I look out the window this afternoon and see the leaves blowing in the trees. The slightest of drizzle coming down. The sun is shining to the south but to the north and west it is dark. I look out from my desk and that tropical breeze reminds me of afternoons when I was young. Sitting out on the dock across the street from our house.
I think for me it was the quiet place. The water lapping up on the seawall and under the lower section of the dock. On a good day we would be swimming or fishing from there. But on a day like to today I would sit quietly by myself looking at the houses across the bay and the water. I don't recall what I would think about. I think it was just my place to not be in the house with so many other people. My place to sneak away. I can't count the times my mother would come up behind me and startle me as I sat there watching the world go by. What are you doing over here? she would ask. Just watching the boats I would say.
One breezy day I know it was before a storm, I can't name which. I can only say it must have been expected to be bad because there were people anchoring their boats out in the middle of the bay. Watching them set the anchors and draw out the line to give their boat plenty of room to move with the wind. People moved their boats out to the safety of the bay to prevent them from battering into the dock as the wind blows and the tide rises. People that weren't prepared could go out the next day to a sunk boat or a grounded one.
Labor Day weekend 1985, Hurricane Elena was one of those storms couldn't make up her mind which way to go and kind of hung out in the Gulf over the weekend. My brother and sisters we were all in our teens and spent the evening putting down the storm shutters. We weren't sure what we were doing but we were pretty sure we were going to leave the beach. It was late or early in the morning after midnight and we got all the windows covered and everything in the yard picked up and we left the house. There were no cell phones and I am not sure how or why but I ended up in the auditorium of Clearwater High with my boyfriend. The next morning we went to the Eckerd store at Cleveland Plaza and I remember the power was out but we had battery backups for the registers so we were able to ring up customers. I remember that I had no shoes on. They were probably in the car but I hadn't planned on working. Somehow I found that my family was at a house out off McMullen Booth Rd. My dad knew the people but the rest of us didn't. It was very strange. We spent the rest of the weekend watching tv in a strange house with people we didn't know. I was so anxious to get back to see if there was any damage to our house. As soon as I heard they were getting close to opening back up the causeway I got in my car and decided I would go sit and wait near the bridge to go home. I did and our house was high and dry as always. To this day 35 years later the house has never had the water rise higher than the bricks in the front yard. Which leaves about 3 more feet the water would need to rise to get even to the front steps.
There is something about watching a storm. Watching the water level drop in the bay was always a strange site. For those without the knowledge could find it fascinating to walk where there would usually be water but Mother Nature will teach her lessons, what goes out must come back and sometimes with a vengeance. More than once I have seen the bay water level go way down and then see the water come back up into the bay and the beach wouldn't flood from the west but instead from the east. So much water would push up into the bay it had no where to go but to head back over the beach and back out into the Gulf.
One such storm was in the 1990s a no name storm as locals called it. Not even a tropical storm. More like a winter storm that lost its mind. I was living on my own by this time and had a roommate. We had gone out and it was raining pretty good at the bar we were at we were sitting outside watching Johnny Carson on TV and talking about the rain. When we got home he said, "are you sure it has never flooded here?" I told him, " not in my lifetime." Well, that changed that night. He woke me at about 3am and said, "you have to look outside." We looked out the back door and the water was rising in the street. I felt that are cars were safe. He had parked his in the driveway and pulled right up to the garage and I was parked right next to his in the grass. The water rose so high that night it actually came inside the garage. We had about two inches of water in the garage but again still needed at least another six or more inches to get into the house. We stayed up that night until daylight. Watched the water rise. There is a fire hydrant across from the house and the only part that could be seen was the the very top. That morning the power was out. We took his car and went out to survey the damage and get some breakfast. We found cars sitting in the street that would normally be in driveways. Signs blown down. But more water damage than wind. Remember this is salt water. So I took my car to a friend to have it cleaned and detailed. It had some water inside on the floorboards. I only drove it one more time and that was it. It wouldn't start again. The damage from the saltwater was so severe the car was totaled. For the next week or two a regular site would be cars being towed off the beach. Lots of cars with saltwater damage.
The next time we had to evacuate was 1998 Hurricane Georges. It was September 25 I remember because the next day my sister was getting married. But the church she was to get married in was in the evacuation zone as well. Her husband had to go pick up the priest from another church he was staying at while evacuated to take him to the Moose Lodge where there reception was to be held. We did the whole thing in one place. It was an all day event since people had no where to go and the weather was horrible out. People just stayed. We finally had to have the DJ stop playing so that we could get people to go home and we could clean up. Then just six weeks later Brian and I got married and on our honeymoon on Sanibel Island we woke to check the weather and saw the guy from the weather channel was on Sanibel Island. The power went off before we knew what was happening and we went to breakfast to find their power out as well. But they gave us juice and told us of the storm that was coming. When the power came on we had our breakfast and went out and watched the storm.
2003 we moved off of the beach which is a good thing since in 2004 we had 4 hurricanes that year. Mom evacuated for the first but got more stubborn after that and stayed home for the rest. We worried but she always ended up safe.
My last I have written about before just 3 years ago this week I would have been sitting here sweating with no power for five days after Hurricane Irma. No way to write this blog having a tree fall on the front of the house. We still weathered the storm.
As I sit here as the sun is setting thinking about all the storms they are now just a breeze in my memory.
