Succumbing to the Raging Hurricanes

Hurricanes Helene and Milton shattered so many lives in Florida, North Carolina, Appalachia, Georgia, and Tennessee that it is hard to imagine that hurricanes would stay so strong inland, so far from the ocean and become more powerful overland.

They destroyed large swaths of Floridian land and forested mountains, taking everything down with furious and fast swirling waters that disappeared entire communities and buried everything in its path under mudslides, sand, and deep water. The horror of humans, animals, and things, large things, adrift in fast moving massive bodies of water is often impossible to escape, not even in trees or on rooftops.

The thought of staying put in your home, barely protected by a foundation or by four pillars while rapid waters are entering through every crevice, door, opening, and window, ripping it apart to flood every space in its path, is hard to fathom.

Two of our close neighbors on Siesta Key had to endure such horror – a young man, paralyzed and left in his wheelchair, unable to escape fast enough on his own, found in water up to his neck, and the elderly gentleman who lived only because he floated on his refrigerator door.

Entire families drowned in NC, and many were never found. Help came too late, and it was inadequate. We have money and personnel to help others around the world, but we neglect our own. Thank God for churches, communities, and individuals who came to the rescue of those alive and in dire need of food, clean water, medicine, a shower, and clean clothes!

We were forced to evacuate from a hotel in Sarasota and we chose to go south to Miami to escape the wrath of the incoming hurricane Milton. We did not return because there was no house to return to, it had been flooded twice. We must make the painful and costly decision to demolish for lack of flood insurance. In 80 years of existence, no hurricane has flooded the area in the ancestral beach cottage.

How many times in history have there been two such powerful hurricanes, back-to-back, hitting the same areas on such a large swath of 600-800 miles, with catastrophic storm surges, wind damage, tornadoes, and such far inland flooding?

Most older people living in these homes will not return and will have to sell unless they can afford to rebuild to code, high off the ground. The real estate jackals out of Miami who had been hounding homeowners on the island to sell, will finally get their wish. The government or their rich corporate cronies will own the land in the most desirable place of real estate, transforming it into their paradise or the “paradise” the 15-minute cities, or re-wilding it per U.N. Agenda 2030.

The raging waters have reshaped the landscape and the mountain areas of North Carolina and Appalachia. People wonder what caused two hurricanes to follow the same path, two weeks apart, flooding with surgical precision the same areas in Florida – the land slated for 15-minute cities in Asheville, Tampa, and one specific county in Florida where most of the land is already owned by one individual.

Each home destroyed had a story. Our beach house has been in the family for 80 years. It never flooded even when it was built on the beach in 1945. At that time, there was nothing on the beach except sand, sea gulls, and seashells.

The beach cottage was brought to its current location in the 1950s. In the 1990s, the interior was modernized and enlarged by one more bedroom and another bath. It was not fancy, but it was a perfect beach house with a lot of memories of several generations of children’s laughter, playing in the sand, frolicking at water’s edge, and family members growing old in its protective walls, watched by the Cereus cactus still standing guard in the middle of the front yard, surrounded by flood debris and sand.

Four weeks before the flood, the cereus cactus had 47 blooms in one night – quite early and unusual in my 30 years of watching it every October, as if it knew that the house would be destroyed less than a month later and wanted to put on a show of beauty. It broke Ray’s heart as he mourned the loss of this cottage, a part of his identity, family’s history, and place on Earth.

Forced to evacuate from the Sarasota hotel, we chose to go south to Miami, a place we never wanted to visit, nor would we ever go back to, we found the teal blue ocean placid for one day, so unusual for the normally angry Atlantic waters.

We entered it with anxiety and dread as our legs were sinking in soft sand above our ankles. The pelagic zone at the water’s edge dropped precipitously 2-3 feet with every other step until we were at least ten feet or more underwater, yet so close to the edge of the breaking waves.

The water was a milky teal blue, so opaque that I could not see my hands 3-4 inches under the water. I imagined all sorts of marine life swimming around us in the balmy ocean, sharks, jellyfish, and sting rays. I could not see any little fish darting around us; by contrast, the Gulf waters in Sarasota were teeming with marine life. It was pointless to shuffle our feet on the bottom of these Atlantic waters as we lost contact with it quite quickly and suddenly. The opalescent ocean was warm, and I could feel the currents tugging at our bodies, trying to carry us far out to sea. We swam and treaded water with an incredible amount of energy to stay afloat and close to the water’s edge.

These brief dips in the Atlantic on Miami Beach made us forget temporarily our loss, the pain and the suffering people had to endure from the strange back-to-back hurricanes.

Some people wondered how much geoengineering and weather modification influenced such a disastrous and “rare” occurrence. 

In the grand scheme of life, we are just walnut shells floating on the vast oceans, disappearing to the bottom one by one.