It's been nine months since Hurricane Ivan slammed into the marvelously unrefined Lower Alabama tourist district of Gulf Shores, Orange Beach and the barrier island Perdido Key, which straddles the Florida-Alabama line and is home to the legendary Flori-Bama bar, where patrons once amused themselves annually by tossing mullet from one state to the other.
The area is an interesting mix of down-home relaxation, typical Gulf Coast vacation spot and affluent getaway station – there are gun racks in the rear windows of the pickup trucks, but they're more likely to hold golf clubs than rifles. Ivan played hell with the entire zone, from the cheesy little amusement park and the trinket-and-swimsuit store where you walk through the giant shark's jaws to go inside, to the $350,000 waterfront homes with the Italian barrel-tile roofs and columned staircase entryways. The storm put all of it under a couple of feet of salt water, eradicating the famous beach dunes and depositing storm windows and boat hulls a quarter-mile from the usual shoreline.
My folks have had a little summer home in the area for nearly 15 years now, so I'm pretty familiar with the vibe. But when I went up to help work on the house about a month after Ivan last year, I found a miniature Third World country: intermittent electricity, roads – the ones that were passable – buried under a foot of sand, curfews, checkpoints and everywhere the stink of rotting food rising from ruined refrigerators piled to bake outside in the sun.
My mother said I missed the worst of it.
Last weekend, three-quarters of a year after the maelstrom, I headed back for a four-day get-together with my mother, my father, my sister, my brother-in-law, and my two young nieces. Things on the Florida side of the border, where various bureaucracies are dealing with the aftermath of multiple hurricanes rather than just the one, are still pretty fucked up (buildings half demolished, roofs still swathed in blue FEMA tarps, the bridge spanning Pensacola's Escambia Bay down to one shaky, barely-there lane). But Gulf Shores and Orange Beach seem to have rebounded.
The amusement park and the marinas are open. The National Guard is gone. They're even rebuilding the beach dunes by dumping sand on top of small fir trees lashed together with plastic mesh. Hell, even the Flori-Bama is open again, albeit in seriously truncated fashion – the place is down from four stages to one, and the liquor store that used to serve as an entrance is long gone.
Just in time for Tropical Storm Arlene.
The atmosphere in town on Friday, the day before Arlene hit, was one of exhausted resignation; when your contractor still hasn't replaced the drywall that got soaked nine months ago, there's little more you can do than throw up your hands and start wondering what you can get for your place in its current state.
Some storms are worse than others, however, and luckily, Arlene turned out to be little more than steady showers and gusts. By 8 p.m. Saturday night, the local news broadcasts originating from Pensacola and Mobile were congratulating themselves for keeping the public so well informed, and running human-interest pieces on the pizza joints that stayed open through it all.
But big storms and small ones have at least one thing in common: They both keep you cooped up inside somewhere for hours on end.
We all know what we need, and what we need to do, as far as hurricane preparedness goes, because we've been told every year for as long as we've lived in the area. Water, batteries, generator, yadda yadda yadda. But what good are these things if you'd rather be dead than bored?
Having spent 14 hours trapped inside a little house with my wonderful yet intimately familiar relatives (and all of one-and-a-half stations available on the tube), I have learned that you're gonna need more than bottled water and a working flashlight if you want to survive the extended indoor living and ensuing cabin fever that accompany any major storm system, regardless of its name. Here are the five things that you don't necessarily need to live, but that you definitely need to keep from killing yourself or someone you love.
Someone you don't already know everything about. It doesn't matter whether debris is flying through the sliding-glass door, or the wind is just moaning a bit about the eaves; you can't put a value on being able to turn to the person next to you and say, "so, Jerry tells me you did some time in the Israeli Army as a teenager. What was that like?" It sure beats asking your cousin the insurance claims adjuster what his last workday was like, or hearing your mother tell everybody, again, about the first time you successfully used the potty.
A battery-operated video game. Any battery-operated video game. Sure, you mastered and then abandoned the Minesweeper program on your laptop, and that hand-held football game where the players are represented by tiny LED slashes hasn't been touched since you threw it in a corner a decade ago. But they're both going to start looking pretty inviting four hours after the TV goes out, right about the time your roommate goes stir crazy enough to suggest you use the down time to get some of that mildew off of the bathroom tile grout.
Scratch paper and pens. Look, I draw with all the natural talent of a 7-year-old with glaucoma and the shakes. But even if you suck as badly as I do, it's fun, it kills the time, and you get the added bonus of trying to make everybody guess that what looks like a piece of white sandwich bread with a pickle in the middle is actually a pretty passable rendering of a jellyfish.
Crappy snack food. Eat a chip. Do a lap around the house. Eat another chip. Go to the bathroom. Don't eat a chip for half and hour, watching the clock, and then idly dunk a chip in the onion dip that went warm and frightening much earlier in the afternoon. It's like trying to regulate your smoking during a boring period, only without the pesky indescribable pleasure of smoking.
Booze. When all else fails, when the minutes have begun to stretch like taffy and itch like a heat rash on the inside of your skull – make everybody a drink. In no time, you'll be asking your mom to tell the story again about how you first successfully used the potty.
SCOTT.HARRELL@WEEKLYPLANET.COM
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2005.