Arcadia - let's buy a new home

The new manufactured homes are better than the old ones, they say.

Let's buy a new home

Arcadia - roof damage, plus

It helps tremendously to have them tied down. We saw an old one that was tied down, but it got lifted off its supports anyway - damaged, but not as bad as this. It may be unfair to show this particular photo because it was on the dealer's lot and, obviously, not fully installed. But it is symbolic of older mobiles homes that today look exactly like this one.

Arcadia - roof damage plus

Arcadia - some roof damage

Some of the oldest house survived with minimal damage, even the tin-roofed houses. There are some really fine old houses with porches all around that also escaped damage - God knows how.

Arcadia - roof damage

Charley in Arcadia

I joined a group of seven folks from Clearwater visiting Arcadia today (Saturday). Arcadia is a small "old Florida" town on State Road 70, east of Bradenton. Charley visited Arcadia two weeks ago and left part of it a shambles. Most of the damage was caused by trees but the wind peeled roofing materials up, ripped sheds and signs apart, and tore some of the homes into rubble. But, some of the homes and buildings were unscathed. Talk about the "Flying Fickle Finger of Fate!" We spent several hours cutting up trees and hauling the debris to the road.

Here's a question for the engineers I know: How much force is required to break a pine tree? Visualize a tall, healthy pine with a trunk diameter of two feet. The break occurs 8 to 10 feet above the ground. The lower trunk and roots are still in place, and the upper part of the tree is lying on the ground, still attached where the break occurred. I wish I had a photo to show you but if you break a toothpick with your thumb you'll get the idea. Now, visualize that kind of wind tearing through your neighborhood and you'll begin to get the bigger picture.

I'll post some pictures tomorrow.

Scuba doobie doo

My last posts have been entirely too "heavy." Time to lighten up! I went Scuba diving last night for the first time in. . .a long time. OK, it was in an indoor pool, not in the Gulf, but the last time I took lessons the other dive shop closed before I finished the course and I never got certified, so I'm starting from scratch again. It is good to be able to examine the bottom of a pool and breathe at the same time. Last time, I got in one ocean dive on an artificial reef in about 50 feet of depth off of Boca Raton before taking a break for surgery. I remember the underwater scene like it happened yesterday - the fish, the barracuda, the urchins on the bottom, the barracuda, the reef, the barracuda - I learned the barracuda are like the instructor said: Unless you are trying to stick your finger in its mouth, a barracuda won't hurt you. You swim towards them, they back up. You back up, they swim towards you. They like to maintain a "zone" like some people I know. But there were no barracuda in the pool. Instead, we had one helluva lighting storm outside. The instructor worried that he might need his wet suit, mask, and air tank for his ride home on his motorcycle but it slacked off to a drizzle. Fun! More on this later. . .

Hurricane Charley - eight days later

Last Saturday, a friend and I went down to Punta Gorda. The general objective was to link up with Methodists from Naples and then to lend a hand with whatever clean-up or repair work we could find. The Naples people arrived late and left early. Don and I spent several hours cleaning up tree limbs and debris around the house of an out-of-town minister. Later, we went out to the Cleveland Avenue Methodist Church and helped them pick up debris from a shattered shed and hundreds of pieces of broken asphalt shingles that blew from their roof.

Words can hardly describe the conditions we saw. I didn't want to be the kind of rubber-necking fool who stops on the highway to take pictures and so I missed several dramatic photos, but I did get a few at the end of the day (see below).

They had no power in downtown Punta Gorda. I got used to Florida's hellish heat and humidity as a kid but at least we had lights, refrigerators, fans, and TV sets that worked. They don't, and it has been more than a week. Some of these folks have tarps for roofs and plywood for windows. If they were really lucky, like the minister whose house we tidied up, they had falling trees that missed the power lines and their roofs. If they weren't lucky. . .life for them is going to be miserable for months to come.

Charley's calling card: roof, walls, trees, debris

Old ice house, Punta Gorda

Debris-lined street, Punta Gorda

The debris lines the streets in all directions. Most of this pile is fiberglass insulation. Elsewhere, the debris piles consist of trees, limbs, broken lumber, and scrap furniture. We wondered how much asbestos was in the air.

Trees, Punta Gorda

Trees, leafless and twisted, Punta Gorda

The eye of the hurricane passed over Punta Gorda. The winds got up to about 140 miles an hour. The trees blew first in one direction and then, after the eye passed, back in the other direction. Those that didn't bend, broke.

Cleveland Ave. Methodist Church, Punta Gorda

The "Cleveland area" was described to us as "five houses and a church." There are more than five houses. This is the church. They were waiting for a big truck to deliver food and supplies for distribution to the neighborhood. While we waited, we picked up broken shingles and debris from the field behind the church. When we left, the truck hadn't arrived yet.

Olympics: Bring on the wrestling

I look foward to the wrestling competition. That's wrestling, not rasslin'. Rasslin' is what you did as a kid on the playground. There was Saturday rasslin' on TV before it became the flashy World Rasslin' Federation. My Grandmother Galbraith, in her eighties, liked to watch the rasslin' on TV, especially the women rasslers. Rasslin' is the world of "Hulk" Hogan, who in real life is a decent guy.

Wrestling, as in Greco-Roman wrestling, is what they do in high school, college, and the Olympics. Originally, the winner was the guy who strangled the other guy to death. The rules gradually got more civilized. Nowadays, the rules are designed to prevent permanent injury.

I once took a wrestling class in college, taught by a P.E. coach who assumed we would someday coach high school wrestlers. He taught us the "coaching points." He also put us through a great conditioning drill, like standing on your head with your heels against the wall, rocking the head sideways or back and forth to strengthen the neck muscles. When the class ended I entered an intramural wrestling tournament. I lost in the first round to the guy who won our weight class. He didn't pin me. He got two points for a take-down, I got one for an escape, and that was the final score.

When you watch wrestlers, you may think they aren't doing much. Don't be fooled. They are locked in position with every muscle testing to see if it can gain some "purchase," trying for the take-down. A three-minute round is a very long three minutes for the guys on the mat.

The wrestlers start up on Sunday. One good thing will be that the wrestling commentators are not like the anal-retentive gymnastics commentators. Nobody will lose points for failing to "stick." But a wrestler will lose points if the other guy sticks him into the mat.

Olympics: Oh, shut up

In case I didn't express my contempt for the commentators strongly enough, let me try again: If the Olympics are represented by a statue, the commentators are the ass end of it. Last night, after Paul Hamm made a sitzplatz in front of the judges, the disgusted commentators were ready to drive him to the airport. "He will remember this moment for a long time," said one. "For the rest of his life," said the other. I turned off the TV and went to bed, missing what may be the greatest comeback in all of sports history. This morning, the local sportswriter gushed so effusively in his first 20 or so paragraphs I had to turn back to page 6 of the sports section to see what happened. The story concluded by saying Hamm's accomplishment "belongs to all of us." No, it doesn't. It belongs to Hamm, who hung in when it all seemed finished. The rest of us are mere spectators, not counting those of use who went to bed early.

The Summer Olympics

I love watching the Olympics, summer and winter. I absolutely cannot stand the commentators, those whining, anal-retentive voices telling me how this athlete, after a super-human performance of some extraordinary event, should lose 0.125 points for having one eye closed during the dismount. Or whatever. My long-suffering wife usually hears me say two things during the evening: "Wow, how did she do that?" and (to the commentators) "Oh, SHUT UP."

I just watched an American woman miss a bronze medal in a swimming event, the 200-meter butterfly, by 0.14 of a second. That's a hair less than one-seventh of a second. Can you clap your hands seven times in a second? One of those claps would be the difference between third and fourth place after churning through 200 meters of water. And that leads me to one of my pet peeves about the Olympics, the idiotic notion that there's something wrong with a silver or bronze medal. Yeah, everybody goes for the gold, or you'd not have the motivation to be there. But, hey, in a field of world-class athletes, any medal that says "Olympics" on it is a valuable thing to bring home. I don't have an Olympics medal of any color. Neither do most of the sports columnists in American newspapers, who generate more manure than an equal number of Clydesdales.

NBC just flashed an invitation to download Paul Hamm's favorite songs. Great idea. They should also let you download whatever it is that Micheal Phelps listens to. Better yet, they should play music as an alternative sound track on TV. Let me watch the athletes performing while listening to their favorite music. Let me hear the commentators only when they are saying goodbye.

trying to reason. . .

It took the St. Petersburg Times only 72 hours to publish the first letter criticizing the National Weather Service for not predicting the path of Hurricane Charley any more precisely than it did. I seldom write letters to editors any more but that one set me off. I pointed out that a hurricane is a tornado with a forty-mile diameter that can stop, go around in a circle, and go off in a different direction. I respect hurricanes like I respect lightning and alligators, all of which are unpredictable and deadly. Any fool who doesn't understand that should go back to Milwaukee or wherever he came from. I wasn't that blunt in my letter, but should have been.

We had Earl churning across down there for awhile, but old Earl has disintegrated. This is not the time to relax, yet. The really nasty hurricanes tend to arrive in September.

I need to find a lighter subject to write about.

trying to reason with hurricane . . .

Devastating. That is the one word used most often to describe the effects of a hurricane. The word "hurricane" is even part of one dictionary's definition of "devastating:" (adj) wreaking or capable of wreaking complete destruction; possessing annihilative power; a "devastating hurricane." Note the "complete" in "complete destruction."

When I bragged yesterday about going back to the old hum-drum, I wasn't thinking of the people who first lost their windows, then their roof, then everything they owned. They no longer have a hum-drum to go back to.

I was ready to claim credit for our close call because no hurricane has ever made a direct hit on any town I've ever lived in. But, this morning, the paper has a story about some old Greeks in Tarpon Springs who believe St. Nicholas (the saint, not Santa) protects their city. They may have something there. Donna went way east, Alma (1968) went to the north, and now this. It makes no sense and you can't reason with it. I can subscribe to the Greeks' theory.

Trivia for today: The muscles you use cutting with two-handed limb-loppers are basically the same as the muscles you use swimming freestyle. The lactic acid left over from Thursday's pool session told me so.

trying to reason with hurricane season

There is absolutely nothing like being in the path of a Category 4 hurricane to focus your mind. I have lived nearly all my life in Florida - since 1951, if you need to know - and this is the first time in all that time that a hurricane has actually aimed itself at me and my hometown. Naturally, this causes everybody to stop their normal humdrum routine and think serious thoughts, like: What if I have no home to go home to after tomorrow? What if I have a home but the roof and three walls are gone? What if the walls are standing but a large oak tree has crushed the roof? We've had the oak-tree-roof experience already, thank you; that is once is too many. Now I'm looking at my neighbor's old oaks, wondering which way they might go down.

So we got the day off from work. OK, now what? Got the tank of gas, got the cash from the bank, got the prescription refilled. Time for the final pre-hurricane checklist: Water, check. Beer, check. Movies, check. Overhanging tree limbs? Better do the trimming I should have done a month ago. OK, check. Gutters? They need to be cleaned every 19 years whether they need it or not. OK, check. Better stake down the new young replacement oak so it won't blow away. OK, check. Move the potted plants in before they become missiles. OK, check. That killed half the day, and now it is time to take a hot shower and relax.

Relax? What's this? Our Cat 4 storm has taken a right turn. After avoiding Naples, it turned and came ashore across pretty little Captiva and Sanibel Islands. I hope it didn't ruin everything. There was an island north of Clearwater Beach that got carved into two islands in 1921, and now they are separated by "Hurricane Pass." There's no film on TV from Captiva or Sanibel Islands, which seems ominous. Now it is heading up U.S. 17, following the highway like an Army aviator following a Triple A map, in the direction of Orlando. That is not good. Yesterday they were probably yukking it up that poor Tampa Bay was going to get clobbered. People from here went there to avoid the storm. Today, they are hustling for the plywood, water, etc.

Why do I have a sense of regret that the storm missed us? We have been missed before. Hurricane Donna was a close one. That's the one that wrecked Naples and worked its way up the state in 1960. My father, principal of Palm Harbor Jr. High School, opened the school as a hurricane shelter. That was some kind of adventure with the rain and wind, but we had no idea how close we were to disaster. They didn't have satellite radar maps and non-stop talking heads on TV then. That was also before the coasts of Florida filled up with high-rise condos and hotels. There are old-timers, older than me, who have wished out loud for a good hurricane to flush it all away. I don't share that sentiment because I know some of those folks. They invested their retirement money in a cube of air in the sky and they do not need to come back and discover that the surrounding walls, etc., are out in the Gulf somewhere.

But you have to admit, an unmitigated disaster of that sort might discourage the further "improvement" of what's left of Florida.

Jimmy Buffet staggered off the hammock and into the nearest bar to get another bloody Mary (in the song). We celebrated our good fortune with a batch of Margaritas. Tomorrow, I will haul a ton of cut tree limbs out to the curb for pick-up on Monday. Then, the normal humdrum begins again. Thank God for a normal humdrum. It could be much worse.