The Report Of My Death Was An Exaggeration

[journeybear]

I hear/see people have been concerned about my welfare during the hurricane. I weathered it just fine, in a solid building where I'd been invited by a friend - who then left town, doubting his own sagacity, apparently. I was fine, the place was fine, my place was fine, my instruments are fine, all my important papers are fine - really, not as awful as one might well imagine.

The aftermath has been much worse, dealing with lack of water, electricity, relief from the heat, and piles upon piles of debris - trees, branches, and everywhere, brown leaves and dust. This town needs a shower badly, a good soaking rainstorm to wash away all this ... this fall. Our verdant paradise looks horribly autumnal. But a lot of restaurants have been cooking food and serving it for free. It's been a grand gesture of community spirit. There have been others, but this is easy to point to as goodwill in action.

I do still have a day job, and the company has been taking care of its employees, paying us even while we've been unable to work. But we - and I mean a skeleton crew of my boss and me, everyone else having left - have been cleaning up the place, undoing the storm preps, and getting ready for the first cruise ship to arrive since the storm bore down on us, tomorrow. Soon enough, things will get back to abnormal.

Thursday, Key Westers gathered at Mallory Square for a pop-up celebration of our community spirit. A variety of food and drink items were provided for only one dollar, all proceeds going to Sister Season Fund, which helps locals working in our tourism/entertainment industries in times of need, and three musical acts played. Well, four - I played in between the first two, and got to do only one song. Well, if I only get to do one song it will be this one, nearly every time. Thankfully, my buddy Steve Craigo got nearly all of it on video, because it was a heartfelt rendition. I was moved and inspired by so many examples of people's resilience, determination, and goodwill in dealing with this massive natural disaster and its aftermath. As I said at the end, "Key West will survive and thrive!" Enjoy!

The video isn't much, so I offer the audio as well.

[BrianWilliam]

Sounds like a great community. Definitely a great title. Take care and best of luck.

[foldedpath]

Good to hear from you, man. I'm a South Florida native, second-generation born in Miami and spent a lot of time down in the Keys. When Andrew hit, my neighborhood was without power for 2 months. I hope FPL can better that record for the Keys. My neighborhood hung together, and it sounds like yours is too. Best wishes for a swift recovery. The Keys are like nowhere else in the continental USA, a very special place.

[HonketyHank]

Thanks for taking the time to post. All the best with the recovery process.

[journeybear]

When Andrew hit, my neighborhood was without power for 2 months. I hope FPL can better that record for the Keys.

We don't have FPL, so ... yeah. I was without power for a week, though nearby neighborhoods had it for 2-3 days before I did. Kind of frustrating. Neighbors two doors down ran a generator and offered their juice for charging devices - a big help.

On the other hand, the complete blackout provided a wonderful ambiance of quiet, apart from the occasional generator and alarm. And Monday night the sky was clear and dark and we could see the Milky Way. That probably hasn't happened here in decades, and may never happen again. It was a magical, soul-stirring sight I will never forget.

[CES]

JB, I'm so happy to hear you're safe and the Keys are coming together to care for everyone. I'll continue to pray for your safety and whatever prosperity you can manage during clean up. And, having run from 5 hurricanes in 7 years in Charleston, SC, I hope none of the pending storms head your way...Peace, brotha!

[Beanzy]

Great to hear you’re still afloat, keeping the company & job going is a real plus, fingers crossed for the long term & a quick bounce back in tourist numbers.
I hope you get the Loons going again soon too, it’s fun watching those videos.

Alll the best

[journeybear]

Thanks for the shout-out re: The Loons. Luna is currently in Thailand. The plan is for her to come here the first week of November, just as the peak season begins, and get the jump on bookings. I'm going to get to work on that next week - which I hope isn't too soon for some of these places, given the more pressing concerns of restoration - as well as completing the daunting task of compiling a CD from our recordings.

And thanks, Brian. I decided to use the actual quote by Mark Twain, rather than any of its misquoted variations, which are much more commonly seen.

[Timbofood]

Yep, leave it to you to be accurate in the quotation department!
Glad you are not suffering any greater miseries that you are, and are safe.
I have a friend in Ocala, safe as well but good grief what a mess, I'm sure you are sharing the same small watercraft.
My brother in St. Pete,said his condo is just fine, they had water, wine and lead so, he was not worried.

[Bertram Henze]

Another obituary that missed fire *


(*) a modified quote of Neil Munroe's

[Mark Gunter]

Great to read your report and hear firsthand of your safety, and it's good to hear your optimism that all will be right back to abnormal again soon! Best to ya!

[Jeff Mando]

I'm glad you're OK, JB!

[stevedenver]

I'm glad you're OK, JB!

Yes, me too.

[Willie Poole]

Good to hear from J.B.....the storms usually are over in about an hour but the clean up time takes months...The park where I used to live down there near Lakeland got hit pretty bad and friends sent me some photos and I am sure glad that I sold my house now although the one I had didn`t have any damage done to it....

Willie

[journeybear]

Over in an hour ... that'll be the day! That would be one wimpy storm. I've found hurricanes take some 6-8 hours to pass through. This one being so wide, and so slow-moving, and the eyewall coming within some 20-25 miles of us, it took three times as long as uual, over 20 hours, for it to quit clobbering us. It wasn't all that bad, but it wasn't all that much fun, either.

Yeh, Tkimbo, you know how I am about inaccuracies. And I sh' 'nuff ain't about to use a misquote as a thread title - even if the real thing isn't quite as snappy as the misquote. What can one do?

[Teak]

Yeah, JB; I thought the same as the others when I first saw your thread title: He misquoted. Glad that you cleared up OUR misunderstanding. It was interesting to see the handwritten letter from whence a thousand misquotes have spread.

Good to see that you and Key West survived Irma.

[journeybear]

The page I found about this calls it one of the most misquoted misquotes ever. I shan't disagree. I have never seen it used accurately. Ever! There's a great quote in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" -"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Seems something like that happened with this quip.

[journeybear]

This is something I whipped up to post on facebook, partly in response to a friend with a really big mouth posting bout how he was mad at people who stayed - somewhat tongue-in-cheek, somewhat sincerely - due to him being annoyed with having to worry about his friends. I learned there have been long-winded discussions or arguments among Stayers and Goers, emotions running high on both sides. Steering clear of all that. But I still felt it behooved me to explain why I stayed.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

This is really about me, but I think a lot of people who stayed feel this way, so I'll leave it in the collective "we" format.

We stayed because we live here. This is our home. We hoped to wake up the day after the storm and continue to do what we would have done the day before. We don't have anywhere else to go, leastways nowhere else like this, where, however odd it may be, our lives make sense. We're a part of Key West; Key West is a part of us. We just want our lives to go back to abnormal. And thanks to the efforts of repairmen, who have been working hard since Day One, this is coming together soon. That is regardless of who needs extra help and the status of their preparedness.

Personally, I was prepared. I had plenty of food and water. My neighbors, who tease me about my stash of canned food - well, who's laughing now? They'd be welcome to some, of course. For a price! Sure, I've accepted the generosity of free water and ice - cold water is a sweet treat, for sure - and the free meals from restaurants have been heartwarming, but none of that was necessary; it was more uplifting than anything else, a true example of community spirit in action.

And I've been contributing since Day One. I was out there Sunday in the rain, clearing trees and branches from White Street so cars could get by. I cleared my street for two and a half blocks, getting trees and branches out of the way, even downed wires wrapped around branches, and cut a hole in the branches of the tree that had fallen across at the intersection of White Street so that people could walk and even bike through. The only people I'm mad at are the ones who didn't come out to help me during the hours it took this senior citizen to do this, some just sitting on their porches chatting, as if this were some sort of amusement. At least one little old lady came out and thanked me, saying, "I'd help you, but I'm feeling a little poorly." I had to smile and say, "That's all right, ma'am, don't you worry." I should have asked her for a cold drink.

I also was instrumental in getting the CVS on Winn-Dixie open on Day Four, enabling people in New Town to get their medicines. Not a big deal, really, just happened to be at the right place at the right time with the means and mindset to make it happen. And I helped clear the mess out of the backyard at the place I stayed, including getting two whole trees out. And I put enough of a buzz in Ed Swift's ear about the notion of rent amnesty that he decided to let everyone renting an apartment from HTA have a free month. [Ed. note: That's my day job; he is the head honcho.] (My idea was to have him talk to the City Council about passing such an ordinance for all landlords, but this is a start.) I daresay none of any of this would have happened if I weren't here.

So I'm glad I stayed. Even if it was really because I couldn't afford to leave.

[Randi Gormley]

Just another note that it's good to hear from you. We all worried because we could see the Keys got hit hard. Glad it worked out.

[bratsche]

Thanks for your posts and glad you made it through okay, journeybear! I was concerned for you, and for all the cats & staff at the Hemingway House. I'm glad you got your electricity back so soon. The power grid in this state really does seem to have been meaningfully upgraded since the storms of previous decades. After Andrew, Frances, Jeanne and Wilma, we were without juice for 10-14 days each time. After Wilma, we finally bought a generator. Judging from neighborhood damages, Irma was at least as bad as those (here in Palm Beach county - I lived in Broward for Andrew), but we had power back in 4 days this time, and our biggest gripe is having too much leftover gasoline. I can identify with feeling like it's autumn, there's a lot of falling leaves and bare trees here, too. Our streets are still lined with giant piles of tree branches. fence pieces and assorted vegetation debris waiting for eventual removal. The joys of Florida.

bratsche

[journeybear]

Hi bratsche - Forgot you live there. Please forgive me for wishing Irma would make its turn earlier - as they had been predicting as late as the Wednesday before - and go up along the East Coast, a little offshore even. That would have put you more in harm's way, in the cause of sparing us here. I guess it's irrelevant now, and anyway, human capabilities are dwarfed by the power of a hurricane.

We were out of power for nearly eight days - well, I was, though some nearby neighborhoods got theirs back 2-3 days sooner. That's the longest I've gone. Even Wilma's effects wore off after just three days - though the flooding put us under for months - and since she struck late in October, and a cold front followed immediately after, it wasn't so bad. This time around, the heat was stultifying. I took to lying in a cold tub (cold is a relative term in these parts) when it got to be too much. I searched through the powered neighborhoods for a solution - some porch on an unoccupied house with an external outlet into which I could plug a fan - to no avail. It would have been a relief to get a good night's sleep, even just one. Being without even little things to which one has become accustomed induces appreciation for them all the much more. In other words, you never miss your water till the well runs dry. I definitely see the value in a generator now. Living and learning ...

[foldedpath]

We were out of power for nearly eight days - well, I was, though some nearby neighborhoods got theirs back 2-3 days sooner. That's the longest I've gone. Even Wilma's effects wore off after just three days - though the flooding put us under for months - and since she struck late in October, and a cold front followed immediately after, it wasn't so bad. This time around, the heat was stultifying. I took to lying in a cold tub (cold is a relative term in these parts) when it got to be too much. I searched through the powered neighborhoods for a solution - some porch on an unoccupied house with an external outlet into which I could plug a fan - to no avail. It would have been a relief to get a good night's sleep, even just one. Being without even little things to which one has become accustomed induces appreciation for them all the much more. In other words, you never miss your water till the well runs dry. I definitely see the value in a generator now. Living and learning ...

Yeah, nothing like an extended power outage to make anyone in South Florida realize how much AC has made living there tolerable (by modern standards).

My neighborhood in South Miami was out for close to 2 months after Hurricane Andrew. By the time power came back and the AC kicked in, we had already adapted to a new lifestyle of backyard BBQ and showers several times a day just to keep cool. People lived in this climate before air conditioning, but we get used to it now, running between AC in our cars and AC in every indoor building. We've done a number on the mosquitoes too, compared to what it used to be like back during the Spanish occupation, and the native population before that.

I used to run overnight kayak camping tours out of Chokoloskee and Everglades City into the national park. Haven't heard much about that area, I hope some of the historic buildings out there like the Smallwood Store survived. There's an old Indian shell mound at the mouth of the river near there, which is how the original inhabitants rode out a storm like this.

[journeybear]

Yes, AC has made life here bearable for us puny humans. I joke how, just as folks up north huddle around the fireplace or stove in the winter, so do we huddle around the AC in the summer here. Not kidding. My bed is right next to a window unit, and an oscillating fan distributes its output as effectively as possible.

Haven't heard reports about the areas you mentioned. My guess is such sparsely populated areas don't get the attention more populated ones do. The focus of reporting always seems to be on property damage. Because of this, I expect there won't be much more media coverage of what we endured. The vast majority of damage here was to trees, whose value have no dollar amount associated with them.

[journeybear]

After several attempts, I finally managed to upload the aforementioned song to youtube. Glad of it, as this was a very good rendition, largely due to good monitors. Even that accidental sus4 chord is OK ...

If anyone wants to know why I prefer oval-holed Gibson mandolins from 100 years ago, I shall offer this as an example, saying something akin to, "It's a fine chording instrument. Listen to how it rings."

[bratsche]

The vast majority of damage here was to trees, whose value have no dollar amount associated with them.

We were in the eye of Wilma in Oct., 2005. There was a big Hong Kong orchid tree in the front yard that had survived Frances and Jeanne the previous year, thanks to our faithful, careful thinning of its branches. Wilma was unpredictable, very late in the season, and we didn't know until the last couple days that we'd be likely in its direct path, so we failed to thin it out in time. During the storm when the winds calmed as the eye began to pass over, we took a walk outside to survey the neighborhood. First thing we noticed was the HKO tree dangling over the street at a 45 degree angle. Not good at all! I imagined our first unpleasant task the next day would be chainsawing the thing to make local traffic possible.

We went inside when the winds began whipping up again. When the second half of the storm was over, to my surprise (but I should have known better, since the winds change direction in the second half), the tree was down completely and uprooted, but lying across our front lawn. Imagine the force of winds that could blow it back upright from a 45 degree list, and down again in the opposite direction! And I'm talking about a tree 25 feet high branching to probably 35 wide at the time, with a trunk base of around 15 inches diameter, that pretty well filled up most of the front yard when it fell. Fortunately, it was planted close to the street, and not to the house!

The sequel to this tale is that I felt badly about losing a beautiful tree, but was delighted in the spring to find a couple twigs from it had taken root around the yard. I nurtured one in a pot until it was about 24 inches high and had branched out, then I planted it in the original tree's spot. The other one was more mature, but intertwined with an ornamental close to the house, and I had to liberate it by sacrificing the ornamental. I replanted it across the yard from the first. Once established, Hong Kong Orchid trees literally grow like weeds! (My husband calls them ugly trees for this reason, though they're really pretty, because they take so much maintenance work to keep them looking nice.) Now, only 12 years after Wilma, I have two of them just as big as the first (I'm a glutton for punishment as I get older, aren't I? LOL), and I managed to thin them adequately a week before Irma, so they are fine. The winds browned the leaves so almost all fell off, but new green ones are growing back already. I'm sure buds will be evident soon for their glorious winter pinkish-magenta blooms.

So, new trees grow and replace the old. The cycle of life continues.

bratsche