After the Storm [Hurricane Ian 2022]

It’s been intimidating trying to capture the experiences of the storm we just weathered here in southwest Florida. 

The first hurricane I remember was Hurricane Andrew. My family lived in Fort Myers at the time, and our family businesses were on Sanibel Island. For Hurricane Andrew we closed up our little mom-and-pop style motels on the barrier island and turned the bad weather into a sort of vacation. As with any hurricane, we had to wait to let the storm get a little bit closer before we ran too far, and when we did go we ended up in Orlando. 

I was little at the time. Knowing my family, we probably made as much fun out of it as possible in celebration of my 6th birthday which arrived while we were waiting to see if we’d have a home to go back to. 

Andrew was a category 5 hurricane, currently the highest rating the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale will score. I can still remember the destruction that waited for us when we returned home to Fort Myers and Sanibel after our run from that storm was over.

As young as I was, my main interaction with cleanup was playing games with the exposed root systems of felled Australian Pines that crowded my play spaces in the months after the storm. As I grew up, my role in the cleanup and recovery grew with me.

There have been dozens of other storms since Andrew, between 1992 Ian’s visit last month. Some were bad enough we ran again, especially if it could double as a mini vacation (like my family and I did with a large chunk of the 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Season that involved 17 named storms, 10 hurricanes, and 6 major hurricanes. Let’s just say that season was a doozy, and we ended up all the way in Columbus Ohio before we made our way back home for the cleanup.) 

Other storms we would ride out at home, boarding up the windows, stocking up on food and batteries, and throwing a “hurricane party” by playing in the yard, eating chili. We’d watch movies until the rain would come, go, and let us move on with our lives.

Some hurricanes are reasonable to ride out from home. They call this “sheltering in place,” and theoretically means minimizing risk (with shutters, sand bags, hiding away the lawn gnome projectiles and pulling the porch furniture inside; getting valuables off the first floor to reduce the damage of a possible flooding storm surge) and making yourself as safe as you can in your home environment. 

We’ve done that sometimes without even boarding up the windows. It’s kinda hard to know with certainty how necessary the shutters or board would be until the storm is close. Too close. Then it’s a real race to get things finished in time. If you prepare too early, you’re likely to wake up the next day and find it’s not even going to make landfall in your state. 

But the most memorable hurricane experiences have always been the ones I’ve ridden out from inside the disaster shelters.

As many hurricanes as I’ve lived through, I’ve only needed to evacuate to a shelter a handful of times. Like when my family was actually living on Sanibel island, not just working there. That was Hurricane Charlie (August 2004). 

I remember packing the usual insane mix of my most precious and irreplaceable possessions (journals and ancient family photographs), and cheap distractions to pass the time (dollar store puzzles, a new knitting project, and during Charlie, printouts of my college syllabi since I was hoping I’d be able to start dual enrollment community college classes in the next week). 

Charlie (what meteorologists  call a “strong category 4,” just like they did with Ian last month) was part of the epic 2004 Atlantic Hurricane season. We packed up our motorhome, tossed all the deck furniture in the pool at our family business, waved goodbye to the Sanibel house, and evacuated the island to dodge the storm. We all hoped to not actually need the hurricane shelter they had converted one of the hockey arenas into, but knew we didn’t want to wait and get trapped on the one lane bridge in traffic.

So with Charlie we spent the night before it made landfall in our motorhome, parked in the lot outside the hurricane shelter. I have this fierce memory of falling into a heavy sleep, haunted by a scrap of Psalm 4 that says “I will lay down in sleep and peace for You Alone o Lord make me to dwell in safety.” I remember turning the words over in my mind as I curled up on the makeshift bed in the motorhome, fell into a dead sleep, and woke up the next morning to learn we’d been strafed by tornadoes throughout the night. It was time to go into the shelter before Charlie hit.

So in we went, down to a backpack and pillow each. As we entered the safety of the shelter, I was amazed at what seemed to be hundreds of people creating a new kind of village inside the sports arena. 

There was food, water, and emergency medical services (which several people needed before the night was out.) But I tucked into a corner with my family and continued reading the book I’d started earlier that week… It was 1984 by George Orwell of all things. I think the book would have made an impact regardless, but from the shared space of a crisis shelter with the murky backdrop of apocalyptic weather, it was a perfect experience for an almost-18-year-old me.

So many lives were lost in those storms, the bubble of contained chaos inside the shelter exchanged for boundless chaos once we left it. 

Sometimes for lesser storms we’d watch the first squall arrive from the Sanibel Lighthouse Beach before tucking in to ride the storm out in the house on Sanibel. Then afterwards I’d return to collect shells churned up by the wild weather. One of my favorite decorations is a shadow box of coquinas I gathered after Charlie, rows on rows in half a dozen colors. I tiptoed through a wrecked tangle of streets, and found beauty on the beach, the surf still roaring with a kind of weather hangover.

As I write this, all I know of my favorite little islands — Sanibel, Captiva, and Cayo Costa Islands — is that whatever is left of them will likely differ a great deal from the place I’ve spent a lion’s share of my life.

Hurricane Ian was also another memorable hurricane shelter experience. 

Back in 2004 I was a bright and shiny high school senior, jazzed to finish up her high school transcript with some college classes. It was before I learned to dance, before I traveled to my first 30 National Parks in my rooftop tent, before I lost my dad, lived on my own, learned to be a business owner, hired and fired my first employees, and grew into a professional coach. 

I  didn’t have a sensory disorder yet.

In November of 2020, I had a sudden onset of hyperacusis and tinnitus. Hyperacusis gave me hearing so fierce I struggled to cope with the normal world of sounds. Ceiling fans, cars starting, closing lids on containers, and normally pitched voices were too much to handle. The world’s volume just got stuck on LOUD.

Thankfully I’ve been seeing massive progress in my sound therapy, slowly prying open my brain’s tolerance of normal sounds. There’s a good chance that one day I might even be “normal” again with sound sensitivity.

But I am not there yet.

I think that’s what made preparing for this hurricane different. If there hadn’t been a clear mandate to evacuate, I would have wanted to stay home and brave the uncertainty rather than be shuttled into a crisis shelter with a thousand people, alarms and announcements, equipment being moved around.

But the storm was that bad, and thankfully I had a safe place to shelter with my family in an incredible operation that supported not just 1000 refugees but served medically needy residents and vulnerable people through the storm.

We went into the shelter Tuesday night, September 27. Because we were volunteering at a family member’s workplace, we sheltered in what would usually be their office. Sleeping bags, a cooler, and my whole office shoved into a backpack…we spent 5 days there, watching a major roadway be reclaimed by the Gulf of Mexico from the office window. It was literally Gulf waves rolling into the parking lot, knocking cars into one another. 

The storm surge was so bad our whole county lost plumbing, including shelters and emergency centers. It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to true crisis conditions, living in an enclosed space with a thousand people and no ability to flush or wash for days on end.

Thank God for hand sanitizer, and the hope of help coming to restore our shattered systems. It was days of all-hands-on-deck, heroic stuff, and the people around me amazed me. My mom who hasn’t practiced bedside nursing in years pulled on her scrubs and took 24 hour shifts as a nurse in the shelter. It was wild to see her with a stethoscope around her neck again. And the heroics didn’t start in the shelter; total strangers helped us protect our home, and neighbors came out of the woodwork to rescue us from a drowned car and get us back into our home after the water receded.

I think there have been times in my life when I would have been in a huge rush to write and publish the “insights” and “lessons learned from the experience.” I would have been in a hurry to metabolize the experience and turn it into teaching points about how to really live, know what matters, or become wilder, braver. 

But not this time.

This time I’m overwhelmed by the grace and help I received through the crisis. Miraculous help. The kind of thing that “just doesn’t happen.” 

I had a different scrap of scripture stapled to my brain during Ian…something my mom wrote on a napkin and left for me to find a few months ago, after I’d had a particularly difficult week with my sensory issues.

She asked that I’d feel God’s care and “a circle of quiet in the clamor of evil.” She must have been reading Psalm 94 that morning, and donated the verse to me in that way she has of doing…a small word at the perfect moment.

I think there’s something more fortifying about the hope of a “circle of quiet in the clamor of evil” than the hope to avoid evil altogether. Whether it’s pulling insights or teaching lessons or strategizing ways to REACH OUR GOALS, I spend plenty of time trying to help people avoid, end, and resolve the evils and noises in their lives. But brilliant as we can sometimes be, evil still arrives. Suffering breaks in.

And though I had a small office to hide in (and was protected from the overwhelming noises of the larger sheltering areas), I have friends who spent hours fearing for their lives, nearly drowning trapped in their homes, stranded while the storm raged on their own rooftops, nearly swept down their streets fleeing to a two-story home next door.

Though we lost one car to the storm surge, totaled and now hosting sea creatures; friends have lost every item they own, homes condemned because the severity of the storm surge meant their home wasn’t just covered in water, it was bathed in raw sewage. There is nothing to salvage from the wreckage, no matter how much they would want to.

Of the 112 people currently counted in hurricane Ian’s direct death toll, I know a handful of them. I also know of people still missing, unaccounted for, who we pray evacuated before they lost contact…but as days drag on with no word you wonder if that number is going to keep climbing.

An evil clamor descended, and it has rattled the normalcy around here. In a way, it was like a COVID Cleanser, shoving us elbow-to-elbow with the rest of our community in a way that started a new chapter of connectedness. It’s hard to find your way back to community after a pandemic remakes your routines. But this storm seems to have done that for me.

I won’t pretend the positive impacts or happy side effects of this disaster somehow make the destruction “worth it.” That would be insane. The kindness and fierce service people have rendered one another during the storm has instead injected a new layer into reality. It is part of the truth, alongside the suffering and losses. 

It has left me grateful in a different way than I have sometimes been. Not a brittle, vulnerable kind of grateful that secretly needs things to keep going well; a kind of gratitude that’s grimy, tired, and oddly bulletproof because of it. 

We don’t really know what we’re capable of until we’re forced to do more than we’ve done before. I watched people rise to challenges all around me, the kind of challenges we truly cannot create for ourselves. No matter how disciplined we are, driven toward goals, or willing to accept the most aggressive accountability on the planet, nothing offers the space to find what we’re made of the way true crisis does.

I don’t think it’s fair to say “we need challenges to become who we’re meant to be” because it could sound like I’m siding the the chaos and destruction that wrecks things for us. But I can say with all my heart that what I want for you more than anything is to receive all of the strength, fierceness, and depth lurking inside the storms you’re facing right now. Tough relationship conflicts, financial insecurity or professional turmoil, health and well being threats… I pray that You will receive a circle of quiet in the midst of the clamor of your struggles, and that in it you would be able to access the treasure buried in the mess. That you too would have a gritty gratitude, a growing sense of strength, and that you would be reinforced and supported by others when you need it most.