I have realized over the last week, that there are a lot more things that I don't know...than I do know.
For example, I don't know why a mile away from my house they have power, but we don't. I don't know why the phones worked all day Saturday after the storm, and then went down for four or five days. I don't know why we keep getting rain, when everyone knows that a hurricane generally sucks all the moisture with it when it goes past...and what's that smell!? Which one? Pick one! There's a smell coming from the river that makes me cringe every time I see someone up to their waist in it. Can't they smell it? Then there's the smell from the food distribution center dumpsters that makes you think that some folks didn't quite have a handle on defining non-perishables. God bless 'em. Maybe the smell comes from the twenty some odd alligators that drowned at the retention pond at the mine. Don't ask me how that happened. I don't know.
I don't know why Charley took the roof-over off our mobile home...but left others intact. Took the front and back porch roofs, the satelitte dish, the animal shelters, the one decent oak tree I had in the front yard, the shed...which housed a dozen power tools, tool boxes, and everything else Fred decided to stow out of the wind at the last minute. It's all buried now, under snapped two by fours and metal roof panels. Then he went and left the chicken house standing. Just like nuthin' ever happened.
Charley took...but he also gave. He gave us mud, water, scraps of building materials that don't belong to us, a couple of chickens that I think might belong to the neighbor to the east, and mosquitos the size of helicopters. And, in his indirect and destructive way, he gave us hope. By way of hundreds of people who have poured into our area to help.
You can't drive a half mile through downtown Wauchula without someone offering you ice, water, or a free hot meal. I have to admit that it kind of rubs me the wrong way to take anything for free. It always makes me feel like a creep. It took me three days to accept any of the charity that was being offered, and the only reason I did, was that I had no other choice. I couldn't get gas to drive far enough away to buy what I needed.
I began to accept the offers of free ice and water. We needed water, and what was coming up out of the well resembled weak coffee and smelled like the mens room at the Greyhound bus station. I accepted two hot meals. A person can only eat so many bologna and cheese sandwiches before they start to dream about the golden arches and cheeseburgers and hot crispy fries. I accepted the groceries that Jill collected at the church one evening, that included dry cereal, peanut butter, jelly, and a slew of snacks the likes of which the kids haven't seen in a week. Basically, I accepted that I had to accept help. No matter how much I hated it. The cost of gas to power the generators was putting a serious hurt on our food budget, and despite everything that had happened, auto insurance and the house payment and other financial obligations had to be met.
God bless the volunteers, both those that came here with food and water, and those that came here with tools and physical strength...a rare commodity here.
We accepted the help. But the minute we were some what on our feet, the urge to give back kicked in with a vengeance.
By Friday morning, the 21st, my conscience was starting to work on me. With all the help we'd had from friends and charities, our lives had begun to remotely resemble pre-storm existance. We had food, water, a roof over our heads, and we were getting the local television stations on a nineteen inch color t.v. that we hooked up to the mangled antenna that Fred retrieved from the pasture.
I was able to cook meals, my house was dry, we could shower and even blow dry our hair if we wanted. Relatively speaking, we were living like royalty. Not true for many of the people in town. I know for a fact that many of the volunteers that came down to work on the power lines were sleeping in their trucks, and it just tore me up. I know for a fact that Mike down the road, who works for PRECO, hadn't been home in over a week, and that Billy, a dear friend, had been working around the clock helping clear the roads so that the power crews could get in. By mutual decision, Jill and I made up our minds to go to town and see what we could do.
We started out at the Kash N' Karry food distribution center, helping to unload and stock the flood of groceries and other necessary items that came in. Almost immediatley it became clear that we were more a hindrance than a help, as we had no idea where anything went and the veterans there were running circles around us. After an hour or so, we gave up and came up with a new plan.
It just so happpened that we had a cooler in the Jeep. We decided to fill it with donated ice and water and physically take it to the crews that were working out in the heat. At the church where we went to get ice and water, we ran into a couple of women who were giving out orange juice. Cases of 24, sixteen-ounce bottles of frozen orange juice. We took five cases.
We drove and we drove, waving those ice cold bottles of water out the window. And we didn't get one taker.
"Why won't they take it, Mom?" Jill asked.
"Damned if I know." I sighed. "Well, if a thing ain't working, it's time to change something."
I reached into the back and grabbed a bottle of orange juice. We had been saving it for last, as it was frozen...we wanted to give it time to thaw out. We passed a tree crew comprised of four men and I waved that bottle of orange juice out the window. You'd have thought it was a bag of money the way they tripped all over each other to get to it. I handed out four bottles. First the bottles went to the foreheads, then the insides of the wrists, the backs of the necks, and last but not least, the lids were pried off and the slushy OJ was sucked down in one hearty slurp.
"That's it, baby." I said to Jill. "They're watered out, they need something different."
Four hours later we had given out one hundred and twenty bottles of orange juice and forty eight bottles of water, and made friends all over Hardee county. We talked to volunteers from Georgia, North and South Carolina, and even as far north as New York and New Jersey. One man had simply thrown his chain saw in the back of his truck and left his home in North Florida to drive down and help. He didn't have as much as a cooler. We loaded him up with as much water and ice as he wanted.
Somehow the bite of taking something for free, isn't so deep now, and the minute I get done here, I'm headed back to town to start again.
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