The No Name Storm

Anyone who has lived in Florida very long has heard of the No Name Storm.  Strange name for a storm, right? 

This is my journal of that night, written after the fact.  Obviously, I survived.*

March, 1993. 

2 a.m.

            “Get up!” yells my dad to his sleeping household – his twelve-year-old granddaughter, her friend, his 75 year old wife, and myself.  My waking brain hears ominous sounds of water lapping and of wind against the window panes.  This is not good.  We live on the Gulf side of western Florida, and right alongside a canal jutting from the bay, but we never hear water lapping.

            As we stumble out of bed and realize we are sloshing through two inches of water in the living room, our situation begins to dawn on us.  Always survivor-ready, Dad has already gone out to the garage to shut off the electricity.  We don’t have power anyway, but he had realized before any of us that if the water kept rising, we might be electrocuted.

3 a.m.

            The water keeps rising and we are trapped inside the house.  It is pitch dark, but Dad found the flashlights and handed one to each of us.  It is eerie shining lights around the inside of our home with reflections off the rising waters dancing on the walls and ceiling.  Unreal.  Could a horror film be any scarier than this?  The water is up to our knees, which, of course, means it is nearly waist-high on my daughter.

4 a.m.

            Quick-thinking Dad has gone for the life-jackets stored in the garage.  Suddenly I hear him cursing under his breath and I go to investigate.  The back door which links to the garage has now been jammed shut by a floating refrigerator.  He shoulders it open with quite a bit of difficulty – he is strong but he’s also76 years old.  I see him squeeze through the opening and out into the completely dark garage.  In a few minutes he comes back with life vests for each of us, which we gratefully and quickly put on.

5 a.m.

            The wind is howling now.  It must be a hurricane or tornado or something.  Last night when we went to bed, there was nothing about this on the news.  Weird.  We’ve been through so many hurricane scares before, living here on the Gulf, but this is March, for pete’s sake!  And we always have some kind of warning so we can decide whether to put all our stuff on a high shelf, or whether to evacuate.  This time – nothing.  But the water has risen even higher and now the waves are pounding against the four glass doors which connect the house to what Dad calls the Florida Room—a screened-in porch.  Oh my gosh!  The storm is so loud it sounds like it’s ripping the house apart.  Oh no!  There goes the Florida Room!

6 a.m.

I’m really scared.  I try to be brave for my daughter and her friend, but it’s hard to think straight with all this water and eerie darkness and noise.  Dad is standing by the kitchen sink, almost waist-deep in the water, and he’s peeling and eating grapefruit!  My step-mom, Anne, and I are perched up on the kitchen counter which is just above the water level.  “You better eat something, too,” Dad says rather nonchalantly.  But then he adds, a bit more ominously, “You might need your strength for later.”

7 a.m.

            The water has continued to rise, the Florida Room is gone, the wind howls, everything is floating around in the water, and it is still dark outside.  Fortunately, my daughter has found something to entertain her.  She and her friend are sitting in Dad and Anne’s two big recliners – and the chairs are floating!  They think this is pretty funny.  I’m glad she is occupied and not thinking the worst, because my mind has turned toward fears of drowning in here.  No one knows we’re in here or how desperate our situation is, and I keep looking up at that ceiling.  Normally a ceiling is not scary, but with the room full of rising water, it feels like the lid on a box of death.

            I’m thinking of taking my daughter and going outside onto the roof.  At least there we will not be trapped.  My Dad, speaking in a way I have never heard before, tells me not to do it.  I’m 33 years old and responsible for the life of my child – I have to do what seems best for her survival.  I persist in saying I’m going out.  Dad looks at me straight in the eye and says, “If you try to take that child out of the house, I will knock you out.”  I know he means it.

9 a.m.

            The water has finally stopped rising.  Dad said that it would stop as soon as it was high tide.  He has lived here in Florida for decades and he knows the tide chart and the ways of the ocean.  His knowledge and calm thinking in a crisis did him well in this unpredictable storm surge.  Why weren’t we warned?  Well, we are all a little bit calmer and more confident now that it is daylight and things are not getting any worse.  Good thing I didn’t go outside – I would have been blown right off of the roof.

            Looking out the living room windows, which face away from the Gulf and toward the neighborhood, we encounter a freaky sight.  No streets, no mailboxes, no cars -- and houses that are sticking out of the sea.  Nothing moves.  We don’t know how we will get out.  Dad says if he can find the row boat or pontoon – if they haven’t floated away – he could take a couple of us at a time and paddle us down the “street” until he reaches dry land again.  But our boats aren’t there.

12 noon

            Rescue at last!  A man in a motorboat has found us.  He helped us into the boat and whisked us down the river-street all the way back out to Highway 19.  On the other side of the highway is dry land.  We climb out of his boat, gratefully give him hugs and high-fives, and head across the highway on foot to the nearest store.  Things are not much better on the “dry” side of the highway.  There is no power.  There are no cars.  So we don’t know where we will stay, or how we would even get there.  And thousands of others have the same problem.

            Dad "pulls a rabbit out of the hat," when he walks to the nearest motel and talks another family into letting us double up in a room with them for a few hours.  Then he works his magic again and walks around until he finds someone willing to lend him a tiny, ramshackle vehicle that we all five pile into.  Now that we have wheels, we can make progress.  Dad also knows someone with an RV that will sleep four, which he agrees to rent us for as long as we need it.  We have no idea, on that day, that we will need it for a very long time.

            Finally we drive my daughter’s friend back to her mother’s house.  Her mother must be worried to death about her by now.  But we find her mother, without a care, sitting in a clean, dry living room and watching TV.

            “What storm,” she says, as we all stand agape.

*(This story is based on something that happened in my family, but the "I" in the story is not Lorraine.)