Florida, sadly, does not lack for storms, as many of us have been reminded in the last month. The sensory evidence of Helene’s and Milton’s rampages is everywhere, not just in sights of disaster and catastrophe and ruin, but in the smells of waterlogged furniture and moldering possessions, the sounds of generators and chainsaws and other equipment providing ambient noise to daily life, and in myriad other perceptions. Yes, we have storms, but fortunately, we also have stories about them. The recovery and cleanup efforts, on every level, may seem “unprecedented,” and on the level of individual experience, they likely are often so; but as a state, Florida has been here many, many times before, and the literary record shows it. It’s comforting to know that.
I am not going to engage in comparison or assumed equivalence between my own experience of these storms and anyone else’s, and I am probably biased in my belief that narrative offers a kind of reassurance via the experience of shared trauma. But I have drawn some emotional sustenance in the past few weeks from revisiting tales of storm experiences far more harrowing than my own, and I believe this can be a form of reassurance to others as well, a reminder that none of this is actually unprecedented. Some of the earliest published literary records of life in Florida were accounts of hurricanes; in fact, the first known — heavy emphasis on known — book written by a woman in Florida was Ellen Brown Anderson’s The Storm, which details a devastating hurricane hitting Key West in the 1840s.
Almost every aspect of the storm experience in Florida – the dread anticipation and attempts to prepare for a storm’s arrival, the sheer terror of the wind, rain, and surge itself, the stunned aftermath – has been chronicled in the state’s literary canon. For just the aura of almost permanent background dread of storms, Heather Sellers’ collection Field Notes From the Flood Zone relates that in captivating and eminently relatable verse. Note the first line of “Evacuation”: “I locked the front door and prayed my small house would live on its own.” Or, from “Threat”: “The eye wall solidifies in the Gulf and in the city so do I”; the speaker broods from afar, safely in New York City. Or, later, returning to her street in “Home”: “The streets are full of standing gray water, a city of wide canals.” Passing through the carnage wrought by Hurricane Michael, in “Category Five,” observing the wrecked remains of a large forest: “In every direction to the horizon, the pale posts shimmer in silence over / the bare land.” A somber, sobering exchange with a gas station clerk in “Still Life, Blountstown Gas Station”: “We stayed. Our house was destroyed around us. Next time,/ we’ll leave. We didn’t know.” There’s a stark, unadorned relief at the end of “Aftermaths,” as the speaker reflects that it’s “the first day after the last day of storm season.”
Lauren Groff’s short story “Eyewall,” and Jonathan Escoffery’s “Pestilence,” from his linked collection If I Survive You, relate terrifying ordeals during the heights of powerful hurricanes, from the perspectives of those who didn’t evacuate. Groff’s narrator begins to hallucinate, receiving visitations from long-dead loved ones as her house and property are torn apart and invaded by water. Escoffery’s narrator contemplates what has happened to his Cutler Ridge neighborhood in the wake of Andrew, while scouring the near-unrecognizable remains of the community: “I’ll say that when we finally located Cutler Ridge, then our block within it – these things were difficult with no road signs, no remaining landmarks, and many obstacles – little more than the skeletal frame and the squishy rotting carpet remained of our home.” He recalls the night previous, when huddled in his aunt’s closet, after the power went out, and “the wind howled like a god come down for vengeance,” and his family “knew Andrew would not join the slew of dud hurricanes we scoffed at.”
So many great works of Florida literature, both renowned and lesser-known, tell the stories of people who encountered and survived these storms. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God climaxes with an apocalyptic hurricane roaring through the Lake Okeechobee community where the characters have chosen to ride out the maelstrom (a sequence based on the devastating 1928 category 5 storm). Joey Hedger’s novella “In the Line of a Hurricane, We Wait” utilizes a powerful hurricane as a terrifying crucible his characters must endure amid their own personal crises and problems, something to which most of us can surely relate. In 2022, Islandia Journal, which we are great fans of here at the clubhouse, put out an entire special issue commemorating the 30th anniversary of Andrew’s landfall with memoirs, essays, poetry, photography, and other assorted media from survivors of that cataclysm – among them images of Burger King’s destroyed Miami headquarters, shredded roofs, and devastated sections of Biscayne National Park.
We’ll get through this, because life always goes on. So many Floridians past and present have done it before. And a lot of them left their stories to guide us. We should lean on them, too, because as the narrator of Groff’s “Eyewall” hears from one of her many ghostly visitors, “There will always be another storm.” An apropos sentiment, for a state haunted by the ghosts of storms past. Or, as Christopher Louis Romaguera put it in “Andrew: Your First Memory,” “Storms come, houses go, so hold on to your people. Home.”
Many of the works referenced above were addressed at much more length, with their authors or editors, in the following episodes of Florida Book Club:
- Field Notes From the Flood Zone – Season 8 Episode 7
- If I Survive You – Season 7 Episode 4
- “The Storm” – Season 4 Episode 3
- “In the Line of a Hurricane, We Wait” – Season 7 Episode 2
