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| South Pointe of South Beach |
IRMA BLEW MY MIND
By David Arthur Walters
Hurricanes come with the territory in Florida. I never paid them much mind until Irma showed up and blew my mind. And it was not her but the media that left me sobbing in South Beach although I had not lost a damn thing, not even my utilities.
Yes, hurricanes are a matter of course in Florida. I was staying at the Colony on Ocean Drive when the cyclones came around in 1969. I do not know if they were hurricanes because I did not have a radio or television nor did I read the papers. I recall that I read my beat up copy of Moby Dick with a flashlight as one tempest raged. The lobby was filled with sand and little birds when I came down the next morning.
Hurricane Gloria visited New York when I was there in 1985. Keiko was in Manhattan from Japan arranging a venue for her dancers. I took her to Brooklyn, and the wind turned out to be even worse there. Long Island took the brunt of her breath, however.
I landed in Ft. Lauderdale in 2004 two days before Hurricane Jeanne. The hotel clerk told me he had no record of my reservation or the person who had made it. The rate was triple the amount I had agreed upon, and he said there were no vacancies at present. Of course illegal gouging was in full force when the cabbie took me to a Days Inn in a ghetto he was familiar with. Russians had just bought it, and three Russian “exchange students” were circulating the rooms as “maids.” Panhandlers knocked on doors after the utilities went down, asking for money to buy milk for their babies and whatnot. The maids were swimming nude in the scum laden pool during a downpour as Jeanne moved in. On old friend, an ex Navy SEAL, braved the aftermath, bailed me out and took me to South Beach just after she passed.
Hurricanes Rita and Katrina skirted Miami in 2005 on the way into the Gulf. The evacuation for Rita was deadly, leading to the decision not to evacuate for Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Katrina left New Orleans underwater and exposed the incompetence and prejudices of the Bush administration.
Wilma was a bitch. We rode her out in the lobby of a decrepit apartment hotel on Collins Avenue. The guests finally met each other, and some were surprised to discover they had a number of dope dealers and prostitutes for neighbors.
The media coverage of the outrages on humanity at the New Orleans Superdome shelter after Katrina arrived resulted in what is known as Shelter Fear Syndrome, and the saying by political leaders that shelters are a “last resort.” Indeed, Miami Mayor Gimenez quoted that frightening phrase with the advent of Hurricane Irma.
The feeling that it would be better to die in a hurricane than go to a shelter was responsible for many people staying on Miami Beach although Irma threatened to smash it to smithereens with her eye, and drown it with her fifteen-foot surge.
Hurricane Matthew was expected to wreak havoc on Miami Beach in October because of frightening media reports. I stayed put, alone in my hovel in the ghetto at the butt end of Flamingo Park three blocks from the beach during the windy spell. Hysterical beings are unpredictable. The storm had fizzled out, much to the glee of the prominent Obama racists. Reporters gathered around and took pictures of a felled tree on the golf course. My friend David Kelsey blamed the local government for not evacuating the beach given the prediction of a furious landing, but all they could say was that the aftermath supported their good judgement.
Telecasts of Hurricane Harvey’s doings in Houston this year left me in tears. I wanted to volunteer to go there and help, but I knew very well that I would have been an additional burden at my age and with the tendency of my muscles to seize up and go into convulsions.
When Irma was advertised, as if death would be certain for those who stayed on the beach, I actually thought it might be better to die than go to a shelter only to survive and die a miserable death as a poor old man in a Florida nursing home given the media coverage of old people tied to beds and walls and beaten, with Medicare paying highly respected medical fraudsters $300 a day for their keep, and the conservative Florida legislature doing nothing.
I did my best to ignore the early media coverage of Irma’s progress. I encountered Frank at the South Shore library on the Wednesday of her arrival.
“Get out. This is it.” he said.
“I don’t think we are in much danger here.”
“I am the local expert on hurricanes. I am telling you, get out.”
“Okay, you are the expert but my intuition tells me the momentum will take her west through the keys before she turns up because she is very powerful.”
“Get out.”
And in fact those who could afford it, especially the wealthy, were abandoning ship. A wealthy friend of mine here on business joked about Irma because he was a VIP traveler, money was no problem, and he could get First Class tickets to fly out before the airport would close. “Stay calm,” was his last words to me, after I told him flights were booked.
I had grown increasingly alarmed by the exodus from the beach and turned on the television to watch the continuous coverage of this monstrous storm threatening to eat all of Florida at one giant gulp. The Hispanics call hurricanes la tormenta. Little did I know that I would be tormented more by the media than by Irma.
A mandatory evacuation order was given. The rats were fleeing in droves. The estimates of wind speed and surge height made a death trap out of my little two-story building. Attempts were made to get our slumlord to at least put plywood in the windows. No response. He had abandoned us some time ago, anyway, refusing to replace refrigerators, stoves, fix central air conditioning, put locks on the gates, and such.
A kind neighbor in the taller building next door dangled a rope from the balcony so we could swim over and save ourselves. I hoped I would not get a crippling muscle cramp in the process. And then again I thought it better to die in at home than in a notorious shelter or Florida nursing home.
My neighbors were taping and siliconing themselves into their apartments. The bragged about a “plan” they had made to help each other, to which I was not, as an Americano, privy to. I had lived in the compound ten years, and was instrumental in ridding it of drug dealers, thieves, and other criminals. I thought it would be amazing to see them actually help each other.
My initial plan was to stay put or get into a higher building. I was not without friends. Aliz called me from Washington. She could not get me into her condo in South Beach because of the red tape of the uptight management, but a South Beach friend of hers was coming up to Washington to stay at her place there, while she was in Maryland with family.
“Let me know if she is going to do that, because I could come up with her. The airlines are overbooked, and I wanted to visit Washington this summer anyway.”
Well, that friend texted her two days later to say she hoped Aliz did not mind, but she was already half way to Washington with a gay friend and a bulldog.
So Aliz contacted her friend Patricia, and Patricia said I was welcome to stay in her mammoth old building right on the ocean. Half the windows had been replaced with high impact glass, but not hers yet. There was always the central laundry room as the last refuge, she advised. I learned after the fact that the uptight condo management decided to lock the laundry rooms.
My friend Denis lives in another mammoth old condominium building on the water, three blocks from me.
“Be patient,” he told me. “You can come here. This building is safe. The roof is good. Do you like hotdogs?”
That is where I would go, I figured as I continued to watch the continuing news about what would happen if Irma’s eye wall would make a direct hit on Miami Beach as expected.
Would that concrete made with salt water in the old days, corroding the rebar bracing the structures, hold up to the blast? Of course it would hold. That is, unless you are a developer and want to have your historic building condemned by the county for redevelopment.
I had been unnerved by the media. I will stay with Denis to be safe, take some food and stuff over there. Saturday was going to get dicey. So I called his number on Friday morning. No answer. I texted. No answer. I supposed he had changed his mind. No problem. I am used to people changing their minds. That is almost what people are for. It turned out that he had turned his phone was off for the night.
The evacuation bus was scheduled to depart a block from his place at 7 am. I was sold on Irma. I would go to the shelter, and if my place were destroyed, I would go to France and visit Virginie, who was worried about me and said she would be glad to have my company. The change would be food for me. French people are humane people.
I packed hurriedly and headed for the evacuation pickup point. I looked at Denis building and texted him again as he always texts. No answer. I would hear from him later, with “I told you to be patient!”
A French couple showed up at the stop. The maintenance man at the building said people had waited for hours for the bus on the previous day. I was still hesitant to leave my home of 13 years. I walked back to my apartment. A neighbor was laughing and said he was going to stay. I got cold drinks from my college fridge, which had replaced the one the landlord would not fix, and headed back to the pickup point, where I shared the cold drinks with the French couple. A German tourist showed up. I was about to go home when the evacuation bus arrived. I got on it.
Fate.
It was an absolutely gorgeous day. As we rode along Indian Drive, I thought I would never see beautiful Miami Beach again. You never know just how much you love a place, even though you complain about it, until you are about to lose it, I realized. Of course it is no loss if you intend to leave a place or person.
I departed confusedly, involuntarily, and from that faithless juncture sadness overwhelmed me, and the hurt is still with me although I am physically safe and sound. Alas that my depressing aftermath is not anywhere near as tragic as those who stand beside the ruins of their homes with nothing but the clothes they wear and a plastic bottle of water.
That I even make this pathetic confession makes me feel worse about myself, for it seems that I essentially care more about myself than others, which is supposed to be a bad thing although the survival of the race may depend on it. Yet I am compelled by my nature to confess, so that is what I do.
You see, I was not physically hurt in any manner, but my mind was blown by the Hurricane Irma news
xYx
South Beach September 14, 2017
Once again, you've written an amazing story of your emotional response to Irma so well that it had me emotional as well.
Two corrections. First, while about 10 to 15% of Harris County residents were affected by flooding, it wasn't the 90% that was perceived by watching the constant media rescues. While the flooding continues along the Brazos and Colorado rivers and the residents in West Houston where the detention dams are releasing water will be flooded another week yet, most residents of flooded homes returned within two days to begin cleanup and restoration. Only about 80 homes are being considered for buyout by FEMA for being repeatedly flooded.
Second, the terrible traffic jams caused by Rita were not the result of the emergency management office or the media, but the result of mass panic by word-of-mouth (cell phone, not Facebook) idiocy of the type you describe in your article. The mayor of Houston and Harris County judge advised evacuation of known low-lying areas after what happened with Allison's terrible flooding. Those people rightly should and did leave. But the lemmings in the rest of the city felt that they were smarter and would get out ahead of everyone else. So everyone got out onto the hot dry highways and ran out of gas, food and water. Stupid. Everyone I talked to, I advised to stay home and have a party. We did, and had no damage. My boss, a supposed expert, panicked with his girlfriend and spent hours on the highway with his fast car going nowhere.
Ron