Zone A

Photo by me, September 2024.

It was time to come north from Fort Lauderdale and while I did, Hurricane Helene was coming north too. She and I were leading parallel lives.

 

A view from my hotel balcony overlooking the docile waters of the Gulf of Mexico on the day I arrived. A wedding was taking place on the beach that evening. Photo by me, September 2024.

I was in a hotel at North Redington Beach on the gulf coast near St. Petersburg. I arrived two days before the storm and the same day storm chasers and network media swooped in to hype the storm and shout catastrophic predictions. I was aware of Helene, but expected or maybe hoped that she would stay far enough out in the gulf as she headed north to avoid the worst of it. I had been in Florida in the center of a tropical storm before, but not a major hurricane. I expected strong winds and pounding rain if we could stay on the periphery of Helene's track. I was not expecting the end of the world; the internet and television gave me immunity against that way of thinking.

The next morning, a television reporter stood on the beach waving his arms like a hyperactive and malfunctioning windmill before a camera directly in front our hotel. He had forgotten or perhaps was never taught that waving and pointing your hands directly at the viewer is considered a threatening gesture and people will change the channel. He and his crew I had seen in the parking deck the day before and drinking in the hotel bar that night. He needed to hire himself a talent coach, spend less time in the gym and cruising in hotel bars.

I went for a walk along Gulf Boulevard and had coffee. Walking back to the hotel, I was jolted out of my remaining haze of sleep. A sheriff's deputy pulled next to the sidewalk and barked through a loudspeaker about a mandatory evacuation and that everyone needed to leave Zone A. I jumped out of my skin. It was like being warned at a protest that this was an unlawful assembly and teargas was incoming. My phone alerted me next with the same message. The expected storm surge was forecast to be destructive and deadly if we stayed.

 

Was the world not aware that I need at least two cups of coffee and an hour of quiet when I wake up before I can muster more than a 'good morning'? It was too much stimulation. I blamed that arm flapping reporter for conjuring Helene to come closer.

 

There was a controlled chaos at the hotel. Elevators beeped, luggage rolled carelessly over toes and the staff scurried about stowing things away. The hotel was closing up and sending all of the guests to somewhere other than there. A quick call was made to a hotel in Orlando and a reservation was secured before the rooms were gobbled up. The retreat inland was on before I even had breakfast or a third cup of coffee. My last moment at the hotel was passing the reporter and crew sorting through their gear. In their excitement I detected that they hoped for the worst, great footage, ratings gold and maybe a promotion to a bigger market. Damn the rest of us. This was their storm of the century... until the next storm of the century.

The night before, Pinellas County locals were overheard at dinner discussing the storm. They planned to ride it out saying it would not be so bad and joked about stocking up on alcohol. These were not young people being cavalier, they were in their fifties and sixties, though it can be hard to assess among sun crispy Floridians what their true ages were. Their misplaced confidence was no doubt based on past storms that just missed them or were not as bad as predicted. 

 

They neglected to consider that the weather, climate and landscapes are not what they once were. Hurricanes are more intense, ocean levels are higher and Florida's coast lines are more perilously populated than ever. Storms of the past were not the best indicator of what the storms of the present were capable of doing.

 

Photo by me, September 2024.

You see evacuation signs when you travel in coastal regions of the country and you say to yourself that you will never be caught in an actual evacuation. In all of my decades of traversing Florida from Pensacola to Key West I had never been through an evacuation until I was. Hurricane Helene was a category four storm that morning in the gulf and headed to Florida.

The traffic leaving the beaches. Photo by me, September 2024.

Some people were taking the order seriously, at least the out-of-towners like us were, as the hotels closed giving us no option but to leave. We were stuck in a miserable jam through Tampa and I-4 to Orlando was a mess moreso than usual. We exited outside Tampa and took the back roads by the tattoo parlors, trailer parks, strawberry fields, miles of planted pines and people hoping to sell watermelons out of the back of an old Chevy van. It was a tour of the hidden away Florida that tourists do not see. I like to think of it as the real Florida that is swampy, often ugly and crazed by the relentless sun and humidity. The real Florida is not a vacation of seafood, the yachts of Fort Lauderdale, the morning drunks on Duval Street in Key West and sand between the toes, it is a sun beaten dream in a faded 7-11 tank top, broken flip flops and with ass crack showing from cutoffs.

Photo by me, September 2024.

Photo by me, September 2024.

Leaving Florida several days later and heading north to Georgia, there were lines of trucks from utility companies and downed trees for as far as one could see. The damage became more obvious to structures  and there was limited gas north of Gainesville and into South Georgia. I thought about the people that rode out the storm on the coast. I saw what became of our evacuated hotel through photos on Reddit. The first floor was washed out by the storm surge and damage had reached the second floor. Cars and boats were washed away like the sand and the beach was much smaller than what I had stood on the week before. If we had stayed and not evacuated we would have been stranded without power, water, sewer and cell phone service. For the locals that stayed and survived they likely regretted that choice. 

 

Along I-75 we stopped to take in some of the remaining tacky old Florida that is getting harder to find with each passing storm and year.

Photo by me, September 2024.

 

Photo by me, September 2024.

Photo by me, September 2024.

This was the Florida I loved in the 1970s as a cutoffs and flip flop wearing kid when the state seemed like a wild adventure of clear inland springs with mermaids, jungles, dolphin shows and wide beaches with fun sized waves for my toy boats and plastic sharks. It was a wilder, bigger version of the woods behind my childhood home and camping at Lake Allatoona. It was the state before I ever knew what a Zone A was or required an hour of silence and two cups of coffee before my brain worked. 

Me falling in love with Florida at Marineland in St. Augustine in the 1970s. Photo by my mother.

It is a place I miss.