Roy Peter Clark: Surviving those Hurricane Blues

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My city, St. Pete, Florida, has changed. And I don’t like it.

Back-to-back hurricanes – Helene and Milton – have seen to that.

Acres of vinyl roof have been stripped from our once domed stadium. The winds that ripped off the roof also spun a crane into a building where I once worked.

Those are the big changes that anyone can see.  I am more interested in the thousands upon thousands of small changes the storm hath wrought, the ones that trigger daily rough feelings from survivor guilt to post-traumatic stress.

The Clarks have lived since 1978 on a long straight avenue that runs west to east along the southern tip of the city and county. The neighborhood is called Greater Pinellas Point, walking distance from a picturesque section called the Pink Streets. From there you can look out and see the Gulf flow under the Skyway Bridge into Tampa Bay.

We live in evacuation zone D, about 15 feet above sea level, and have never seen, in almost a half-century, water rise over our curb onto our lawn. We saw no water at all through Helene, persuading us that we were immune from the storm surge that flooded out so many of our friends and neighbors.

We were naïve. Who could have imagined a thousand-year rainfall during Milton? At 4 a.m. when I looked out the window at the roaring storm, our street looked like a little river, the water creeping up toward our house. It would stop about halfway up our driveway, but for houses down a slight slope toward storm drains, Milton would send sewage into houses, now still under repair.

The weather has been beautiful since then, but it feels more cruel than comforting, like a person trying to persuade you that they love you, even after they have kicked you in the groin.

The streets have been cleared, but the yard debris and piles of ruined furniture and household items remain a cruel reminder of all we have suffered. Perhaps by the new year, much of this damage will have disappeared. The city and other services are working hard to restore some sense of normalcy.

But there is one current consequence of the storm that captures my attention, no matter where I go. Have you noticed how many things that were, a month ago, standing straight, are now leaning south?

The counterclockwise circulation of wind, and the position of the eye closer to Sarasota, meant that 100 mile an hour winds and monster rains would hit us from the north.

The broken branches from my oak tree fell to the south. A neighbor’s palm tree fell south and landed on their roof.  All the bushes and palm trees on our street now point, like a broken compass, to the south. Countless broken fences and scraped shingles were pushed south.

And there is one other striking dislocation and distortion of our old ways of seeing.  Have you noticed how many traffic signs are pointing south, from Stop to Yield to Hump Ahead? And then there are the corner street signs. Milton pinwheeled them into weathervanes, twisting them into the wrong direction, so that a stranger trying to find 16^th Street may wind up on 62^nd Avenue South.

The whole tableau looks like a Dali tapestry, the landscape askew. Who knew that Mother Nature was a surrealist?

Let’s get something important out of the way: If you have read this far, as a high priest of writing, I absolve you of any survivor guilt. Just because your house was not flooded or your car not destroyed does not mean that you have not suffered. You have. We all have. And we all will again the next time the meteorologist points to a new storm percolating in the Gulf.

I know this, and you know this, because everywhere we go, everyone has a story. A story about the tree that crushed their roof. A story about the neighbors next door who braved the howling winds and rain to break into your house to bring you to safety. A story about the old man who rescued your dog from the flood.

The antidote to the Hurricane Blues, beside the eventual reopening of the beach bars, is the telling of these stories. I hurt my back preparing for and trying to recover from the storms. I find myself leaning as I walk. I promise I will be standing up straight again soon. I hope the same for our beloved city. 

Roy Peter Clark is a writing instructor and vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.