Category: Small TOwn

Hurricane.

Hurricane Ivan stripped my mother of her home, car, and job in one fell swoop. For someone already struggling with mental health, this experience broke her. Mom sheltered in her apartment, trapped by a huge old-growth Oak Tree that fell through her roof. It took two days for help to come.

Ivan ransacked Pensacola. Bridges were destroyed, roads were flooded, and homes and businesses stood gutted. People from outside of the Gulf Coast asked that same old question: “Why didn’t people evacuate?”

I can’t speak for everyone who stayed, but I can speak for my mother and those like her. She took care of an elderly patient on oxygen who was bedridden. Moving Margie, her patient, was impossible. At the same time, Mom’s car was less than road-trip worthy, and her bank account couldn’t withstand the gas and lodging it would have taken to leave. All the things added up to sheltering in place.

Other people stayed for similar reasons. Disabilities. Poverty. Lack of transportation. Stubbornness. A pack of farm animals that would have made it next to impossible to leave. People build significant lives in one place, and leaving in the chance that a hurricane hits their home seems like a gamble; sometimes, that doesn’t make sense. There’s also the economic side- entire cities don’t shut down because a storm may hit. Companies don’t shut down. Emergency operations still run, and the businesses that serve those operations are still available. Some may be surprised to hear that a gas station has to stay open to fuel vehicles, and the people behind the register there cannot evacuate. People HAVE to stay. The state cannot shut down.

In any case, many people remained, and the trauma that they endured was no joke.

I relay this story because Hurricane Ian just barreled through my serene second hometown, Englewood, FL. I have family and dear friends there who withstood similar trauma as my mother in Ivan. The town endured mass destruction—when I look at pictures and video, my heart sinks. I realize I haven’t posted quite yet, even though I have started this piece about a hundred times.

Southwest Florida is indescribably special. We grew up swimming in crystal clear Gulf water. We learned about manatees and alligators up close and personal. Cougars visited us from rescues at our school assemblies, and we took field trips to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford’s Winter Estates in Ft. Myers, which is now temporarily closed because of the hurricane. We didn’t have metal detectors at our school, and there wasn’t much to do other than go to the beach and hang out with our friends—at the beach.

Englewood was always and will always be the picture-perfect beach for me. It was the first beach I ever visited and remains the bar against which every beach is measured, and suffers. We ran to Englewood after moments for which I have no words, and it was our solace. We attended Sunrise Service on Englewood Beach Service to affirm our Faith.

I am in Cincinnati and watching as my friends and family rebuild. I hope they address their trauma with as much care and urgency as they are the treasures of our beautiful SW FL towns and beaches. Speaking from experience, they can break a person.

If you’d like to help give, please visit this link.

The collective consciousness of a disaster-stricken community is what pulls them back up, and I am not skeptical about the Gulf Coast. Instead of posting devastation pictures, which we have ALL seen, here are some beautiful images of resources, working together, and help.

Ready

Who We Were

I come from a small town that revolved, for me as a kid at least, around the beach.  I was allowed to roam free, mostly as a child, carefree on my pink and grey ten-speed bicycle that I received on my 9th birthday.  Some things about that world, as I have learned in my adult life, were not as I remember them, and the world was not as safe as I believed.  Perhaps my free roaming rights should have been a little more restricted, but if that were the case, I wouldn’t have had those long sun-filled days burning the bottoms of my feet and picking sand spurs out of them at Englewood Beach, grabbing a hot dog and Coke lunch at Circle K; or spent my evenings at Pelican Pete’s Playland earning enough tickets for a slap bracelet or some other useless plastic bit and running the go-carts until I was out of the money my mom had handed me in the parking lot.

Englewood is where I was a kid at Englewood Elementary watching the Challenger explode, where I was re-zoned into Vineland Elementary and became a Pop Warner cheerleader,  and where I suffered through middle school at L.A. Ainger, where I was both bullied and the bully at one time or another and our class of hooligans was denied the benefits of the classes before and after.  Lemon Bay High School, by comparison to high schools in the city, was a tiny school where essentially everyone knew everyone, and you’d run into them eventually at the beach because it was really the only place to go in town.

For that reason, when we lose someone that ran the same roads in high school, that hit the beach on the same weekends, that you can trace all the way back to elementary school—it hits home in a different way than people you lose from your adult life alone.  It’s happened again, and it’s happened all too often.

It’s different because when I see his face, I see the 11-year-old Darrell Baxter that used to run me into the wall on the slick track at Pelican Pete’s but still let me win in the end.  I see the Darrell Baxter with spiked hair giving me a Suicidal Tendencies CD for my 11th birthday, after which “All I wanted was a Pepsi” became a running joke. I see Darrell Baxter spinning himself on a bar stool until he puked just to make my brother laugh.  I see the Darrell Baxter that made me watch bad horror movies and then secretly held my hand when he thought no one was looking.  Even in High School, during Mr. Pearcy’s History Class, I saw 11-year-old Darrell when we’d talk. He was definitely still in there.

Who we were back then, in a small beach town with nothing to do, set us on our paths towards the places we’d go and the friends we’d keep.  It also means that when we lose one of the pack, looking back is inevitable and hurtful.  I’m looking back a lot today at the moments I had with my friend, with all my friends in the storied beach town of my childhood, sentimentalized as it may be in my head.  I’d rather look backward with fond memories and forget the harsh realities that must have co-existed.  And I’d rather remember Darrell as that 11-year-old boy, digging in the sand on Englewood Beach with 11-year-old me, still mostly sure that things would turn out okay.

Skeptically Yours.

Our friend Darrell took his life on February 27th, 2013.