- I live in a mobile home. It leaks. The ants really own
it and I just rent it from them.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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).
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- And worse "the new predicted track" had it
aimed right at us.
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- 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 " n 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.
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- So off we went, armed with peanut butter sandwiches and
a weather radio (but not a flashlight) as the storm cycled closer.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- We were lucky. Others, not so far away from us and just
as innocent, were not.
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- 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.
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- 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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