Can I buy your bike?
I decided to turn off the TV because the weather channel wasn’t doing me any good. I had made the decision to stay and there wasn’t any changing that.
The hour before the storm made landfall was exceptionally uneventful. There were no more preparations to make, just unsettled waiting.
Looking South over the water on St. Andrew’s Bay, I could see the storm approaching. Even though the storm was still miles away, the most disturbing part at that point was the roar of the wind. Like a fleet of helicopters barreling towards our town and there was no possible change of course.
My wife had taken the kids to Tuscaloosa. We joked before the storm that it would be just bad enough to knock out power to give her an extra day off and a good excuse to go to the Alabama football game that Saturday.
The three of them were safe and away from the storm. I needed to stay to make sure that if something happened to our house or my wife’s business, I could remedy it immediately to further reduce any damages. My wife is an owner of a business and we were in the process of buying a new building. We had three buildings in Hurricane Michael’s path. My goal was to get everything back to normal before my family made it back to town.
I anxiously watched as the rain bands began to hit the windows. When the first trees started to fall in the yard my cell phone still had service. Even though I was in contact with my family, I chose not to let them know trees were starting to fall.
Trees falling meant things were getting bad. I didn’t want them to know things were getting bad. I knew it was time to bunker down when debris started to fly horizontally across the yard. Our two dogs and I nestled into our area of safety in the laundry room. As the storm raged, I could feel the house shaking and the sound of a freight train filled the air. Before cell service went out my wife sent me a chart which showed the expected timeline of the storm. When I felt the storm intensifying, I looked at the chart. Two more hours to go.
I closed my eyes and imagined I was on a turbulent airplane that would soon land. That all changed when the smoke alarms activated. My first thought was, “Oh my gosh, my house is burning down in the middle of a hurricane.”
In fact, the alarms were sounding because a cascade of water was pouring into the house and right through what seemed like every vent and light socket. I spent the last two hours of the storm using every trash can, storage bin, ice cooler, pot and pan to catch as much water as I could. It felt like a futile exercise because every time I dumped one bucket out another was already overflowing. I couldn’t just sit idle, I had to do something to try to save our home.
The storm passed and I went outside for the first time. It felt ironic that the weather turned into a beautiful day. The front yard had at least 20 trees down but luckily, none had hit the house. As the sun was starting to set, I made my preparations for the night to come with no power.
I made dinner with some food we had left in the fridge. I mopped up the floors and hung wet towels out to dry. Little did I know that in a week the floors and walls that I worked hard to keep dry would be taken down to the subfloor and the studs.
Back in Tuscaloosa, my wife was watching the news coverage. She saw the flattened buildings on 23rd Street, very close to her office. She had it worse than I did. I knew that I was fine, but she didn’t. Everything she was seeing made her doubt my well being.
I heard someone beating on my front door. I knew looting would be a concern. The front door was jammed shut from the storm and didn’t open any more so I went to the side door. I opened it to find our friend who lived a over a mile away. My wife had gotten in touch with him and he had hiked for hours to get to my house to check on me. I have so much appreciation that he would come that far for me.
His phone had reception but the battery died before he got to my house. I supplied him with a flashlight and he began the trek back to his house. It took him several hours to get back in the dark but when he did, he was able to charge his phone and get a message back to my wife that I was safe. She said those were the worst 12 hours of her life.
The next morning, I needed to get out of the neighborhood to check on our office buildings. I had taken a survival course the year before so the next morning I packed a bag that would have made the survival instructors proud.
I put on my running shoes and started the five mile trek across town to 23rd Street. I passed a neighbor who said, “Where are you running to?” My reply was simple, “I have places I need to get to.”
I stopped at a friend’s house. No one was home so I tossed a note inside their house through a broken window to let them know I was fine.
I ran passed McKenzie Park and saw an American Flag, torn and battered, laying on the ground. I folded it up and put it in my backpack. The flag deserved to be preserved after what we all had been through. I kept running. I passed a group of people on bikes. I offered them $100 to buy a bike. They said no.
I asked a guy in a pick-up truck for a lift. He dropped me off a mile shy of my destination. He also had a bike in the bed of his truck. I offered to buy his bike for $100. He said no.
I ran the rest of the way to the building we were in the process of buying. It did well. We were lucky. I still needed a way to get around town. I stopped at an apartment complex to find a group of residents standing outside. I asked again if I could buy a bike.
As I expected, one resident said I couldn’t buy their bike, but then surprised me by saying I could borrow it for as long as I needed, free of charge.
The bike had character. Instead of brakes, you had to drag your feet on the ground to come to a stop. It wouldn’t have won any races but it got me around town for the next several days.
I made it to my wife’s current office. Total destruction. The roof was gone and every room had a collapsed ceiling. There wasn’t anything I could do to mitigate the damage, so I secured what I could, put the backup hard drives in my backpack and moved on.
I stopped at the hospital and convinced the security guards to let me make a phone call. It was a short call to my wife to let her know I was okay, the house had water in it, the old office was gone but the new office was fine. Her response was simple, “Ok, I’m coming to help.” She coordinated for our children to stay with their grandmother and made the drive into Panama City.
Over the next several days, my wife and I would work from sun up to sun down to clean up what we could.
We heard that the Toyota dealership was giving out hot food. As we were waiting in line my wife looked at me and said, “We should be the ones helping.”
In most situations we are fortunate enough to be able to help and to give to others. Right now, we didn’t have any food to eat ourselves. It was a humbling moment. Everyone had been set back to the same point.
Six days after the storm we drove to Walton County to celebrate my wife’s birthday. We all needed a break from our new reality and this offered us a few hours of normalcy.
Grandma drove the kids down from North Carolina. It was the first time I had seen our two children since before the storm. Our embrace seemed to last for an eternity. No one wanted to let go. My wife snapped a picture. To most people it would look like any other family photo, but it wasn’t just a normal photo, it was something more.
Our children have been relentlessly resilient through it all. As we drive through town and pass the destruction, they have turned into mini property appraisers. “Damaged. Severely damaged. Oh, that one is a total loss.”
We are slowly getting our lives back together. There are good days and bad days, but progress is being made.
The company I work for was flexible with my schedule those first few weeks after the storm.
Three months after the storm I returned the borrowed bike to the rightful owner. I was grateful of their generosity.
After four months of construction, my wife’s office opened to rave reviews in her new location. Now we are focused on home repairs.
The storm seemed to take away so much and getting back to our daily routine is an important aspect of pursuing my new goals. Normalcy and happiness. These goals seem simple but nowadays most people in our area can likely appreciate that they are hard to obtain.