🌪 Recalling Matthew after Helene Just before Milton

EVACUEES

Sol Luckman

Nothing makes you miss your island home like being forced to be away from it. With a now Category 4 storm as a backdrop, we showed up in the middle of the night at Leigh’s parents’ house near Columbia—from where, over the next couple days, we watched the storm on TV as it bulldozed the East Coast on its slow and inevitable march toward our island.

News ratings went bananas. The Weather Channel and CNN, fearmongers extraordinaire, conducted Hurricane Matthew Marathons. It was hard to fathom that so much hot air could be blown over so much airtime on a single topic.

The upshot: we all needed a breath of fresh air. But the talking heads talked everyone’s ears off in segments of sound and fury that spiraled repeatedly through the same talking points like, well, the arms of a hurricane.

“The waiting,” as Tom Petty so aptly put it, “is the hardest part.” This is especially true, I discovered, when you’re living like a refugee.

The drip-drip-drip of news of a hurricane approaching a home one has left behind is enough to make the most balanced person experience mental illness. I’d recommend a full lobotomy over that modern form of Chinese water torture. The cumulative sense of helplessness in the face of assured destruction on such a grand scale soon becomes maddening.

I was reminded of how I felt when George W. Bush and the Nazis neocons stole the election from Al Gore. Like his opponent, Gore was obviously just a puppet of the Deep State, but he struck me as the lesser of two evils. Following that election, as with Hurricane Matthew, there was no doubt in my mind a deadly storm was approaching.

Mercifully, by the time Matthew raged within spitting distance past our island, it had downgraded to a Category 1. This meant that instead of winds possibly upwards of 150 miles per hour, they were no higher than 95 miles per hour. Not that this was much consolation as reports of serious fallout throughout the Lowcountry came pouring in.

Hurricanes pose three major threats to people and property. Simple wind damage may be the least of these. There’s also a virtual guarantee of flooding. If you don’t get blown away by the storm, the surge caused by winds pushing water onshore can bite you in the proverbial ass.

A local friend had her car totaled by Matthew’s storm surge. When she opened the driver’s door upon returning home, gallons and gallons of water came rushing out along with several varieties of fish.

Then there’s the perennial threat of tornadoes generated by a hurricane like little fractals spinning off the central vortex and wiping out everything in their path. A number of homes on my small island sustained massive damage during Matthew this way. Roofs were ripped off, lawn chairs were hurled through windows, trees were uprooted and dropped on living rooms.

Strangely, given the round-the-clock media coverage, the most challenging part of waiting out the hurricane from a distance was … lack of news. The mandatory evacuation left precious few people on the ground, so information from the front line was hard to come by—at least initially.

For days in the storm’s aftermath, we had no way of knowing if our condo was even still standing. Finally, we were able to reach our neighbors who had stayed behind via cellphone. They were fine. Thelma, their Chihuahua, was fine. Our building was fine. Incredibly, there was barely even any flooding in our neighborhood.

Many other sections of the island weren’t so lucky. As soon as the mandatory evacuation was lifted and emergency crews were allowed back across the bridge, Facebook and Twitter lit up with photos and videos of Matthew’s destruction.

All over the island, trees—to the tune of tens of thousands—had been toppled. According to one report, over six hundred trees had been downed around a single golf course.

You could count the number of passable streets on one hand. The emergency crews had to gnaw their way across the island like beavers. Needless to say, the roadside paths were also completely blocked.

Thanks to trees taking down power lines, most of the island was without power. Large sections of the south side—where many properties were below sea level—had flooded. In the central part, a sewer main had burst, leaving thousands of residences without potable water.

Miraculously, given the severity of the storm, not a single one of the hundreds of thrill-seeking inhabitants who had refused to leave was killed or even—to the best of my knowledge—significantly injured. Maybe they were just lucky, or maybe the island’s buffer zone had come to the rescue …

One thing was for sure: cooped up with my “in-laws” for so long, the tiny sane part of my psyche that hadn’t gone crazy viewing CNN was starting to lose it. So, with the tropical depression that had dumped buckets of rain on us finally gone, we decided to evacuate once again and take in the autumn leaf season by visiting my family in the mountains.

There was certainly no reason to rush back. For the better part of a week after the Lowcountry reopened and people were permitted to return, I-95 remained a colossal parking lot.

You could spend the whole day getting home and still not get there. Even if you did, half the island’s infrastructure was destroyed or otherwise not functioning. Better to wait it out and enjoy being refugees in the outside world a little longer.

By the time we motored across the bridge and connected with our small island again, a joyful moment indelibly imprinted in my memory, ten days had passed. Even at first glance, it was obvious much had changed.

The tornado paths were still visible as telltale trails of twisted limbs and uprooted timber. Having lost so many trees, the island seemed skinnier. You could see into the landscape now—where before the old forests that had never suffered a major hurricane were like haunted woods in a gothic tale, dark and impenetrable.

The emergency crews had managed to clear the main thoroughfares, but the side streets and paths were still a royal mess. We were able to access our parking lot by four-wheeling around an uprooted magnolia. Our condo ended up being just as we’d left it—rather a mess itself if otherwise intact—but the pool was a dingy swamp of branches, leaves, palm fronds, and patio furniture.

The air had changed as well, I noticed as I surveyed our community’s grounds littered with debris. The atmosphere felt thinner, less humid than usual. Looking up, I was struck by the immaculate vividness of the sky, which was a preternatural blue without a cloud or chemtrail in sight.

Even the beach had changed. This fact the three of us discovered after unpacking when we ventured out for a stroll before dinner. Having traversed the nearly leveled dunes that had sacrificed themselves protecting the island, we beheld not the smooth sandy beach we were accustomed to but a vaguely lunar surface pocked with thousands of tide pools large and small brimming with salt water.

As it turned out, these pools—which would later be filled in by a multimillion-dollar sand renourishment project that also rebuilt the dunes—were like treasure chests chock-full of prizes washed up from the deep recesses of the sea.

With our swimming pool completely unusable, the bike paths totally impassable and surfable waves practically nonexistent in the calm left in Matthew’s wake, we spent a number of afternoons feeling around the warm tide pools with our bare feet until we had trash bags overflowing with huge knobbed whelk shells.

The knobbed whelk is the state shell of nearby Georgia. Beautifully striated with raised points around their outer coils, knobbed whelk shells range from cream-colored to light gray.

They’re so attractive Native Americans valued them as money, using them as one of various components for making wampum shell beads that could be traded for goods and services. We didn’t make wampum with our shells, but we decorated our condo with the best specimens.

For all that the island had changed, one thing was the same: it could still surprise you. No sooner had we settled back into something resembling a routine than all hell broke loose in our low-density community when every single one of its empty vacation rentals suddenly filled up with itinerant arborists from Alabama and Mississippi.

Itinerant arborists are a special breed of redneck: backwoods guys with two-inch lower lips, full-size pickups and chainsaws who specialize in cutting down and chopping up trees for money in disaster areas. Since there are so many disasters these days, they stay pretty busy.

The island was crawling with arborists for months. We endured the particular misfortune of having two dozen of them shacked up nextdoor, which meant in the evenings they convened in the parking lot directly under our front windows for drunken tailgating and—you guessed it—country music played at eardrum-smashing decibels.

With a few Buds under their belts, they’d start to sing. At first there might have been just one or two off-key voices, but as the night wore on the situation turned into a choral cacophony.

Imagine bullfrogs with hillbilly accents and no sense of pitch broadcast over stadium speakers. It wasn’t music to my ears; it was death by serenade.

I’m surprised we didn’t pack up and evacuate all over again. But somehow, after weathering one storm, we managed to weather this new one—until one day a couple months later, the arborists finished their business on our small island and moved on to a fresh disaster. At least they’d done their job and the streets and paths were mostly navigable again.

🏝 Excerpted from MUSINGS FROM A SMALL ISLAND …

Copyright © Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

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