Condominium (61 page)

He stretched out on the wide bed and read road maps and travel brochures. He napped, woke up and scrambled some eggs and made a tall bourbon and water, then cleaned up and napped again. Each time he woke up the storm sounded worse.

He was napping again when the storm surge reached the School Road area, bringing in eight to ten feet of water which came curling around the corners of the warehouse to meet in whirling turmoil in the corner where he had parked. There was enough buoyancy in the buttoned-up body to enable the water to lift it and
skid it around so that it faced the building before tipping it over. When the generator was killed, he was plunged into darkness. When it went over, a side window was shattered against the edge of the curbing of the parking area, and the water rushing in ended the meager flotation effect. He was completely disoriented, thrashing about in darkness, water rising swiftly around him. He knew he had to find a door and open it and get out. He could not see. Nothing around him was familiar. Surfaces, edges, drawer pulls. He felt exasperated, put-upon. Planned everything so beautifully, and now this. Where the
hell
is the door? He felt glass overhead. He got up onto some solid object. He did not know what it was. He braced himself and got his shoulders against the glass. The last of the air was going fast. He took a couple of deep breaths and held his breath and pushed against the glass. When he made a final mighty effort, instead of the glass giving way, the front of the storage locker he was standing on collapsed. His feet went down into it. He could not yank his right leg loose. He bent down to try to free it and moved slowly, as in a dream. It doesn’t make any difference, he thought. Not any at all. He was breathing. His lungs pumped the water in and out. He saw lights behind his eyes. He slid down without panic or urgency, telling himself he would take another little nap and rest up and then try again.

The McGinnitys, Davenports and Forresters had three pleasant adjoining units at the Travel Motor Lodge, just south of the Athens City limits on Route 41 and a mile north of where Woodruff Creek had backed up and washed out the highway.

They had all made a special effort to bring things which would make their stay as pleasant as possible. They had imagined drinking wine and playing cards by candlelight, safe from the storm outside.
But water blew in at dozens of little places, sopping the rug and steaming the air. When they tried to get some ventilation, the candles blew out. They could not hear the radio, and they could not play bridge except by writing down the bids and holding them up. Mr. Davenport began having severe attacks of angina, and Mrs. Davenport kept loading him up with nitro, and everybody pretended he was not going to get any worse, because there was absolutely nothing they could do if he did. The constant hard whining whistling roar frazzled their nerves. The women wandered about, picking up the wet towels from the doorsills, wringing them out in the toilets and replacing them. Pete McGinnity drank too much wine. They all fretted about what might be happening to their homes and possessions out on the key.

At about eight thirty Hadley Forrester discovered, with their strongest flashlight, that there was about a foot of water outside, and that was why it was coming under the doors so insistently. The others could not believe it. They had to look too.

When, a little while later, the storm surge swept in over Route 41, the smashing tonnage of water broke down the doors and broke all the windows in the entire length of the motel, and covered it to a depth which left the top of the motel sign out of water and put the long flat roof about three feet under.

It was later estimated that the great surge moved in at a relatively constant depth for about six or seven minutes, was held in stasis there for a few minutes by the seas pounding behind it, and by the velocity of the wind, and then began to move out, slowly at first, then more rapidly than it came in, scouring and guttering, sluicing its way back into the bays and the Gulf. Where the coastal plain had the least elevation, the surge had moved a considerable distance inland, generally up to the contour level of thirty feet above mean high tide. It had come slopping right up to the very
doorway of the most secure shelters, and brought two and three feet of water into many others less favorably located.

The runoff quickly exposed all the places it had smashed and covered, tugging movable objects along with it, carrying them for varying distances as it receded.

It left Pete McGinnity wedged under his Cadillac, his mouth packed with mud.

In a small and handsome house five blocks from the bay in the northern part of the city of Athens, Nancy McKay had been spreading newspapers in the hall to soak up the rain spray being blown in around the door when the storm surge reached her home. The house faced west. The wall of water had dwindled to a depth of about three feet above her floor level.

It burst the door from the hinges and knocked her down and floated her backwards into the living room on the muddy crest. She struggled up and was knocked down again by wind and water. She grabbed a chair and got to her feet. Everything was floating and blowing. Everything was mud and stench, leaves, sand, dirt, papers and oily water. Soon it receded, carrying magazines, sofa cushions, throw rugs, books and wastebaskets out the front door, leaving them on the steps, on the lawn and in the driveway.

It took all her strength to shut the doors opening onto the front hall and thus close out the worst of the wind. She trudged through the rain to her bedroom. Dirty puddles were draining down into the spread. All his shoes had drifted out of the closet and lay in random pattern on the carpeting they had selected together.

She sat on the wet bed, hunched, elbows cupped in her palms. She knew that Greg was dead and the house was spoiled, so she reached down into herself for tears and found she had none left.

THE STORM SURGE
brought water up onto the long porch of the Crestwood Nursing Home and into the ground floor, up to a depth of two feet in the rooms of the patients.

Gus felt the thud when it struck the frame structure. He got up quickly and went down the hall and down the stairs, carrying the big camp lantern with the adjustable one-mile beam set for its widest pattern.

The surge had knocked the front door open, and the huge incoming wind was adding to the panic. Heavy old nurses were galloping and stumbling around the main hallway like the buffalo he had seen once in Africa, spooked by lions. He went to work on the door, and one of the quicker-witted women, half again his size, came to help him, motioning to the others. They managed to brace it shut with a steel chair from the office waiting room.

A big nurse grabbed at him and yelled something he couldn’t understand. His engineer’s mind had been at work on the problem
of the volume of water and the contour of the land. Water could not get this deep on anything but the most temporary basis, merely because it had such a vast land area beyond the city which it could spread out and cover. This had to be some kind of tidal wave. Clamping the flashlight in his armpit, he tapped his wristwatch, then held up five fingers, then held both hands out, palm down, and made a lowering motion. She nodded and some of the anxiety went out of her face and she sloshed off to tend her patients. The water came halfway up to the fourth step on the staircase. That was his mark. He looked at it from time to time, and when he saw that the dirty water had begun to recede, he went back to Carolyn’s room just in time to intercept an old old man in the act of stealing the food. In the bright light of the gasoline lantern, he was stuffing it into a pillowcase. When Gus put the light on him the old man stood motionless and then began to take the stuff back out of the bag and put it back on the bureau. When he was finished he stood with his underlip protruding, tears running down his face, and his right hand held rigidly out, palm up. Gus finally realized what the old fellow was waiting for, so he gave the hand a hearty whack with his own, and the old man fled, head down.

Gus sat back in his chair beside the bed. Carolyn put her hand out and he took it. He looked at her eyes. There was no particular recognition, no fright, no tension. Her face was slack and the eyes looked out of it, bland as wet polished agate. He was glad she was peaceful. She had been irritable for hours, and he had guessed that it was because the television set had not worked since the power went off. She missed the meaningless movement and sound.

He clicked the camp light off, pumped up the pressure in the lantern and sat down to work out a rough estimate of elevations. There was a lot of guesswork involved. This was very flat country.
The problem was to get a reasonable estimate of how high that crest had been out on Fiddler Key. He finally found a minimum he could accept. Twenty feet. He could remember no observation of terrain which could cut this estimate. If Apartment 1-C was still standing, it was sluiced pretty clean. Good thing Carrie would never know that. She had loved the place. He had removed all the small stuff of value, relying on Sam Harrison’s analysis of where a new pass would cut through the key. But now, of course, Harrison’s model was inoperative. Harrison had been computing forces almost in balance—the trapped water trying to escape the barricades of the land itself and the silted passes. With this incalculable tonnage of water inland of the key, the forces were far out of balance, so the sea could cut through at will, in one, three or nine places, gouging torrential channels, guided more by the volume of upland runoff and bay bottom contour than by the width or height of the alternate portions of the narrow key.

Another factor, he remembered, would be the sand shoved up by the hurricane tides and waves. Huge bars would be pulled apart and shoved ashore, millions of cubic yards of sand and shell, and the random dispersal of the new dunes on the key would affect the location of the new passes the sea would cut through it.

No computer model of a storm of this magnitude could be set up in such a way that the contours of the keys could be predicted in advance. One could only say that they would be changed in major ways. Carrie’s hand made small twitching motions, and he knew she was asleep. He wondered what dream possessed her, what shape pursued her through the tilted hallways of her damaged brain. The great forces of the world we live in, he decided, are wind, water, fire and time. They change all they touch. He gently disengaged her hand and stood up, head to one side, listening to all
the deafening tumult, and then went out of the room to hunt up the old nurses and see if there was anything else he could do to help them through the night.

When the storm surge began to run off at increasing velocity, the turbulence reached down through the high level of the hurricane tides and ripped at the surface of the key, setting up whirlpools around major obstructions, guttering the sand and marl and shell. By then the eye of the hurricane was crossing the coastline. At its forward speed of fifteen miles per hour, it took two hours to cross the small city of Venice, one hour to cross Sarasota, fifteen minutes to cross Boca Grande. Winds in the eye dropped to twenty miles an hour. The surf thundered unabated. The sky was clear overhead, and in starlight the huge strange side walls of the cylindrical eye were visible. When the hurricane winds resumed after the eye passed, they came out of the north and, hour by hour, began diminishing.

North of the eye, as the winds changed from east to northeast, the Gulf came tumbling back into the wind-depleted bays. South of the eye, in Palm County, the final great runoff began at one in the morning on Sunday, August eighteenth. All the water, backed up at places such as the headwaters of Woodruff Creek for as much as ten miles from the Gulf, added all its volume to the increasing speed of the dropping levels of bay and Gulf.

For a time the waters flowed across all portions of Fiddler Key and Seagrape Key, turning the hurricane waves back into an erratic and very steep chop, with the wind blowing the spray from the wave crests toward the south.

As the water level dropped, portions of the keys emerged, and the runoff was restricted to narrower and narrower areas. Finally
there were but three, and they were scoured deeply into the substance of the keys. They bit more deeply as the level dropped. One pass was formed a mile north of the southern tip of Seagrape Key. Two new passes ate through Fiddler Key. One was just to the north of the south bridge, so close that it took the bridge supports out on the key end and dropped the structure into the bay.

Broad Pass, between Fiddler and Seagrape, was completely accreted with sand brought in by Hurricane Ella. A dune crossed from key to key where the channel had been. The second pass crossed from the Silverthorn tract to the Gulf, and in the hours before dawn it had eaten under Golden Sands, Captiva House and the Surf Club and collapsed them into its awesome current. For a time, each structure, in turn, had obstructed the flow, so that spray leaped high from the places where the current impacted against concrete corners and uptilted slabs and columns piled like jack-straws. But the tireless current worked around and under the jumbles, shifting them, turning them, breaking them up, burying them, sucking the contents out of the little concrete boxes, like a fox at the hen’s nest, and spewing the soft fragments out to sea.

On Sunday morning there was a milky, hazy sunrise, and the winds were down to twenty miles an hour. Ella, her mortal balance upset, her fury fading without fuel, was grinding and churning her slow way past Orlando, heading for the Atlantic and her probable rejuvenation.

There were early overflights by the Coast Guard, Red Cross teams, state officials, newspaper and television reporters. They reported the anticipated damages at Fort Myers and Naples and Key West, at Venice and Sarasota and the Tampa Bay area. Heavy wind damage. Wave damage along the waterfront.

But the Red Cross observer radioed back a different message about Athens. “It looks like we’ve got a full-scale disaster here. Roads in and out of town are gone. I’d estimate heavy loss of life, and hundreds of millions of property damage. Incredible desolation on the keys. Bridges out. Buildings gone. We’re going to put down now near the terminal building and see if there’s any men and equipment here to get a major runway cleared. We can’t raise the tower. I will say right now that what we are going to need here is body bags, food, medicine, mobile kitchens, maybe an air evac hospital unit. It looks to me as if this whole damned place was underwater for a time. Water purification units will be needed. Portable generators. This one is a bitch. A real bitch.”