Breaking Point

“Everything has a breaking point.

Our house is 80 years old with a 12-foot by 7-foot front window that once served as a clothing display window.

One of our home’s previous owners also owned Smith’s Ladies Shop in Panama City and took advantage of vehicular traffic on our road to adorn mannequins with the garments that could be found in the store. If drivers didn’t notice the displays, the brightly colored front door that regularly changed hues depending on what the “it” color was each season would catch their eye.

Despite being covered with plywood, Michael’s pressure caused the enormous plate glass window to shatter into a million pieces, covering our living room. The plywood kept the wind from blowing in and lifting the roof off.

I am originally from New Orleans but moved to Panama City in 1996. My stepfather (Dad) was a criminal defense attorney and I would eventually go on to graduate from Ole Miss law school and follow his footsteps into criminal defense law. My mother was born here, and I have deep roots in this community, and loads of family who still call Bay County their home.

The Monday before the hurricane I was in court and received a text message from my husband saying we were in a mandatory evacuation zone. I could not believe it. It seemed premature for a little storm which had barely graduated from tropical depression to hurricane status. On my lunch break I raced to the grocery store to pick up hurricane essentials. I don’t know what it is about a hurricane that makes me crave pop tarts. I got what I thought we needed. Looking back, it wasn’t nearly enough food.

On Tuesday night I was watching the weather. I have lived on the Gulf Coast my entire life, except while in college, and have faced many storms. I had never felt a nagging, persistent feeling of dread about a storm, but I did that night.

I texted my father in New Orleans asking what he would do if he were us. He replied that since we had begged him to evacuate in 2005, but he chose to stay through and ultimately waded out of Katrina, he certainly could not tell us what to do. But he added that if he knew he had a place nearby to go to, he would go. This added to my unease. However, I was still not fully convinced the storm was cause to evacuate in spite of my intuition trying to get my attention relentlessly.

Around 10:30 p.m., I received a text message from a good friend of ours who was at the emergency operations center and therefore was receiving weather information before the rest of us, that the storm had been upgraded to a high category four, and that he was hopeful that we had decided to evacuate after all. Almost immediately after my receipt of that message, my husband walked in the room and said, “It’s a high four. I’m evacuating and taking the girls. If you’re coming pack your stuff. We’re out of here.” Much to his surprise, I complied without complaint.

I ran around the house trying to gather irreplaceable items. We quickly packed those items that we could and wrapped the remaining invaluable items in plastic garbage bags and placed them in my closet, the only room in the house without a window.

I had to be in court on Thursday so we didn’t want to drive too far out of town. At midnight we left Panama City and drove in record time to my parent’s pine tree farm southwest of Marianna. We didn’t see a single car on the road. It was eerie.

The next morning, we helped my parents make the last of the storm preparations on their home, and then we waited.

On the leading edge of the hurricane, there was a gentle rain, and there was very little wind. That did not last long. The power went out early but the whole house generator flipped on, and we continued watching the local television station’s weather broadcast.

We were 50 miles inland from the coast but that seemed irrelevant to Hurricane Michael as the eye of the storm barreled towards us, ultimately passing directly over the property.

It got bad quickly. Really bad. The once gentle rain morphed into torrents of water so dense that it was hard to see through them, and the continuous howling wind blew the rain horizontally. Old pine trees began to fall, thudding on the ground emphatically. I imagine that the sound of huge trees falling is what it must have sounded like when the gigantic dinosaurs walked the Earth. The water pump house eventually blew over and short-circuited the whole-house generator, so we lost power. A locked freezer outside on the deck which was full of venison blew open and over. My husband and Dad went outside to right it, dodging weaponized flying broken-off ceiling fan blades and other debris. Dad threw everyone a raincoat and directed us to take shelter in the cars parked outside if the roof of the house blew off. The way the house was groaning, that was a real possibility.

We six humans hunkered down on the floor in the hallway with our two shivering dogs and listened to the wind and rain molest the house. I had my head on my knees. I prayed to myself. I was trying to be strong because I didn’t want to scare our twin daughters. At my lowest moment I thought, “This isn’t going to end well.” I began to pray for absolution for us all. I was sitting in front of the air conditioning return vent. I could feel and hear the wind rushing in and out of the vent. The house was breathing and our ears were popping. I honestly don’t know how long we sat there, five minutes or five hours. It eventually quieted down as the eye of the hurricane passed right over us.

We walked outside and wandered around in shock. Almost every tree on the farm had been snapped like a match stick. It was like small child got mad and twisted their toy towers.

Thousands of exhausted sea birds that were trapped in Michael’s eye had landed on the lake in front of the house. They didn’t have long to rest, and neither did we before we had to retreat back into the house to wait out the second half of the storm.

The second half wasn’t nearly as bad as the first half. Or perhaps I was in so much shock that I don’t remember how bad it actually was. Again, I don’t know how long we waited in the hall for it to end.

Once it was over, we went outside to see once and for all what was still standing. This was the beloved farm where my husband and I were married and where our entire family gathers every year for Thanksgiving. Where we go to relax and get away from the world. Where our girls have spent countless hours playing, and being kids without limits. Where they and Dad built a treehouse in an ancient Oak tree. It was all too much to take in.

In addition to all of the pine trees, the girls’ beautiful treehouse tree had fallen. The pole barn and its metal roof were scattered in torn sheets into the broken tree line. The scuppernong vineyard was crushed by a huge pine tree. Pieces of siding were everywhere. Thankfully, the house made it, although it was bruised badly. My Dad’s beautiful respite, his investment in the future which he carefully tended with his own blood, sweat, and tears, his gorgeous pine tree farm was thoroughly destroyed. It was, and remains, devastating.

We are not alone in our loss. Thanks to three hours of Hurricane Michael, there are three million acres of timber now rotting on the ground in Florida.

Dad is ill with lymphoma. He was diagnosed in February, four months after Michael’s landfall. I am convinced his illness is the result of the stress on his body which was caused by the storm and its aftermath.

Once we gathered our wits as best we could, we pulled chainsaws and tractors out and cut and pushed the pines that crisscrossed and littered the almost mile-long drive way. It took us a day and a half to get to our neighbor’s house five miles away. They had satellite internet and we were able to reach out to family and friends and let them know we were okay.

Over the next couple of weeks, we were reduced to almost nothing. We had no potable water, and little food. It’s still incredible to me how quickly life can change from complete comfort to utter deprivation. We had not come to the farm prepared to stay. I had expected to be back at work the day after the storm, so I had not brought any of the food (not even the pop tarts) I had bought for my family. That combined with the lack of electricity put a strain on my parent’s supplies. Despite our lack of amenities, I was glad to be there with my parents. It would have taken them far longer to cut themselves out of their home, and there was no way for us to clear a path to them because the tractors were all at their house. There is no doubt that it was God’s plan that placed us on their side of the fallen trees.

We made the pilgrimage into Panama City on Sunday. Our house was still standing but the 200-year-old live Oak trees surrounding it weren’t as lucky, which still breaks my heart. But, there was one tree that I was glad to see go. Like any good Southern lady, I love Magnolia trees. I just didn’t like the work they require. Our neighbors had a huge, messy Magnolia on the property line. Before we made it back to town, we knew from satellite imagery that we had likely lost our lovely Oaks, but we could not determine if the Magnolia was standing. I told my husband that if the oaks were gone, but the Magnolia was standing, I was cutting it down myself. The Magnolia got its revenge for all my ill will. It made its way onto our roof as it fell.

We had extensive damage, but we were some of the lucky few as we still had a house. We were only displaced for roughly three weeks, as the linemen, many of whom came from far away to help, and the Panama City public works folks did a fantastic job of restoring power and water relatively quickly considering the widespread damage.

We are slowly putting our life and our home back together. We were lucky that we didn’t lose any items that couldn’t be replaced. We even found a glass company that could replace our huge living room window with tempered glass, which was a minor miracle as we had been told that tempered glass could not be made that large, and it has to be tempered nowadays.

People, like our plate glass window, also have their breaking point. A good friend coined a phrase “Hurri-come-apart” and I use it regularly to describe those frustrating situations that occur in normal life, but when combined with the stress of post-hurricane life cause us to react irrationally. It’s post-traumatic stress disorder, but we can’t even call it “post” because we are still living through and with the trauma. It’s all around us, and in us, all the time.

A couple of months after the hurricane a neighbor hired someone to move their debris out of their yard. The hired man was using a tractor to dump all their tree pieces and other wreckage in the middle of the alley behind our house. My husband had been exceedingly meticulous while clearing our property, and had neatly stacked “our” debris in a single large pile in our yard so that the debris trucks could pass through the alley to collect it. My extremely even-tempered, and usually courteous husband uncharacteristically had a “Hurri-come-apart” on that poor worker and in excited tones called him colorful names and told him where-he-could-stick-his-debris in ways that don’t bear repeating. Fortunately, the hired man decided that it was best to choose a more appropriate location to dispose of the debris. I am grateful that the worker’s cooler head prevailed or I’m positive there would’ve been a fight.

I’ve now seen two cities which I love on their knees. New Orleans has gotten up and is better in many ways than it was, so I know that things in our area can and will improve in time. We’ve already made discernible progress. It doesn’t mean that we’re not still struggling, mentally and physically. It still angers me to leave the disaster zone to find that most people don’t even know that there was a category five storm called Michael, much less the amount of devastation he wrought. It’s hard for me to relate to outsiders anymore.

Panama City has massive potential, and it always has, but there was never a real impetus to make change happen. Michael, although horrific, has required us to effect change. We need to see it as an opportunity. If done thoughtfully, the modifications we make will result in an even cooler place to live – eventually. It’s going to take a while. There is still much work to do, and it’s going to be dirty and not any fun. It is like Panama City had an enema and there is still some shit on the floor. We’re not going to leave it there on the ground. We are #850strong. We will get out our cleaning products, put our gloves on, and do the work it takes to clean up the stinky mess. Once the poop is all gone, although it will be different than what we knew on October 9th, 2018, we will have an updated and improved city which we can all be proud of.”