Florida Flip Side

The howl of wind is an unbroken and relentless moan.

On most days of the year Florida’s east coast offers a benign climate of warmth and endless sunshine, brushed by the gentle hand of Mother Nature with afternoon showers and gentle breezes. But stay here long enough and another side soon sends a reminder that climate even in paradise is not always meant to comfort our fragile constitutions. That less friendly face has been our companion around here over the past several days. We’ve been spared the snowstorms making conditions as bad as those in the northeast, and neither have problems with power been our particular bad luck. Life on the eastern edge of Florida these past days has been more a battle with wind and water.

Warning flags are flying and rip currents are swirling, with windy conditions and rough surf describing the state of life on the beach this week. Surfers are attracted to the kind of wave action out there now, but this time there’s something about the current that is keeping everyone out of the water. Word is out that it’s going to stay with us for a couple of more days, wind blowing out of the northeast at about twenty miles and hour, with stronger gusts possible. Strong wind on Sunday and Monday blew piles of seaweed onto the beach, sending out teams of turtle specialists to comb the wrack for tiny hatchlings. Those that hatch on Florida beaches commonly swim out in the water and find patches of seaweed to cling to. When storms wash large amounts of seaweed onto the beach county officials search the seaweed for baby turtles. Wind gusts reached twenty-five miles per hour on Tuesday, bringing in more seaweed and keeping the risk of rip currents high

The nature of rip currents and the risk they pose to swimmers is not clear to many eager to fling themselves into rough water. The dangerous currents form when rough surf washes gullies into offshore sandbars lying perpendicular to the beach. The water rushing through those gullies can trap swimmers, carrying them quickly out to deeper water.

For many with homes just above the beach concerns about rip currents are secondary to the incessant baying of wind tearing over agitated ocean surf. It brings with it an assault of sound, a growing irritation with no ‘off’ button that blows multiplied doses of salt covering everything and leaving all but the hardiest of plants beaten down and half dead.

These are the days when all the attractive elements are missing and the summertime paradise of beach life seems a faraway place. Each day brings thoughts of escaping to a quieter place where windblown salt is not in season. The phone rings and it’s a lady from the local newsletter asking about the chances of an article on “Holidays at the Beach.” Laugh out loud.

The Secret Storm

This past weekend saw the coastal areas of eastern central Florida thrashed whipped, beaten and soaked by a tropical storm that somehow didn’t show up on the crystal ball of weather forecasters. Not only did they not see the storm coming, they ignored its presence once it arrived and began kicking the stuffing out of everything and everyone across a huge swath of eastern Florida. How is it that over a three-day period wind at fifty to fifty-five miles an hour knocking over fences and trees, streets flooded by rain and a power outage lasting for hours, how is it that all that goes unnoticed by television and Internet?

Rising water, bending trees and endless sheets of horizontal rain are bad enough, but the nightmare of this particular storm was a demon wind that never let up for a minute over seventy-two hours, setting loose a howl of sound that grew maddening over long hours. I have read stories about places where the arctic wind blows constantly in a similar moaning wail, and where people get a little nutty after a while. Shades of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1975 The Gulag Archipelago. That was me this past weekend. Try as I might, telling myself it was just a a little wind, to be more patient and occupy myself with something—all a futile attempt that didn’t help to assuage the ongoing nervous irritation.

My sanity held and Monday morning brought blessed relief. Would like to say that the sudden quiet was astounding, but true quiet is a quality not present when home is so near the ocean, when waves never cease to roll and crash onto shore. It was the absence of wind that hinted at something like quiet. I stood for a while in early morning light tinged with the promise of an unclouded rising sun, stood surveying the post-storm scene and making a quick count of the clean up ahead. Downed palm fronds, tumbled chairs scattered and upended in flower beds, broken walkway lights, flattened sections of fence, someone’s twisted table crash-landed in a heap among the bulbine flowers…and then attention turned to the salty, sandy mess on my patio, windows and doors.

News to no one, a three-day wind blast of salt and sand is lethal to shallow rooted patio plants and three of them were stone dead. Two other plants were moved inside on Friday, and the heavy geranium managed to hold on outdoors, but just barely. Glass sliders were murky with sand and dried mud carried by wind and rain. The front door had gone from milky green to greenish brown, earthworms had for some reason taken shelter beneath the doormats, both front and back, perhaps escaping the inundated ground.

The patio and its three glass doors required two hours to put back into shape. Sweeping, flooding with water, scrubbing and wiping took care of the biggest mess, but then the dead plants had to be uprooted and glass polished. Thanks to my German friend’s gift of a magic cleaning rag brought from Frankfurt, the front door was easily cleaned, along with the screen door. Everything finally looked good enough to leave and work elsewhere.

Along the seawall in front of the deck I collected a garbage can full of plastic debris, shoes, glass bottles, rope, Styrofoam, rubber balls and a Maidenform bra with barnacles. The thick layer of seaweed I left for either the beach sanitation buggies or someone else with a hankering to shovel up a half-ton of soggy, pungent wrack.

There is a building a half mile up the road that has a long row of globe lights along the length of the property. I drove past there on Tuesday and saw that all but three of the lights had been smashed by the wind. The little ice cream store farther along no longer has a sign, it too smashed. Property damage for sure, but count it fortunate that no one was hit by a falling tree or windblown glass.

Still asking myself, where were the weather forecasters on Thursday last?