At 3 p.m. last Thursday, my cell phone rang. It was my friend and tattoo artist in Lakeland calling. He and his wife wanted Peaches and me to vacate the Hillsborough/Pinellas area, stat, and bunk with them for the weekend. Inland. Out of harm's way.This conversation would later be revealed as ironic.
Like just about everyone else in the Bay area, I left work a little early. Unlike most folks, however, I headed east, toward St. Pete and the puppy and the house situated a couple of miles from the stretch of coastline everyone was saying would be battered by Hurricane Charley in about 24 hours.
Traffic was, heh heh, pretty light on the beachbound side of the Gandy. Westbound, the flow was already gridlocked from the light at West Shore all the way back across the bridge, almost to Pinellas' Fourth Street. There were no tunes on the radio, only antsy deejays taking calls and generally assuring listeners that the region would be a soggy, debris-choked crater in two days' time.
My cell phone rang again. It was Mom. Mom was not overjoyed to learn we were going home, and that we intended to stay there. The knowledge that our house isn't in a designated storm-surge evacuation area didn't seem to help much. Mom is partly to blame for my cavalier attitude toward impending natural disasters — my earliest memory of one entails the hurricane party my folks threw down in Homestead when David limped into South Florida back in '79 — so maybe her agitation should've told me something. But the connection was tenuous; I was in the middle of reassuring her when we got cut off.
Some wind. Some waves. What's the big deal? Frankly, I was excited.
At the Kash 'N' Karry on Ninth Avenue, everybody was excited, though not exactly in the same way. Smiles were brittle. Tempers flared in every aisle. Nobody was beating anybody up over the last bottle of water or anything (the last bottle of water having probably been purchased hours ago), but courtesy was about as plentiful as products in the bread section. Something was coming, and it wasn't The Beatles.
When informed the wait to cash out was somewhere around 45 minutes, we put back the pickles and the Gatorade and split. We had half a jug of water and plenty of beans at home. How bad could it be?
No one I knew indulged in the traditional pre-storm-surge surfing. Another clue.
We fell asleep watching the news. It was official: The biggest storm to threaten West Central Florida since before the stock market fell was headed straight for us. Peaches was wondering if we maybe shouldn't have done a little more in the way of preparation; I hadn't even put away the deck furniture.
Friday morning, all was creepily still in the neighborhood, save the telephone. (Peaches' mom tried a lot harder to save her daughter, and her daughter's idiot boyfriend, from certain death than mine did. What can I say? Mommy's got confidence in God and her son — in that order.)
The Eckerd six blocks away was anything but still. I had forgotten about those cute little mini-carts the chain used. On Friday, the store looked like a bumper-car dance floor with built-in obstacles. Apparently, Day One of a hurricane crisis is the designated period for procuring water, plywood and generators, and Day Two is all about alcohol and Oreos.
The Chevron station across 49th Street from Eckerd — one of the few still pumping — was a gas 'n' ice free-for-all. Employees snaked between bumpers, taking money and preventing drive-offs. Inside, every transaction included an exchange skating up to, and often over, the edge of argument.
"Whatever happened to 'the customer is always right'?" grumbled a longhaired young man, after suffering the indignity of being forced to wait five minutes to pay for fuel he hadn't yet pumped.
"It's not always true," snarled one of the two cashiers who'd been behind the counter since before six that morning.
I asked the other woman how long they planned to stay open.
"Until we're out of gas," she replied, while taking money from three different people simultaneously, "and that won't be long."
I started to wonder if I shouldn't take the whole thing a little more seriously.
Back home and finally worried, I filled the shed with all the stuff that usually renders our deck uninhabitable. Beyond the deck fence, in the alley, neighbors would periodically coalesce into conversational knots, where we joked lamely and the prized live oaks loomed precariously.
A crew of evacuees from the flood zone arrived around noon, fully equipped — if the post-apocalyptic barter economy traded in beer, we were going to be the Ruling Class. We lowered the storm shutters I'd just discovered were part of our house. Progress reports were phoned in to various friends and relatives. The noise and talk in the alley faded to ominous silence.
At 1 o'clock, it began to drizzle lightly. Six people, five cats and one overstimulated young pit bull/boxer mix proceeded to wait.
And wait.
And nothing happened.
I am so totally right all the time.
You all know what transpired: Charley's slight eastern turn, noted by TV weathermen earlier that morning, had intensified. The hurricane came aground much farther south than anticipated. The Bay area was spared, again.
We celebrated, and confided in one another that we were a little disappointed by the lack of action.
Then the reports came in from Punta Gorda. And Port Charlotte. And Arcadia.
I called my friend and tattoo artist in Lakeland.
"Hurricane's getting a little too close," said his answering machine. "Cindy and I are out of here for the night."
Much later, a squad was dispatched to the only open restaurant in the neighborhood, the St. Pete Diner, for rations. Much, much, later, the squad returned, reporting that the place was mobbed, and that our order had been screwed up by the surly, hopelessly overwhelmed staff.
"You should be happy you got anything at all," the manager told them.
Wrong.
We should be happy we didn't.
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com
CORRECTION In last week's Scene & Herd, artist Greg Latch was mistakenly referred to as "Craig Latch." Sorry about that — my handwriting sucks.
This article appears in Aug 19-25, 2004.