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In Wilma's Aftermath
Saturday, October 29, 2005
I'm writing this in the airport in Dayton, Ohio, early Saturday morning while I wait for a flight home to Pennsylvania. The last time I checked in, it was Monday night and I had just rode out Hurricane Wilma in Fort Lauderdale. The story got worse before it got better.
When I signed off, I was sitting in the hotel bar, which was being powered by gasoline generators, sipping a Heineken. Shortly after filing my blog entry, the hotel shut off the water, including toilets. Within an hour every last bottle of drinking water in the place was gone. I slept in pitch blackness,thankful that my window opened to let in fresh air. The next morning I made my way down to the ballroom-turned-hurricane-shelter, and the staff gamely presented the best breakfast they could -- eggs, toast, yogurt and orange juice. "Don't tell me there's no coffee," I said.
"There's no coffee," the waiter said.
"I need coffee."
"We have no water."
No water I could handle, but no coffee? It was about to get ugly. Could things possibly get worse? A few minutes later, the concierge told me she was kicking me out.
"The hotel is shutting. Everyone must be out," she said.
Every traffic light in the three-county area was out. The roads were filled with debris. Many of my fellow guests had no transportation of any kind. "So where are we supposed to go?" I asked.
"I'm sorry, sir," she said, averting her eyes. That was it. The hotel was closing; the guests were on their own.
When things fall apart, they fall apart quickly and utterly. Just twenty-four hours earlier, this hotel lobby was the model of polished-marble accommodation, a place where every need, even the most ridiculously self-indulgent, is met. And now here we were in a place with no power, no water, no plumbing, plywood over broken windows, soggy carpeting -- and averted eyes.
I packed my suitcase and headed to the parking lot where my rental car sat beneath a fallen tree. Another guest helped me lift the branches off the hood so I could back out. The paint on the hood was scoured to bare metal; the trunk was creased by a steel hotel sign that fell during the storm; but the car ran, and that was all that mattered. I made my way cautiously -- each intersection treated as a giant four-way stop -- to the expressway and began driving north. The damage was breathtaking. Giant lengths of guardrail were peeled back and tangled like spaghetti. Overhead expressway signs were bent in half. Light posts sat askew. And this was only a Category 2 storm, with winds that topped out somewhere about 115 m.p.h. It gave me an appreciation for what those living in the path of Cat 5 Katrina had faced.
I poked my way out of Broward County, past my former home in Boca Raton, and the exit for my old neighborhood in West Palm Beach, the one I describe in the opening chapter of Marley & Me. Traffic was thick; I wasn't the only one who had the bright idea to flee this mess. I nervously watched the fuel gauge; no gasoline stations were opened anywhere.
An hour north of West Palm Beach, I stopped at a rest area. The restrooms were chained shut. Another 45 miles up the road, now on Florida's Turnpike, I pulled into a service plaza that had power. Cars waiting for gas snaked a half mile back onto the turnpike. The line for food at Burger King was a good hundred people deep. I fought my way to the coffee counter and filled up. The first sip gave me new hope.
Meanwhile, the travel agent called; she had found a flight out of Orlando. Things were shaping up. I reached the car-rental return on vapors. The rental folks were decidedly unsympathetic. It didn't matter that the car was damaged by an act of nature while parked at a hotel; they treated it no differently than had I, say, crashed it into a pre-school while driving blind drunk. I filled out forms, signed God knows what and rushed to catch the flight, arriving at the gate with seven minutes to spare.
When we lifted off I breathed a sigh of relief -- and felt a pang of empathy for my many friends in South Florida who could not, as I was doing, just run away from this coast-to-coast mess. They owned homes. They faced days ahead without power and weeks of repairs and headaches. A few hours later I was back in Pennsylvania with its verdant hills, crisp air and changing fall colors, The place never looked better to me.
...
I was home just one day and then it was back to the airport before dawn, this time to head to Cleveland and then on to Dayton. Both signings went well and I met a lot of wonderful people, nearly every one of them with bad-dog stories to rival anything Marley had done. One woman told me her Lab had swallowed a pork roast whole after swiping it off the dinner table. Another said her Lab snuck out on the porch during trick-or-treating and consumed 65 Reese's peanut-butter cups, foil wrappings and all, with no ill effects. Another said her Lab had just eaten an entire cherry pie left unprotected on the counter. Are we detecting a trend here, people?
At Books & Co., a very cool bookstore in Dayton, customers were invited to bring their Labrador retrievers for my reading and signing. And bring them, they did. There were at least 10 Labs in the audience, all desperately happy to be out for a night on the town. It was a total slobber fest. Needless to say, I was totally upstaged, but, hey, I didn't mind. Since being on the road, I've been suffering Lab withdrawal, so it was good to get my doggie fix. By the time the reading was over, I was covered in dog hair and drool. Total bliss.
posted by John Grogan at 4:02 PM
 
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