On Hurricanes, Hearts, Heartlessness, and People I Care About in My Birth State of Florida

An opinion in a time of devastation

Katrina, from a safe distance.

On a sober note, about people under seige

As much as I appreciate being in the Canadian Northern Territories to see aurora borealis this week, I have to take a moment here.

I am a Floridian, born, bred and brought up.

During the 21 years I lived in that state, my family weathered our fair share of hurricanes. Some leveled my dad’s business and nearly did us in a few times. Back then I was a kid. All I knew was how exciting it was. Until I owned a house that got a direct hit from a hurricane in North Carolina in 1996, I didn’t really understand how huge the losses could be. Then it got personal.

These days I live with extreme fire danger in the summers up in Oregon. We had a brutal ice storm in January. While those can take us out or cause terrible damage, and they did, I still have a house. Many lost theirs to fire the year I moved to Eugene in 2020.

I still have a house. For now. As Milton rips through my birth state right this moment, hitting Naples where my cousin lives, Central Florida where I grew up, Winter Haven where I have many friends still, I am terrified for all of them.

It’s impossible to express my sadness for those in my birth state being battered repeatedly by the kind of climate change blunt force trauma they are experiencing now.

People I care about are in the path of those monsters.

I’ll bet anything that many of you can relate, and are frantic if you can’t reach them.

I can’t reach anyone and know better than to try. My cousin was calmly having her hair done two days ago, choosing to stay in Naples. I wanted to scream at her to GET OUT. GO NOW.

In El Paso recently I met a woman who runs tourism for Sanibel Island, a place of memories and magic. They are being battered right now too. Back when I was tiny, my parents rushed to Sanibel in November because storm season invariably delivered collector-quality shells on its sugary beaches.

These days, that placid island is the scene of multiple, awful storms. Damn the shells. It’s the shell-shock I worry about. I’ve lived it. But the storms my family weathered up to the Eighties are nothing like these.

I might mock Florida’s politics at times, but Florida is part of my DNA. Unless you have lived in Florida (or any of the other battered states), unless you have lived through a hurricane, it really is hard to appreciate the kind of dread and potential devastation that these monsters bring in their wake. The storm only lasts a few hours, maybe a few days, but the damage is profound, the scars deep.

I am particularly troubled by the misinformation being propagated which terrified and insecure people, in the face of such threats, may believe, to their great loss. I mocked some of that in an earlier story, but the impact on Floridians and millions of others in these hurricanes’ wake is serious.

I am so angry about it that I honestly am not coping with that very well.

To politicize such terrible events for gain is evil beyond imagining. That’s for others to deal with. In the face of this kind of danger, I can only wait, hope, and like so many of us whose loved ones are in harm’s way, pray that common sense led people like my cousin to a shelter.

Wherever you are, I hope your loved ones are not in the path of these terrible forces. If they are, I hold a space for all of us that they are safe, warm, dry and can emerge on the other side safely. That said, there are more coming this season, the next and the next. There is no we’re okay for good now.

Just like next summer there will be more fires. There will be more storms. There will be more terrible heat. Once you’ve survived a few such events, you understand that politics is the least of our worries. Survival comes first, compassion for the losses, and being brave enough to face an increasingly challenging future by planning for reality, not trying to avoid the truth.

The truth is what’s happening to millions of people right now.

We need to do this together.

Let’s please figure out how to do this together.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Thanks as always for reading. These are tough times and they will require that we find resources we didn’t know we had. I might make fun of things at times or be sarcastic at others, but this was too important to call out. Please consider

and support my work. Above all please consider what might happen if your neighbor, any neighbor, is in trouble. Will you help? or will their yard signs cause you to turn away?

We’re better than that.