If the best thing about an earthquake is that it’s over by the time you start thinking about it, a hurricane feels like the worst possible case of ADHD. Your thoughts race everywhere and nowhere, each sabotaged by anxiety; reasonable second thoughts devour each anticipatory response; the ultimate outcome seems like it will never arrive, and eventually it does in spite of you. By then, you’ve gone from mental powerlessness to the literal kind.
I began constantly thinking of Hurricane Milton on Saturday October 5, four days before landfall. It’s usually not fun having your ex tell you to please leave, but mine works as a FEMA-trained specialist for local government, so it was nice of her. She was probably more concerned about our son, but I chose the broader interpretation.
As a boy child, I went through the customary stages of boy-child fascination: dinosaurs, vehicles, volcanoes. On a clear day, Grandma’s house outside Portland furnished me with a view of Mount Hood, Mount Rainier, Mount Adams and the ruined shape of Mount St. Helens. Even then, I thought a lot about Harry “The Mountain Ain’t Gonna Hurt Me” Truman, the man who owned a lodge at the foot of St. Helens and refused to evacuate. They never even looked for ol’ Harry, his body likely pulverized, burned, and dissolved by thousands of tons of pyroclastic flow moving through his lodge at the pace of the Indy 500.
My son could go to stay with his mom, in a modern house out of the floodplain, with no big trees nearby, and storm-rated up to a Category 5. I live in a cinderblock house outside of any mandatory evacuation zone, far above the height of any flood or storm surge. For some reason, all my hurricane anxiety said stay. It was important this time to stay. The storm wasn’t gonna hurt me.
Despite being America’s hurricane playground, Florida does not make it easy to leave. That would be a public service, and minorities can technically use those. Southbound I-75 does not get opened for contraflow. The one ponderously slow rail line running north-to-south swerves across the state to hug the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. That $6 billion high-speed rail line to Orlando that McKinsey said would be profitable after the first year got vetoed by GOP Governor Rick Scott, who contended it was a theft of taxpayer dollars. So the money instead went to taxpayer-funded toll roads built by the Koch-affiliated expert who told Scott the rail line would be unprofitable. (Scott did personally invest in a private rail company, but that’ll only take you as far as Orlando, and it kills people at a rate three times greater than the second-deadliest rail line in the country.)
By Monday the 7th, northbound I-75 was a parking lot. Just nine days before, Hurricane Helene lawn-mowered the Big Bend region, closing gas stations and sparking mass anxiety about fuel shortages along coastal non-interstate highways as well as a 100-mile stretch of I-75 and westbound I-10. Gas paranoia already sends people topping up every quarter tank between Tampa Bay and northern Alachua County and grinding traffic to a halt, and the aftermath of Helene made it worse.
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Even assuming the roads were empty, neither Florida nor the federal government make any part of leaving easier. Prisoners are left to be claimed by weather, and for the rest of us, you need a car to begin with. Then you need to be able to throw $100 at gas and more than that for lodging for one night, assuming you can find a place to stay along the interstate any closer than Valdosta, Georgia.
It’s little better if you stay. You need hundreds of dollars in food, water, batteries, phone and radio chargers and artificial light to last for a week without power. But you’ve eaten and drunk the food and water from last year to keep it from becoming ruder. You’ve used the batteries. Maybe you can’t find that brick of a phone charger. Your kid killed the flashlight playing lightsaber with it. You could put everything on the credit card, but if you can’t get a cash advance, you won’t be able to buy anything in a world without power. God help you if replacing everything isn’t in your budget.
It’s not in mine. Things weren’t going well even before the natural disaster. Do you need a content writer? I’m a wonderful writer, and I love content. I love The Nation, too, and I haven’t crunched the numbers, but I’d be surprised if this piece covers even the emergency supplies. If you hire me, we could afford to move. Assuming that there’s anywhere left to go.
The worst part is always, always the waiting. In the immediate aftermath, you wait to see if the floodwaters rise and how fucked you are. During the storm, you wait to hear if the last few rain bands have gotten steadily quieter, signaling the passing of the storm’s peak, and to see if you’re already as fucked as you’re likely to get. Even before a hurricane hits your own community, you wait to see how badly the storm surge is going to fuck the coast and everyone along the rivers. For up to seven days beforehand, you wait to see if your area’s even going to get fucked at all. Afterward, with the lights out and the food warming in the fridge, you wait to see how long you’re going to stay fucked.
Waiting this time was different because the storm came pre-hoaxed. Conservatives disgorged a slurry of lies about Helene’s aftermath in the Carolinas: FEMA was stealing supplies, interdicting aid and keeping it from the needy; FEMA was bankrupt because it was buying gender-reassignment surgeries for undocumented immigrants in Gstaad. Milton was going to be more of the same.
Far be it from me to argue with a gym lady who got a job in government to break up the days haunting the new-member desk for fresh meat, but I can spot a few holes in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s theory that they (substitute “the Jews” here) control the weather and are weaponizing it against Republican voters. For one, there are an awful lot of Democrats in Asheville, North Carolina and Jews in St. Petersburg, Florida, and it seems like it would be a lot more demographically sensible to send a bunch of tornadoes to dust Missouri. For another, Tampa reliably votes blue.
Still, it was nice to see that Greene and Matt Gaetz—her running buddy accused of trafficking underage girls across state lines for drug-fueled parties—joined ten other Florida Republicans in voting to defund FEMA and the National Flood Insurance program. I believe it was Ronald Reagan who once said that our enemies had a space weapon, and it was incumbent upon us all to unilaterally disarm our only response to it.
Not that I knew what the response to Milton was. While the rest of the country could look at the devastation made when the storm made landfall in Siesta Key on October 9th, I couldn’t even see as far as the Port of Tampa.
Cell towers had been knocked down or knocked out. Everyone without power was suddenly without WiFi, and we were all pulling on the same damaged digital infrastructure. Everyone was now having a nonstop version of the experience of trying to text a photo to a friend from a giant outdoor event, putting your hand in your pocket five minutes later and discovering that your phone had become a brick of lava with a spinning progress dial on it. Texts with images took minutes to get through or simply timed out. Incoming texts arrived sometimes not at all, or sometimes in bursts of dozens at once from days before. Loading the city webpage or the home page of the power utility was a sick joke.
Lightweight apps like social media still could load in reasonable spans of time, and it was remarkable how quickly the world devolved to unhinged, unsourced rumor. Images of the storm on Twitter or Facebook were reduced to window dressing, and made scarcely a dent in the robust traffic still determined to prove that Jews control the weather. Someone who’d traded texts with someone who lived near the Air Force Base had the same moral force as someone who’d seen something on about South Tampa on TikTok, which is to say only as much as you felt like. A Nextdoor poster who mistook phone lines for power lines in a conversation with an electrical crew cast neighbors into misplaced gloom about the duration of the outage.
Eventually, everyone had to trust someone they were confident wasn’t an asshole. That coffee-fueled lady who always organizes after-school activities was speaking the truth when she said the church had power and would let people charge their backup batteries. In Tampa’s Forest Hills neighborhood, floodwaters deep enough to reach car windows and create “Lake Fowler” could have been the lakes overflowing or the river backing up, but it took an affable busybody to track down early speculation that a pumping station had failed and a water main had broken. The latter was an honest mistake given the huge scope of the correct explanation: that multiple pumping stations had failed because Tampa was flooding in areas where it’s not supposed to flood.
Beyond that, there was the grim evidence before your eyes. Two trees with snapped trunks lying across one block of my alley trapped a half dozen neighbors’ cars. They’re still trapped. Hardy live oaks lay across roads, pushed out of the ground by a combination of wind and saturation, their root systems now standing over ten feet high. Road signage stood at 30º angles where it hadn’t been shattered or blown out by the wind; fences leaned precariously toward homes or into traffic, warped into ribbons. There was something like this on every block, and it all said the same thing: You’re going to be living in the dark for a long time.
The City of Tampa had planned well. Traffic light generators came back online so quickly at major intersections that it was impossible to tell if they’d ever been out. The Tampa Police Department, meanwhile, planned like police.
Florida and Nebraska Avenues run north-south through the city, half a mile apart from each other. From Hillsborough Avenue, north to Busch Boulevard, Florida is nearing complete gentrification, while Nebraska is still effectively The Black Street. For three nights, each street stood in more or less total darkness, and I found myself cruising up and down both, trying to keep from going stir crazy alone in a dark house without interfering with rescue efforts, charging my phone in my car. As I drove, I listened to the community-conscious station 88.5 WMNF remind people that intersections with disabled stoplights become four-way stops during breaks from its Mexican Darkwave programing.
Each time I passed through the three miles of Florida Avenue from Hillsborough to Busch, I saw between three and four police cars parked with their lights on at larger intersections to bring traffic to a four-way stop. Meanwhile, a minimum of five to six police cars spanned the 1.5 miles of Nebraska from Sligh Avenue to Busch Boulevard, with a minimum of four active patrols constantly rolling down the street or gunning their engines to zip off toward or return from the neighborhoods in the Darker East.
True to form, four days after the storm passed and less than 24 hours after I broke down and posted online that I would be spending my evenings reading by camping lantern for a long time, the power came back on. (Such a powerful reverse jinx tempts one to bait other outcomes: The Yankees will win the World Series! I’ll never have a regular, fairly compensated job again! Certainly not as a content writer!) By then, reality had been back for a while.
The houses in my old neighborhood came with pre-cut metal shutters for the windows. When 2017’s Hurricane Irma looked like it might strike Tampa Bay with Category 5 force, everyone dug the shutters out for the first time and helped each get them mounted on houses. I remember standing on a ladder, trading jokes and swapping tools with a neighbor who once made as if to hit me at a party because he told me a story about some new victimization being forced on then-candidate Donald Trump and I replied, “Not a single detail of that is true.” It was nice to see that even Republicans were happy to disprove the conservative dogma that all human interactions should be plotted out as Hobbesian war of all against all. But, as with Irma, the palpable humanity of everyone around started to bleed away as soon as everyone stopped sharing the same danger.
I made my daily rounds, hunting for ice to keep the contents of the fridge and freezer from being a total loss. Despite some provisional success at crowdsourcing ice sightings on WhatsApp and reducing the supplies of frozen chicken breasts and pork chops by grilling myself turf ’n’ turf meals each night, the chilled-food rescue mission failed by Saturday the 12th.
Still, I kept checking in each day at the same convenience stores and groceries, and made a point of parking a few blocks down from the rare gas station still pumping fuel and walking over to check things out. I’d try to find the employee who looked the least in extremis and ask them how they were doing. The finer details were a bit different—exasperation with the cops’ idea of traffic control on the lanes leading to the gas station, annoyance at the discovery that their nationwide chain didn’t think to ship extra beer before a hurricane. They all shared the same basic complaint, though: “People have been good except for these white boys.” By which they meant grown-ass men.
One day, just to feel a different kind of tedium, I spent a small bit of forever in line at a Wendy’s across the street from a shining Wawa on a hill—one that had never stopped pumping—talking with a tall, barrel-chested Black gentleman with a nasty limp. He would have seemed almost courtly apart from the damp washcloth he wore on top of his bald head.
“It’s always two white boys in a damn truck,” he told me. True to form, as I waited for my order, I watched as two white dads across the street erupted from a gleaming Dodge Ram and a gleaming Chevy Silverado. By then, parked police cruisers had cordoned off access to Wawa’s parking lot and pumps for days. It wasn’t immediately clear what either dad was aggrieved about. But they proceeded to beef, and were quickly separated by a detachment of the Tampa Police who hadn’t yet been deployed to menace would-be laundromat thieves on Nebraska.
Things had been getting that way ever since a few white Entitled Americans, already anxious to preserve their slice of civilization from the threat of surviving the storm, started isolated rebellions against common inconvenience. Generators were starting to sputter, and sometimes you could feel in your bones that you’d just met someone running their central air on them instead of just the fridge.
It wasn’t like that on Thursday night, though, 24 hours after the storm. Everything was still out, except for traffic lights, the community-minded ABC Pizza and the two Wawas. At one, the beef jerky displays had been laid waste, and the beer, including the walk-in cooler, had been picked all but clean. People were still ordering subs, with the touchscreen computers disabled because so much was out of stock that the deli workers were shouting out what was left when people walked up.
There was a line more than 30 people deep for the register, and not a soul was complaining. Everyone smiled on entry at the first sensation of air conditioning, and they smiled again at the opportunity to talk to a person, a real live human they didn’t even know. It was heartwarming to know that we all had the same amount of nothing, that we all shared nothing, and that in spite of that, we all somehow were going to be the best behaved and in the best mood we’d be in public for the year. Maybe until the next one.
