The majestic cranes, rising high into the air with their yellow and white coloring, their ascension marked by those passing on the interstate - the cherrypicker boxes on the end filled with phone company guys, cable guys, and the like...
...everyone has a huge pile of brown sticks and leaves in front of their houses, when they have houses. These piles are sometimes six to eight feet high, and have, in some cases, spilled out into the streets, so they are hard to navigate around. You can’t see the houses behind the piles, and you can’t tell whether or not the businesses are open, unless they’ve resorted to huge banners out front proclaiming that fact. That’s what I’m going to do. Nothing seems to really work right. The ATMs are slow, the phones are out and back in, kind of when they feel like it, and the radio signals are all screwed up in places where they worked fine before. My radio at work only picks up WUWF, the station that carries NPR, if I put it in the closet. You have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not Winter, since everything that’s not an evergreen has had all of the leaves ripped off and deposited all over the landscape, sometimes pasted to the sides of buildings. No gas station in Pensacola has an intact, upright canopy. Some of them are missing panels of siding, and some of them are down completely. The “Mom & Pop” gas place on 29 is not visible from traffic going by, because the canopy has fallen toward the road, completely obscuring the building. Ditches and road easements are filled with pieces of twisted metal and tree parts, and there are no fast food places on Navy Boulevard with signs. Every sign face has been blown out, and only the skeletons remain, the oddest of these being the 3-D chicken bucket at the zenith of the KFC sign post. Every house in my neighborhood is missing shingles, since the destruction farther away from the bay was more egalitarian. Downtown, I realized that my building is stained on the outside ten inches up with the water that came through here, supposedly in a huge, flat flood plane of traveling water - the bay come to visit Garden Street. I thought that all of my hurricane preparation had been for naught, until I removed the sandbags that had stopped the water and saw the small standing puddles on my carpet. If not for 400 pounds of sand, we would have had major flooding. The Bee-Line Auto place down the block looks like a 100-foot across karate chop landed on its roof, and you can see the sky from the lift bays. The lawyer three doors down got “the largest and oldest oak on Garden Street” through his front window, and the tattoo place (who had just changed name and management) got destroyed. Apparently, the bathroom at Democratic Headquarters is caving in, and the property appraiser’s office got torn in half. My father-in-law owns (owned) a warehouse on Massachusetts and W that has tenants in it, and I drove by that today. The roof is gone, and the walls have been shredded for about a third of the building, from the back door forward. It’s a lot like that Jim Florentine phone prank where he’s got windows and stuff, but the walls fell down. A great many of the churches are wrecked in some way, and all of them have inspirational messages about how Christians can rise above the storm that their god sent to kill them. Plywood is a big staple of the environment, with “R.O.E.” signs in yards, and still covering a great many windows...
...and the image that will stick with me for a good long time, the Crowne Plaza Hotel, downtown, a twenty story building if it's fourteen inches, with huge yellow accordion pipes running all the way down to the pump truck on the ground from the topmost floor of the building. It's hard to believe that there's no more expeditious way of pumping out water than this, but this is apparently working.