Charley makes landfall at Punta Gorda, Florida, Friday, August 13, 2004.
At this time last year, I was glued to the TV, watching the approach of Charley, a category 4 hurricane. I wasn't a hurricane virgin last summer. I had lived in Florida since I was five and had experienced numerous tropical storms and two hurricanes, David [1979] and Erin [1995]. Usually, a named storm meant at most one day of cancelled school, twelve hours without electricity, and an afternoon spent picking up moss and twigs from the front yard and unpacking the lawn furniture and trash cans stowed in the garage. Ever since Andrew hit South Florida, causing thousands of people to live in tent cities for weeks and scaring the rest of the state into better preparation, I made sure I had bottled water, batteries for the flashlight, a jar of peanut butter, a package of crackers, and plenty of dog and cat food. Here in Orlando, experience had proven, hurricanes were never as bad as the newscasters predicted; they were mere annoyances. Charley completely changed my thinking.Elizabeth brought the Banana and Pequod to my house, where we decided to ride out the storm. Even before Charley hit the west coast, wind gusts in Orlando were flattening the grass against the ground. Shortly after the monster made landfall in Punta Gorda, we lost power inland, and the wind started to threaten more aggressively. So we evacuated the relatively spacious living room to huddle for three hours with four dogs in the cramped hallway, the only part of the house without windows. Here we hoped we would be safe from debris crashing through the windows. The wind blew so hard [gusts of 105 mph] that the house felt as if it was stretching on the cinderblock foundation. Elizabeth and I kept chanting "StabiliTrak, StabiliTrak, StabiliTrak" when the gusts cranked up to 9+ on the fright-o-meter. [Elizabeth had just bought a Volkswagen Beetle with StabiliTrak, a feature that keeps the car from tipping over in adverse driving conditions. We visualized the wind blowing harmlessly over the roof of the house as it would over the top of her new Beetle.] Although the two of us were scared, the dogs all slept peacefully on the featherbed we threw on the wood floor.
Throughout the storm, we kept hearing BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! We mistakenly thought transformers were still blowing; it wasn't until we ventured out of the house in the daylight that we learned that the noise was giant oak trees toppling over into the streets and sometimes, unfortunately, onto neighbors' cars or roofs.
When we emerged from the house at first light, all I could say was "Oh my god, oh my god" over and over. The neighborhood looked as though it had been bombed. We could not leave as every street was blocked by a fallen tree. Phone service still worked, however, and when I called my mother late in the morning, her answering machine picked up, which meant that her neighborhood already had power! That her development also had buried electric lines didn't strike me as important. I was certain that the men from the utility company were just around the corner ready to restore our electricity. I kept listening for the squeaky brakes on their big, rumbling trucks. How they were going to pull the power lines from under mammoth fallen trees didn't occur to me either. That first morning, we exchanged a few words with our fellow stunned neighbors and, since there was nothing else to do, began clearing small limbs from the road. For this storm, the tree debris was overwhelming; I didn't own enough garbage bags to collect it all.
The reality was that we didn't see a single city/state/federal worker until three days after the hurricane. They didn't arrive en masse until four days after that first appearance. Until then we sweated, cheered the neighbors with chain saws who helped to clear the roads, learned to navigate four-lane city streets without the help of stoplights, and profusely thanked employees of restaurants that were open, grateful for a few minutes of air conditioning and hot food. [On day two post-Charley, when no nearby business had regained power, Elizabeth and I shared the most disgusting meal of Chef Boyardee ravioli straight out of the can with warm Coke. When Chick-fil-A finally opened, we almost kissed the employees.]
On day eight, I was walking Bug in the last light of the evening before pitch dark descended. Utility crews had been working all day, but I didn't have much hope of power being restored any time soon. Suddenly, the street lights winked on, and from down the block, I could hear Elizabeth crying, "Sparky, your house has light!" Bug and I ran home to find cool air seeping from the air conditioning vents and the empty refrigerator humming in the kitchen. We got to enjoy the beauty of electricity for eleven days, until Frances arrived on September 1.
