The Storm Approaches—Wednesday, September 25: Florida’s latest hurricane, Helene, is an impatient monster. It came to life as a tropical storm, skipped briskly into the Gulf of Mexico between Cuba and the Yucatán, and lurched up to a Category 1 hurricane. Since its formation, we have waited for the National Hurricane Center’s latest tracking chart.

Hurricanes are a waiting game. Whenever a tropical storm rises from ocean waters, we wait to see if it builds into a hurricane. If it does, we wait to see if it tracks toward Florida, and chances are it will. Florida has 1,350 miles of coastline, more than any other state among the Lower 48. It’s an “appendage,” as Carl Hiaasen calls it, dangling off the continent between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Since 1851, when the Saffir-Simpson Scale was developed to categorize the strength of hurricanes, 121 have visited Florida. 

The latest tracking chart shows that number 122 will continue due north and whip alongside Florida’s West Coast. We wait to see if it changes course, which is always a possibility, although not a favorable one for the place that becomes the new target. I live in Gainesville, at the north end of Florida’s dangling appendage, equidistance between the Atlantic and Gulf, both around 65 miles away. We lie within the cone. 

The city has always been prompt with foul-weather updates. This morning’s announces that municipal offices will be closed on Thursday while certain essential services will remain available. The update includes emergency phone numbers. 

The University of Florida, the city’s economic and intellectual anchor, has not yet revealed its plans for a possible closure. “We’ll have to wait to see,” I tell the students in my morning class, who want to know if they’ll have the rest of the week off. Then, at noon, the university announces that it is canceling classes for Thursday. “What about Friday?” the students in my afternoon class ask. I repeat my morning response: “We’ll have to wait to see.”  

I bike home after class, appreciating the tailwind at my back. I think about the organized bike ride I’ve registered for on Saturday morning, "100 miles for 100 years," celebrating Jimmy Carter’s birthday. The ride runs through Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, right in Helene’s projected bull’s eye, and the organizers have not canceled the ride. Yet?

At 2:45, a hard rain crashes down on my metal roof. Is this the storm? Or an isolated event in advance of the larger system? I put on a rain jacket and go outside to take down the sun sails over my deck, and when I finish, the rain does too—of course. Taking advantage of the break in the weather, I run a few errands. My last stop is at the grocery store to pick up a few buy-one-get-one items. The store usually sees a lull around mid-afternoon, but the place is packed. Shopping carts are filled with shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water. I see all the plastic and think of its petrochemical source and the industry that is a principal culprit behind our global environmental challenges, including intensifying storms. All these customers are buying climate change in a bottle. 

My thoughts then go to Governor Ron DeSantis, who last May signed legislation removing the words “climate change” from state laws, despite recent record heat and the costliest storm in the state’s history, Hurricane Ian, which arrived from the Gulf in 2022. He prefers the words “energy dominance,” and, as a presidential candidate, pledged to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign energy sources by ramping up domestic production of oil and gas. DeSantis’s resilience plan is essentially to harden the coast with concrete, which is much less effective than restoring the thousands upon thousands of acres of living shoreline the state’s growth industry has historically and adroitly destroyed. Acre for acre, an estuary absorbs more carbon than woodlands; meanwhile, the production of concrete is a significant source of carbon pollution. The state government has dismantled local growth management plans implemented in the 1980s, and development on the coast continues apace. The construction crane will never be an endangered species in Florida. 

Attempting to join the rush, the DeSantis administration recently proposed constructing lodges, golf courses, and pickleball courts in nine state parks, seven of which are on the coast; in other words, they are places that serve as buffers against intense weather. Loud public outcry sent the ill-conceived plans, in the governor’s words, “back to the drawing board.” 

Leaving the water bottles behind, I drive home past a front yard crowded with oversized Halloween decorations and wonder where the five-foot-tall human skeleton torso and the two gargoyles of similar height will end up after the storm. In what neighbor’s yard, and how many blocks away? Who will be the recipient of the heavy-fanged, spiked-collar dog skeleton? Not me, I hope.

When I get home, I plug in my EV to fully charge it in the event of a power outage, and do the same with my portable cellphone charging pack. All this electricity reminds me to text my friend Melissa Seixas, as I do with every approaching hurricane. She’s been with Duke Energy of Florida since the 1980s, starting out in a part-time position when in college before working her way up the ranks to become the company’s state president. She takes hurricanes seriously and gets by on little sleep for days as she and her team coordinate power restoration and cleanup. I ask if she is bunkered in Duke’s command center. “Yes,” she writes back, sending along a PSA video of her surrounded by a bank of video screens monitoring the storm and readiness activities. “Kinda like MI5 here but with bucket trucks.” I ask how many. Six-thousand and five hundred, she tells me. 

Officials in the Tampa Bay area have been expecting a storm surge to rival Ian’s, which lifted water 12 to 18 feet around Fort Myers and Sanibel Island. I call Stephanie Zick, a professor in the meteorology program at Virginia Tech University, to get a good read on Helene. She tells me that what makes Helene different from the more common hurricanes that originate off the coast of Africa and cross the Atlantic is that Helene sprang from a “gigantic” low-pressure area in the western Caribbean known as the Central America gyre. We get about one of those a year, she adds, and they tend to be extra-large in size and push huge storm surges. The Gulf’s warmer-than-usual waters mean more moisture in the air, moisture that fuels hurricanes.

Zick tells me she’s equally worried about inland flooding. Heavy rain troughs have been sweeping in from the Atlantic, and they would probably collide with Helene over Georgia, where Jimmy Carter is preparing to celebrate his 100th birthday—and where I’m headed to join the celebration. 

Shopping carts are filled with shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water. All these customers are buying climate change in a bottle.

Helene damage at Dekle Beach, Florida, in rural Taylor County on September 27. | Photo by Kate Payne/AP

Eve of the Storm—Thursday, September 26: I text Melissa at 3:16 a.m. “Are you awake?” I follow that with several questions, including, “Do you have one of those navy-blue command windbreakers like the gov?” She eventually writes back, “So many questions.” Indeed, so many questions. It’s a waiting game.

The morning in Gainesville is calm, and the tracking cone has moved to the west of us. We now lie outside the strike zone. It seems neither a gargoyle nor a skeletal dog is likely to end up at my front door. The city’s updates caution residents against complacency, however. 

Complacency is unavoidable. It’s too easy for longtime Florida residents who have experienced multiple hurricanes to become desensitized. That’s how I hear a young employee at my neighborhood bakery describe herself, explaining that she had grown up in Miami. But she might have offered a different description had she been old enough to live through Hurricane Andrew, a compact Cat 5 storm that ripped through her hometown in 1992, killing 44 people and leaving behind a city of blue-tarp roofs saddled with $25 billion in damage. 

Living here in Gainesville—removed from the coast—can leave you with a false sense of security. When I asked a neighbor how she felt about the hurricane, she remarked, “Umm, well, I don’t know the name of this one. Maybe that right there sums it up.” Another neighbor said, “Being in Gainesville, most of the hurricanes are just rain with a name.” But then she was more thoughtful in a way that spoke to the two minds that many of us who suffer from hurricane fatigue have. “Sometimes they are like a holiday. Sometimes they are a huge inconvenience. Sometimes they are a little bit of both. I definitely take it seriously and take precaution, prepare for a loss of electricity and take in [outdoor] furniture.” 

Last night, I sat with my friend Sandy sipping tequila and talking about Helene. Sandy is a therapist. She’s never had a client worried about a hurricane. 

For some Floridians, intense weather is exciting. Sandy’s teenage daughter told her she loves hurricanes. My own says the same. “I love when it rains hard and loud.” Admittedly, I do too—if the roof isn’t leaking and trees and branches aren’t sledgehammering your car or house and people remain safe. “It’s a tricky balance,” says Sandy. “You want to respect people who have been through hell or are about to go through it. But you also want to find a balance and occasionally welcome levity to lighten a stressful situation.” Then she has an afterthought that speaks to the reality we are all facing. “It’s scary that hurricanes seem to get bigger faster.”

And coming more frequently. Just two months earlier, Hurricane Debby traveled a course eerily similar to the one projected for Helene. Debby careened onto the coast directly west of Gainesville at Steinhatchee, population 514. Projections at this point are that Helene will make landfall north of there in Florida’s Big Bend, the crook between the Panhandle and the peninsula.

This sends my thoughts to Apalachicola, a lovely historic fishing village of 2,400 in the Panhandle. I was there the previous weekend to visit friends who are oyster farmers. They were both lawyers who had worked for human interest groups for years before leaving the lawyering business and moving down from Atlanta. They launched the Near Futures Project, which promotes a “different world,” as their website says, “where humans are in right relationship with the earth, each other, and all other living beings.” Their vision emanates in part from “Indigenous movements domestically and internationally for land and food sovereignty.” Three years ago, they acquired an oyster lease in Apalachicola Bay and started a sustainable bay-to-table aquaculture farm. They went into it cold, never having worked in commercial fishing or even driven a boat, or backed one down a boat ramp. 

They showed the skills of seasoned waterpeople when we launched and motored out to their lease during a fine Gulf sunrise. After we cut the engine and tied up to one of the lines stringing grow bags, we passed around an oyster shell and, with it clasped between the palms of our hands, each of us presented prayers of gratitude and safekeeping to the bay and all that thrived within. My friend Vickie, who has a doctorate in religious studies, was with me. As my Apalachicola friends pulled in bags and sorted the oysters by size, fishing out the occasional carnivorous stowaway crab, the three of them talked ravenously about sacred waters. I had grown up on the Gulf (and experienced numerous hurricanes) and had written a book about it—the Gulf had long been an animating force in my life. Whenever I leave landlocked Gainesville and come to the coast, I feel a visceral connection deep within. 

The Gulf has been a giving sea for humankind for at least 10,000 years. We, in turn, have only taken from it, with our appetite for more and more utterly unbounded since World War II. We have taken away its estuaries with our unceasing encroachments. We have taken away its clean water and given back filth. We have taken the black viscous mineral beneath it and turned it into plastic, clothing, roof shingles, petroleum, packaging, water bottles, and just about every manufactured thing we surround ourselves with. We are all, not just the industries we call evil, party to the global crisis we face. 

So, it irks me when we speak of hurricanes as natural disasters. Living and building in harm’s way, exploiting at will, and warming the planet—those disasters are of our own making. 

Helene was bolting toward Apalachicola. My friends had only recently regrouped after their oyster grow bags were scattered during Hurricane Debby, while never pointing an accusatory finger at nature. I text them and ask if they have evacuated. They respond sooner than expected. “We came up to Tallahassee where my folks have a solid brick house.” They would need that solidity. Tallahassee is well within Helene’s assumed course. I ask if they brought their boat and chickens with them. “No, boat and chickens all still there. For now.”

Rain comes and goes all day. It’s mostly light, the sky seamlessly gray. Around the state, officials at all levels of government are making a strong pitch up and down and around the coast for evacuation. The urgency in their voices seems unprecedented. They are pleading, insisting, commanding. Wayne Padgett, the no-nonsense sheriff of rural Taylor County, the county where Hurricane Debby came ashore, is downright emotional. He tells his people that they will be in the “dead center” of Helene and asks those who refuse to evacuate to write their “name, birthday, and any important information on your arm or leg in a permanent marker.”

Sometime in the afternoon, Helene builds its strength into a Cat 3 storm. FEMA, which President Carter created with an executive order in 1979, is preparing for a multistate event. The University of Florida cancels Friday classes. It’s a good call, I think, appreciating how the university makes wise decisions on such matters.   

At 4 p.m., breaking news releases report that more than 17,000 households and businesses serviced by two power companies in the Tampa Bay area are without electricity. 

Just before 6 p.m., the organizers of the Jimmy Carter bike ride email: “We are fully planning to hold the event, since the forecast shows great weather for Saturday.” I’m incredulous. Are they blinded by an intractable desire to honor Carter? Surely, the hurricane and the rain troughs won’t permit the ride. 

Four hours later, during a quick moment they can scarcely afford, Melissa and Duke Energy’s director of public affairs and communications tell me they have dispatched trucks and other resources to emergency operation centers in some 30 counties. Melissa compares the mobilization to “staging an army.” They have to feed and house the crews, do their laundry, and provide first aid.

Conditions are escalating in Gainesville as my dog and I are preparing to go to bed. A friend who lives around the corner texts, “Eek. It’s rocking outside.” The National Hurricane Center in Miami has promoted Helene to Cat 4. 

I lie in bed thinking of trees falling. We’ve had a lot of rain since August. Trees, especially pines with their shallow roots, are prone to pull out of saturated ground. Two blocks away, Tom Petty City Park usually loses at least one 50- or 60-foot pine during big blows. (Tom Petty’s childhood home is in the neighborhood.) Bumps and thumps against the roof and side of the house more than once draw me out of bed. Each time, I grab the flashlight I’ve put bedside in anticipation of an outage and step outside to inspect the roof and the car and anything else the cone of light trains across. 

I go back to bed and try to settle in. Just before midnight, the phone dings. It’s Melissa. “Tomorrow we go into Mach 4.”

The waiting game has turned into anticipation.

The construction crane will never be an endangered species in Florida. 

Cranes used for constructing new condominiums dominate the skyline along Bayshore Drive in Miami. | Photo by Lynne Sladky/AP
 

The Storm Arrives—Friday, September 27: I get up a few minutes after 4 a.m. and have a message from Melissa time stamped 3:39 a.m. “Are you awake?” 

“Yes. How’s it going down there? By the way, our public utility here came through. Did not lose electricity.”

“Outages are still coming in even as we’re restoring. Very common. We’ll know much more when damage assessment begins at sunrise. The local flooding is bad.” She’s been awake all night. 

I watch a video of the Coast Guard rescuing a dog in Clearwater and then go out again with the flashlight to inspect my house and street. All is fine. Mostly debris from the live oaks strewn about. The streets are clear. All the trees are standing in Tom Petty Park. Frogs are singing, but not as vociferously as they do after big rains. The one that came with Helene dropped only 1.3 inches, or so my neighbor, who is wedded to his rain gauge, shouts from across the street. 

The catchphrase of the day is, “We dodged a bullet.” Some areas of Gainesville are without power, and trees have fallen in many places. That’s to be expected. 

An email pops up with the subject line “Plains, Trains, & Bike Chains IS ON!” It’s from the organizers of the bike ride in Plains, Georgia, reporting, “Though we’ve had a rainy and windy few days here in Sumter County, damage has been less than expected.... We are thankful, and tomorrow’s forecast is looking beautiful for a celebratory ride!” They are four short of the 100 riders they want for a proper celebration of Carter’s birthday. I wonder if all of the original 96 riders will show up.

The expected good times in Plains are colliding with realities elsewhere. News agencies are reporting 26 people dead in three states, and millions without power. Flooding and destruction have stamped the Southeast. The storm surge reached a record 15 feet along the Big Bend. I wonder if Sheriff Padgett was reading names and birthdays on the arms of some unfortunate souls. As he predicted, Helene made landfall in Taylor County again. 

The fishing village of Cedar Key, in the county below Taylor, and directly west of Gainesville, has been demolished—houses, restaurants, the post office. Cedar Key occupies a barrier island among a cluster of 14. Given its location, Cedar Key is a place that probably should not exist. But it is historic, humble, and environmentally responsible. It has kept its waters clean and the condo builders at bay. It is a place that has known no construction cranes. It is very different from St. Petersburg, where the day before the city development coordinator offered assurances in a press conference that the “cranes”—plural—had been put in weathervane mode. “If you see a crane spinning,” he said, “it is doing what it is supposed to do.” 

I text my friends in Apalachicola. I don’t hear back. Another friend has received no word from them either. The son and daughter-in-law of a neighbor of mine live 100 miles directly north of Apalachicola in Bainbridge, Georgia. They suffered no more than a roof leak and a messy yard. That gives me hope. But then 100 miles is 100 miles; Helene quickly lost steam went it left the Gulf. 

I’m starting to reconsider the Jimmy Carter bike ride. It seems that Tim, my riding buddy, and I should instead give our time and energy to places in need. But then I think of Jimmy Carter and how as president he tried to move the country ahead toward environmental responsibility like no other president before him, with the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt. Carter pushed for renewable energy sources, tried to stop wasteful big-water projects, and promoted conservation over increasing resource extraction, only to be (often) blocked by both parties in Congress. I remember when he put solar panels on the White House and when Ronald Reagan, making an anti-environment statement, took them down. Carter was president in the 1970s. I don’t want to depress myself by imagining where we would be today if his vision had prevailed.

As Tim and I are driving to Georgia Friday afternoon, Tim at the wheel and me gawking at Helene’s destruction along Interstate 75, the quiet, brilliant-blue sky defies the wreckage on the ground. On both sides of us, thick, tall trees are lying flat facing north, giving the interstate the feel of a golf course fairway. Billboards are broken and twisted; their vinyl advertising facing flaps like sheets on a line. 

Utility bucket trucks are the most conspicuous vehicles on the road. Emergency lights flash at the end of almost every offramp. The electricity is out all along our route. The lines at the gas pumps of the rare filling station with a backup generator remind me of 1979, when President Carter imposed an embargo on oil imported from Iran after a radical Islamic group took 66 Americans hostage. 

We exit onto a state highway where, for the next couple of hours, the scene is the same, except trees are lying on downed power lines, some stretched between poles like a drawn string on an archery bow. Traffic lights are out. The rains have greened up the highway shoulders but left fields and parking lots underwater. When we reach the town of Americus at 9 p.m., lights are glowing, and our campsite has electricity.

The Gulf’s warmer-than-usual waters mean more moisture in the air, moisture that fuels hurricanes. 

The Storm’s Aftermath—Saturday, September 27:

Tim and I roll out of his tear-drop camper at 6 a.m. The Milky Way spills across the sky. The temperature is in the mid-60s and everything around us is sopping with dew. We’re in a campground in Americus, Georgia. I text Melissa.

Yesterday, she sent images from a press conference with the governor on St. Pete Beach. The pictures are not of her and the governor but a favorite waterfront bar on St. Pete Beach that a group of us frequented decades ago. In the picture, it’s a pile of splintered wood and cinder blocks. I recognized it only from the neon-pink-and-green-painted remnants. Residents are barred from returning to the area beaches. “The barrier islands,” Melissa writes, “with no people.” 

Throughout the Tampa Bay area, first responders have carried out some 1,000 rescues. Flooding waters have forced the city of St. Petersburg to shut down its wastewater treatment plant. Restored to only partial capacity, a quarter of the community cannot flush toilets. I got a text from an old friend who lives on a bluff overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. In 30 years, he’d never seen storm waters top his seawall. The surge from Helene rose three feet above it. 

I still haven’t heard from Melissa when Tim and I leave the campsite for the bike ride. We decide to complete a metric 100 (62.2 miles). Tim and I offload our bikes in Leslie, Georgia. The police chief tells us he recorded 10 inches of rain the day before. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the place. Fortunately, Helene’s winds have spared the little town of 350 from damage, unlike when Hurricane Michael four years earlier toppled trees and ripped apart buildings. 

We ride out to Plains and the old Carter family farm on quiet two-lane roads flanked by cotton and peanut fields and pecan groves. Everything has a freshly scrubbed appearance from the rain. There are no broken trees or curled-back metal roofs, only the occasional partially flooded field. 

For 32 miles, we pedal into a mean headwind. But it is worth it. The ride corresponds with the Plains Peanut Festival. Thousands have turned out, and you would not suspect a hurricane came through less than 48 hours before, although plenty of people are talking about it. The ride fell noticeably short of its 100-participant goal, even while people came from DC, Alabama, and as far away as Colorado. Tim and I meet a couple who drove down from Flint, Michigan, in their 23-foot motorhome. They left on Wednesday and hit pouring rain and buffeting winds the next day in Kentucky. Things had gotten hairy by the time they pulled into a truck stop in southern Tennessee to spend the night, “wedged” between two 18-wheelers for protection. They fell asleep to the rain hammering the top of the motorhome. When they got back out on the road Friday morning, the sky started to clear. 

A text interrupts our conversation. My friends from Apalachicola have returned home. They, their boat, and the chickens are all fine. They’ll check on the oysters tomorrow morning. I’m relieved that Apalachicola didn’t get slammed as predicted. 

Tim and I saddle up and ride out to the Carter family farm, collect pecans from beneath trees Jimmy’s father planted, and loop back to Plains, where we stop at Billy Carter’s old Phillips 66 gas station, now a museum with shelves of his short-lived Billy Beer, in production for less than a year. Alas, we never catch a glimpse of Jimmy. But it’s been a good day—for us, at least. Though I know many others are suffering. 

It irks me when we speak of hurricanes as natural disasters. Living and building in harm’s way, exploiting at will, and warming the planet—those disasters are of our own making.

We get back on the highway headed home toward Florida. I still haven’t heard from Melissa. Taylor County is in the service area of Duke Energy. So is Horseshoe Beach, next to Steinhatchee. On breaking-news images, it looks as battered, flooded, and broken apart as it did after Debby. It’s a lake littered with remnants of homes, fish camps, stores, you name it. Locals are standing staring in shock, sitting with heads dropped in their hands, crying. The Big Bend fishing village of St. Marks has water up to the rooftops. The region has not experienced a hurricane like Helene since 1851, the year hurricane strength was first measured in categories. 

Atlanta has never seen such a hurricane either. Neighborhoods are flooded as if the city sits Gulf side. In North Carolina, the governor has requested FEMA assistance for 38 counties and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. These disaster areas are in the western part of the state, not on the coast, running up into hill country. Asheville, elevation 2,314 feet, is experiencing mudslides that smack of the more familiar California mudslides carrying rocks and trees. The streets have turned into rushing muddy rivers. One would think you’d be safe from hurricanes in the mountains. The death toll across the South is climbing above 60 and, like a mountain hiker, is bound to keep climbing.

On our drive south, the trees are still down along the interstate, the electricity is still out, and the bucket trucks are still rolling. I search on my phone. Meteorologists are watching two threatening weather formations, one in the Atlantic and one in the Gulf. If the latter brews into a tropical storm, it will be named Leslie, the town we just came from.  

An old adage you learn growing up in Florida comes to mind: “June too soon; July, stand by; August, come they must; September, remember; October, all over.” Climate change has rendered the verse obsolete. We have rendered it obsolete.