There is an irony inasmuch as we found ourselves at the other end of Highway One just as the more familiar end was starting to flood under the not so delicate ministrations of Hurricane Ian. The irony was compounded by the lovely weather and serene skies at forty seven and a half degrees north latitude.
My colleague Keith sent me a picture just to remind me of the bad old days. He and I sat out Hurricane Irma a storm of comparable strength to Ian but which chose to land on my street in Cudjoe Key. I prefer my sleeping quarters to Keith’s even if he is making hurricane pay:
Another of my colleagues had an apartment in the complex that burned down on Wednesday morning and he did save his dogs if not his possessions. That’s another irony: to lose your home to fire in the middle of a storm. It’s not unheard of but utterly devastating.
There’s another storm developing in the south Atlantic with no potential to reach the Caribbean but there’s plenty of time for more storms. As I write Hurricane Ian is about to strike the not so very well off communities of Punta Gorda and Charlotte Harbor, towns that have finished rebuilding from their last strikes. It’s much more sexy for the press to picture a big city like Tampa getting leveled rather than the working class manufactured homes of southwest Florida. But there it is, the headlines trumpet the notion that Tampa may be unrecognizable. Punta Gorda? Who’s heard of that?
Hurricane Irma pictures, September 2017:
I never evacuated for any storm because I had to work but even living at the police station and having a generator, life got pretty bloody tedious. Hurricanes don’t kill people in countries with building codes and evacuation plans. They just make life really, really boring for the survivors. No water, no electricity, standing in line for a hot breakfast, it’s not the way you expect to be heroic. Heroism implies defiance and martial struggle, not smelling feral with fuzzy teeth and terrible food struggling to do the basic daily tasks.
I don’t miss it one bit. The climate is changing and these sorts of scenes won’t be decreasing but will be more frequent and worse. And yet real estate prices continue to rise and the rush to own a piece of paradise continues unabated. Clearly I am not in a position to understand any of it. I love being on the road luckily and if people want houses at sea level have at it.
No one is spared thanks to the huge variety of catastrophes that can befall a community. Ft Kent was flooded out a dozen years ago which is why they have a huge levee system in place to keep the St John’s River at bay. Big Pine Key gas handout after Irma:
All I know is that I’m glad I’m up here and not down there. Sometimes people wonder that we have no real estate left as we go on the road. Here’s the answer: one less thing to worry about. I doubt anyone will ever tell me I’m smart to live in a van, but of course that isn’t my concern. I’m just lucky I find joy in living on the road. And I’m grateful I survived mentally twenty years of waiting in an office to get mashed by Mother Nature. Not today, Satan.
