I’m still loving on Gulfport. So hard.

Believe it or not, the town of Gulfport was once known as Barnett’s Bluff.

“There’s a bluff?” I’m often asked by visitors to the Gulfport History Museum, where I volunteer. The look on their faces suggests that the only bluff they can detect is the craggy crock I appear to be handing them, something akin to the “proof” in Frostproof or the “city” in Everglades City. Florida place names can be deceptive.

“It’s subtle,” I politely concede. “But yes, we have a bluff.”

It’s so much easier to show them the bluff. And we do, once a month, on our walking tours. We take them to the foot of 52nd Street, passing over quaint brick roads where you can see, if you look carefully, the faint impression a brickmakers’ fingers pressed into the blocks as they handled them. Here the road narrows down to driveway width and cozies right up to the 148-year-old Torres House—a quirky Victorian manse, all lavender clapboard and frilly trim. It’s Gulfport’s oldest remaining residence. We snake through a tunnel of trees onto a public right of way, a berm stretching between the Torres House and the adjacent property down to the shore of Boca Ciega. Here the view opens up to an immense swath of sky, framed by graceful lawns on either side and a dark fringe of mangroves in front, boats drifting in the shallow water just beyond. It’s a beautiful place—one where the past feels very present.

This is where, in 1868, the town’s first white settlers, John and Rebecca Barnett, spotted that subtle bluff, which you can still detect if you look northwest. It was high ground with a freshwater spring (one that still burbles up into one of the backyards visible from the berm) that was perfect for a sensible pioneer homesite. The so-called “Gulfport ridge” that runs northward toward town from this point still hosts some of our most significant civic structures. City Hall, two schools, two churches, and some of Gulfport’s oldest homes can be found on this modest rise (topping out at around 40 feet).

A “ridge” and a “bluff”? Well you might scoff. It’s much easier to see the more recent impressions builders have left on the land, like the seawall stretching across most of our downtown waterfront, a mark of our town’s extensive dredge and fill in the mid-20th century. Like a Magic Eye image, these early earthen shapes require some practice—and a certain amount of wishful thinking—to really see.

“We weren’t thinking like the Barnetts—or like the water.”

The thing is, before Milton and Helene, my street never had to think too hard about bluffs or ridges. When my partner and I moved into our bungalow on Beach Boulevard 10 years ago, we weren’t looking for secure elevation and a close source of water. We were looking for a roomy kitchen, a place to garden, and good walkability. We weren’t thinking like the Barnetts—or like the water.

But still, there were signs. Since that first summer, I’d noticed the broad puddles that formed on the next street over, turning the intersection of 26th Avenue and 56th Street into a small pond—much to the delight of our son, who came along about 18 months later—for a day or two after any good rain. I had a vague sense, confirmed by years of strolling around the neighborhood, that if Boca Ciega’s waters ever swamped us, they would come from this direction, creeping up from the southwest, where, just three blocks away, stands an 18-building condominium complex built in the 1970s on what was once called Fiddlers Flats. As in fiddler crabs. As in tidal flats. If a big enough storm came, the water would first reclaim this old lowland and then surge up the gradual incline toward our house—the kind of invisible hill you can only detect when pushing a stroller or pedaling a bike.

This topography is a little easier to see when you look at a FEMA flood map. In the most recent edition, our house is perched just a few feet outside the orange overlay that indicates “moderate risk”—an awful swathe that licks alarmingly at the southwest corner of our property and engulfs the side street where I normally park my car. The next block over is a solid “high risk” blue, clear down to the bay. My partner and I had taken to joking about our smart investment: the beach front property of tomorrow, folks! No flood insurance required.

But the water came home in a different way this past September, when a sudden downpour transformed our neighborhood into a shallow sea. Crawling home from work in my Prius, I cozied up to the curb and reached for the door handle, my impatience prompting me to race up the sidewalk despite the driving rain. Then a tremendous bolt of lightning slashed through the sky, followed almost instantly by a deafening crack of thunder. My Girl Scout training kicked in: better stay put until I can count at least 10 seconds between flash and report. So I waited, peering out my car windows like the portholes of a submarine into the sheets of water tumbling around me.

That’s when I noticed that 56th Street had turned into a river.

Not a regular street with some heavy rivulets crisscrossing its width. Not a constellation of puddles swelling with rain. But a bonafide knee-deep river, bursting up over the old limestone curbs, with—I swear to God!—rapids in its midst. A swirling, raging creek I’d neither cross on foot nor brave in a boat. As the storm began to clear, I ventured out to the flood’s edge, joining a few other neighbors who had come to gawk. “Has it ever done this before?” I asked the man who lives in the house on the corner, up to his ankles at the edge of his lawn.
He shrugged his shoulders, at a loss for words. “This is a first.”

We turned our gaze northward up the street. It seemed all the stormwater in Pinellas County was funneling down the old brick road—seeking, as always, its own level. Some foreshadowing, perhaps, of what the next two months would bring: in just a few weeks, a quarter of the city would be under water.

Unprecedented times. This has become a byword for the whole awful year of 2024, but it was surely the case for Gulfport, and for us, in the weeks after Milton and Helene. Our family experienced so many awful new things. We labored with friends as they vacuumed toxic storm surge water out of their homes, plucked dead fish out of their yards, waded through piles of paperwork and wrenching decisions. We witnessed as whole blocks of houses vomited forth their furniture, their coffee mug collections, their toilets, their drywall. We mourned as cherished trees were chopped and hauled away, marveled as a small mountain range of mulch covered the softball field where the Gulfport Boomerangs used to play. We came to dread the smell of Fabuloso.

Not everything was awful. When my son’s waterside school flooded and the district determined it could not reopen until the following year, the school was reassigned to an old middle school campus, just a few minutes from our house. In the space of a week, his teachers managed to transform that strange new space into something welcoming and exciting—Like an AIRPORT!” our third grade buddies said, in awe. And just across our street from our house, neighbors and city staff turned our senior center into a busy respite station, where hot, belabored storm survivors could cool down, use the Internet, and get a good, free meal from the World Central Kitchen / Shawarma King truck in the parking lot.

More than anything, what I remember from that time was the waiting: waiting for the power to come on, the water to be safe. Waiting for schools to reopen, for parks and roads to be cleared. Waiting for the doors of our favorite businesses to open and the familiar comfort of neighbors’ homes to be restored. Waiting for things to go back to normal—and knowing that maybe they never quite would.

Before the storms, we’d fretted that we were perched on the rim of a disaster, our toes dangling into a confluence where water—after many decades of being hardscaped, channelized, and paved over—was beginning to reassert its ancient patterns. But after the storms we could see, in bold lines, how that transformation was unfolding. This time around, our family and our home was spared, more or less. We came home to an inch of water in our converted garage apartment, a couple of dents in the roof, and the two trees that shaded the southeast corner of our house torn in half. So much less than what so many Gulfportians have endured. But still, we couldn’t help but imagine how Milton’s mind-boggling 18 inches of rain must have pooled in our backyard’s low spots, pushed under the door, steadily-warping the cheap particleboard legs of our Ikea cabinets.

That same rain seeped under the bricks of 56th Street, chewing voids into their sand foundation and leaving two cavernous, brick-edged sinks in the middle of the street. The holes are still there, slowly spreading behind their barricades. A third is growing nearby. The repair will take time; in a city where we are still waiting for our iconic Casino and our less-iconic but equally vital Rec Center to come back online, these potholes are many lines down on a very long list. They are one of the hundreds of places, large and small, where we will have to reconsider the power and direction of water in future years if we want to keep on living here. And most of us do.

Of seven close friends and neighbors whose homes were flooded this September, four are remaining in Gulfport, though it’s been a struggle to do so. One friend’s waterfront condo community forced all its renters to vacate with just one week’s notice. They’re now renting elsewhere—farther from the water. Another friend, her home totally flooded and her FEMA determination still pending, has moved from temporary housing to temporary housing as various spaces have opened up. Some landlords have offered a few weeks free or a reduced rent; she calls these people her angels.

Two of our friends have already left; they loved this tight-knit community as well as anyone else, but after all the trauma they have experienced, their houses could never quite feel like home again. Another friend, who is waiting on a job opportunity out of state, has moved six times since the storm; at least the moves are easier, she jokes, since most of their things were already destroyed.

And our family? In our 10 years here, we’ve weathered six major hurricanes—three in our home, three from evacuation. We’re observing these changes from the 16-foot finished floor elevation of our 86-year-old timber-framed house, for which we owe the bank—as of earlier this month—exactly $0.

The future is difficult to discern. It’s easy to see placing solar panels on the south side of our roof, now much sunnier (thanks, Milton!). But it’s much harder to imagine growing old together here peacefully. Whatever comes, at least, we will own our home, and our decisions about it, outright.

“Every step of this journey felt like another stitch binding me to this place.”

In December, I decided to make my annual pilgrimage out to Barnett’s Bluff, something I love to do when the air is just cool enough, the sunlight slanting at the just the right sweet, golden angle. The walk has come to feel like meandering through a scrapbook. I crossed through Gulfport Food Forest, which has grown over the last decade from a sapling effort of a couple dozen donated fruit trees to a delightful, leafy maze of edible and medicinal plants. I recall striking a railroad spike with the tip of my shovel when planting blue porterweed there, and learning this was a remnant—“a relic!!” as our head volunteer put it —of the trolley line that once ran down my street. Next I bisected Chase Park, named after a founding settler who tried to market the town as “Veterans City,” a retirement paradise for Civil War survivors. This peaceful, oak-shaded block houses the playground where my son once loved to romp and the Gulfport History Museum, where I’ve passed out more glasses of punch (and pinot) at more historical society soirees than I can possibly remember. Then I wandered the garden of the Methodist Church, a sprawling midcentury building with a distinctive portico steeple, its cross tipped at a sleepy angle by Hurricane Debby. These last two years, my mom and I have found a loving community there as we’ve negotiated the difficult process of moving her to Florida and learning to live with the illness that brought her here.

Every step of this journey felt like another stitch binding me to this place—my own fingerprints on the bricks. Every memory inspired, every pedantic history factoid evoked, was a yearning to be part of this place. Part of a story that, I hope, will keep unfolding across many more years. But to do that we’ll have to learn to live with this land (and this water)—not just on it.

I crossed through the archway of the oaks, out into the sun and breeze and mangroves, paying my respects to the Barnetts, the Torreses, and the countless generations that inhabited this spot before them. I know I must have looked ridiculous to the current residents, who probably wondered why a random pedestrian had wandered out to perch among their shrubberies.

But neighbors, that should really be obvious to you: I’m just loving on Gulfport. So hard.

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This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2025.