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Life
After Frances
Post-Hurricane Reflections from a Weary Floridian
by Marcia Ford
Since
August, those of us who live in Florida have developed
a whole new lexicon, one composed of never-before paired-up
words: hurricane fatigue, FEMA frustration, generator envy.
And we discovered a whole calendar, one that replaced August
and September with Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne. No
one talks about Labor Day weekend this year; we talk about
Frances. We don’t remember dates; we recall events
through strange-sounding but universally understood phrases
like “right after Charley” or “between
Frances and Jeanne.” Time measurement has been reduced
to name-calling.
Compared to many of our fellow Central Florida neighbors,
our family had little to complain about. We lost countless
trees, the roof on our carport, shingles on the roof of the
house, and electrical power for more days than I can remember,
but all that paled in comparison to the losses suffered by
hundreds of thousands whose homes or cars or businesses were
destroyed.
Undaunted,
I nevertheless managed to find something to complain about
as I surveyed the damage done by the particularly reckless
Frances. “Do you realize we can see all our neighbors’ houses
now?” I asked my husband in what was more a tirade
than a bona fide question. The loss of so many trees and
so much vegetation had destroyed our privacy, our natural
defense against prying eyes and those oh-so-bothersome requests
that neighbors can sometimes make when you happen to make
eye contact across the fence.
Had I
voiced that complaint outside instead of inside our house,
there’s no doubt that a prying, bothersome neighbor
or two would have heard it, because Frances had left an eerie
silence in her wake. The absence of the familiar sounds of
the central air turning on or the water pump kicking in or
the pool pump cycling off made for a somewhat unsettling
atmosphere. It didn’t help matters when the silence
was broken by the hum of one neighbor’s generator.
As we sweltered in the 95-degree heat without even a bucket
of water to cool us off, the last thing we needed was an
auditory reminder that the family across the fence was probably
sitting in the lap of air-conditioned luxury, sipping freshly
brewed iced tea, laughing at the image of Frances heading
toward Georgia on the Weather Channel, and taking turns enjoying
a refreshing and much-needed shower. Yes, generator envy
did stimulate my imagination.
But soon
enough my imagination flat-lined. The neighbor’s
generator fell silent, one of many victims of a storm-induced
gas shortage. The few service stations that still had power
quickly ran out of gasoline, as long lines of cars reminiscent
of the Carter administration drained their tanks dry. Meanwhile,
many stations that had full tanks beneath the ground were
unable to get the gasoline out because they had no electricity.
It was a Catch-22 situation that kept many areas of Florida
paralyzed for days, if not weeks.
Frances had clearly leveled not just the landscape but also
the playing field, as generators ran out of fuel, hurricane-proof
homes filled up with water, and both the privileged and the
underprivileged were prevented from leaving their homes or
neighborhoods by downed power lines and fallen trees. Like
the other four named storms, Frances turned out to be no
respecter of persons.
Tragedy
is said to bring out the best and the worst in people,
and that proved to be true during the C through J segment
of this year’s hurricane season. The
news --at least so I hear, from those who actually had television
service
during that time--was filled with reports of price-gouging
and vandalism and fights breaking out in long lines of weary
residents just wanting a bag of ice or a bag of food or even
a bag of sand to keep the rising floodwaters at bay. But
that’s not what I witnessed. What I saw were incredibly
patient people, kinder than usual, cutting everyone else
some slack, making actual eye contact with each other, and
smiling empathetically even though they had no way of knowing
whether one person’s loss was greater than theirs,
or whether another person’s life had been turned upside
down or only mildly disrupted. None of that mattered; in
the wake of so much upheaval, we had become a kinder, gentler
people.
Life
has since resumed a veneer of normalcy. Everyone has power,
the gas stations have actual gas, and people are free
to be crabby again if they feel like it. But it’s hard
to exercise the freedom to be crabby when the people you
encounter continue to look so tired, so defeated, so beaten
down--and when you realize you look just like they do.
We Americans may be a resilient people, but we do have a
breaking point. And we Floridians came much too close to
ours this year.
Two
weeks after the last storm blew through, I ran into a casual
friend I’ll call Beth. We smiled and hugged
and began to swap storm stories. At first she laughed and
told stories about the challenges of bunking for a week with
another family. The longer she talked, though, the weaker
her voice became. I recognized the syndrome immediately--and
I knew I was losing her. Her mouth kept moving, her voice
kept uttering intelligible words, but her mind had retreated
to a private, shadowy place, a place in her memory where
the sound of Frances’ winds would never be completely
silenced. Her voice eventually trailed off to a near-whisper,
and with a polite “good to see you,” Beth walked
away, lost in remembered pain. I wondered if she would even
recall our encounter later on--or if, instead, the mere
thought of the storms was strong enough to erase later memories.
I tend to think it was.
Sometime
between Frances and Ivan, a friend asked this question: “Is
God mad at us Floridians or what?” My
answer at the time was “what”--in other words,
it’s
just weather, not the wrath of a vengeful God. My answer
today, though, would be a different one: It was more than
just weather; it was an opportunity to discover more about
ourselves than maybe we wanted to know. Did we face the storms
with fear or with faith? Were we concerned only about ourselves,
or did we truly care about our neighbors’ welfare?
And just how willing were we to share whatever we had with
those who needed it? As long as we refuse to wallow in self-condemnation,
reflecting on questions like that can bring us closer to
becoming the person we’ve wanted to be all along.
As
for me, well, I figure I’ve made great
strides toward becoming that person if I can just continue
to be a bit more patient in long supermarket lines and a
touch kinder to crabby people and a whole lot more grateful
for the neighbors I’m able to see now. Most of all,
though, I’m trusting God to show me how to help Beth-–and
others-–fill up the empty places the storms left behind.
Copyright©2004 Marcia Ford
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