again.
I never was this personally involved in a disaster until Florida. This could be a broad statement, because some believe Florida is a disaster, hurricane or not. The state has a rep for rushing into things like building without studying the terrain; like crooked local politicians in bed with developers cozying up to the big guys in the legislature and the city councils and the county commissioners. And life goes blithely on until a hurricane hits. Should there be rules regarding the building of flimsy mobile homes in a countryside that is a skinny peninsula in the direct path of mighty weather June through November?
Well, mobile homes are cheap to build and cheap to repair. Maybe they do fit the state of Floriduh.
When my daughter and I had to drive to Walmart to see if we could get something important to our clean-up – what it is now I can’t recall – we had on our pick-up-nails-and-screws work clothes – and people looked at us as if we were different. We began to hope that the folks who take photos of weirdly dressed customers at Walmart would spot us; we’d go viral. I didn’t have a tail, like I’ve seen on “Instagram goes to Walmart” or a mask with elephant ears; but I did wear my filthy white rainboots, short shorts (so hot out), and a wide-brimmed teagarden hat with silk flowers (glaring sun, no trees); and I had scratches all up and down my arms and legs.
Things are shaping up – neat piles of different materials: plastic, aluminum, wood, appliances, doors, glass, wrought iron railings, fiberglass steps. Whoever made himself/herself in charge has done a really admirable OCD (obsessive-compulsion disorder) job. Everything in its place waiting for the big dump trucks.
The OCD gang also have a huge hand-painted board at the front gate: YOU LOOT WE SHOOT, and a sign-up schedule for through-the-night vigilantes – two over-55 guys per Ford-150. With guns.
Beautiful as this place was and will be again, I’m sorry to say I live here.
