Greetings y'all!

No, Hurricane Ivan did not kill me, nor have I dismembered myself with a chainsaw as of this writing. It's just taken BellSouth eight weeks to get our phone service restored,and dial-up is the only kind of Internet connection those of us who insist on living in the middle of nowhere can get. In fact, I started typing up this message shortly after electric service was restored back in late September. I figured phone service would be restored just a few days later. Boy, was I fooled. But, hey, I'm back!

So, here's the tale of our adventure courtesy of Ivan's little visit, and a few ruminations on the aftermath thereof....

First off, for those of you who have never been to my place (and that would be everyone except Marion), my wife and I live in northern Santa Rosa County, Florida, the county to the east of Escambia County where Pensacola lies. We live in a small cabin we built ourselves on about eight acres of woodland. We make our living as potters, selling at arts and crafts shows, so we also have a free-standing studio that's almost as big as the house itself, and a separate building housing the kilns in which we fire our pottery. Throw in a couple of toolsheds, gazebos, and my wife's Japanese teahouse/meditation room and we wind up with eight structures on the property. We also have several good-sized garden plots and a half-acre fish pond where we raise koi and comets. We are inveterate tree huggers and have made a conscious effort to take advantage of naturally occurring clearings in choosing where to situate our "improvements", often opting for preservation over convenience. For example, our vegetable gardens are about two hundred yards from the house because that's where the clearest area was. We've tried to leave as much of the property in its natural state as possible. We have no lawn, but we do have a series of maintained paths that meander through the property. Most of the buildings, including the house, are situated in the very back of the property, a full quarter-mile from the road, nestled among over a dozen large oak trees, some of which are just a few feet from the structures. The likelihood of one or more of those large trees crashing into the house was the primary reason we decided to evacuate instead of riding Ivan out. As much as I like trees, being impaled by a limb from falling oak is pretty far down my list of preferred ways of dying, just above being eaten alive by fire ants.   

Anyway, when I last checked in with the Mudcat on September 15, my wife and I were among the ranks of Hurricane Ivan evacuees holed up in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Why Arkansas? Because it's west of the Mississippi River and it was looking like anything east of that waterway was subject to being flattened. In contrast to the horrendous experiences of many evacuees, our evacuation was a breeze. We expected the major highways to be slammed and expected most normal people to wait until after sunrise to get on the road. So, being abnormal, we left at 2 AM, hours ahead of most folks (and 24 hours ahead of Ivan), and stayed on secondary roads. Traffic was almost nonexistent. By the time we crossed into Arkansas, Mississippi Public Radio was reporting that there wasn't a hotel room left in Mississippi and they were telling people to go to shelters instead. So, it looked like we had made the correct decision by planning to go a few hours further west. There was no shortage of vacant hotel rooms in Hot Springs. We checked in, took a nap, grabbed some dinner and settled down with the Weather Channel to vicariously watch Ivan beat hell out of our home. As a rule, I hate television and mediated experience, but powerful hurricanes are definitely the exception to the rule. On television from over 500 miles away is the only sensible way to experience something that can toss a quarter-mile stretch of interstate highway into the water.

After awakening the next morning and seeing just how bad Ivan's impact had been, we knew there was no point trying to go back home right then, so we spent the day cruising through the Ozarks.   We wound up in Mountainview in the afternoon and did a little shopping for things that we knew would be in short supply when we got home. I figured my trusty old Husqvarna chainsaw was going to see some use when we got home, but that I wouldn't be able to get parts or repairs if it developed any problems, so I bought a spare saw. We also picked up several coils of rope in case we needed to pull downed trees out of the way, tarps for emergency roof repair, and food. We had pretty much decided to stay one more day, but we both woke up at 2 AM and decided we were too anxious to stay and that if we left right then there might be some daylight left if and when we got home. So, we drove through the rest of the Ozarks in the dark, got to Memphis at sunrise and hit Meridian, Mississippi before noon. We again had the radio tuned to Mississippi Public Radio and they were telling Floridians to avoid trying to get home yet because too many roads were still impassible. But we figured that everybody in our neck of the woods has a chainsaw or two and Bubba and Jim Bob don't need no stinkin' government to get trees off the road.

Now, I'm a native Floridian and I've been through a few hurricanes and the rulebook says "Hurricanes will beat hell out of the coast but only do moderate damage well inland." Ivan forgot to read the rulebook. It was just outside Meridian that we started seeing a lot of downed trees and power lines. We stopped for gas at a little town called Quitman, Mississippi that must have been hit by one of the tornadoes that hurricanes spin off. It was a mess of toppled trees and damaged houses but roads were clear, the power was back on and, thankfully, gas was available.   As we drove on through Mississippi and into Alabama we saw so many downed trees and damaged power lines that they quickly became pretty unremarkable. We also saw hundreds of people waiting in lines hundreds of yards long to buy gas at the few stations that had power. When we got to Repton, Alabama, the small town about forty miles north of the Alabama/Florida border where we turned south for the final leg of our journey home, it had been totally devastated. It looked like every building there had been damaged by either wind or falling trees. We really started to get worried at that point because Repton's a hundred miles inland and we still had another fifty miles toward the Gulf to go. We expected things to get worse the further south we drove, and we were right. When we got to Brewton, Alabama, about fifteen miles north of where we live, northbound traffic was backed up for miles. We prepared ourselves for the possibility of having to turn around, but it turned out that the traffic problem wasn't due to southbound blockage, but due to the fact that all the bridges between Santa Rosa and Escambia counties were closed so the only way those who evacuated eastward could get home to Pensacola was to drive north into Alabama and come into the city via a north/south route. But our destination was only a few miles further south, not far off of the highway we were already on, so we kept the nose of the van pointed south and both eyes peeled for obstructions. The further south we got, the worse the road conditions got until, instead of both lanes of the highway being cleared, single-lane became the norm and there were some places where we had to drive on the shoulder. But, we got through somehow and turned onto the road on which we live, about ten miles south of the state line, at around two o'clock, twelve hours after leaving Mountainview.   

The first mile or so of our road goes through managed pine timberland. There were a good number of pine trees down, but southern pines are prone to being snapped off in high winds so they're not a good indicator of how the hardwoods will do. Oaks will only break if they have weak spots from old wounds or if they're diseased. Sound oak trees have to be completely uprooted and it takes more wind to uproot an oak than to snap a pine. So, we allowed ourselves a few moments of cautious optimism. But when we drove around the bend just north of our place and saw what the storm had done to our neighbors' properties, our jaws dropped. Oak trees were down everywhere. Our nearest neighbor's place looked like a westbound bulldozer had gone through the front five of his fifteen acres and just pushed the trees over. When we arrived in front of our own property several trees had fallen across the power lines and into the road, taking a power pole and transformer with them. As we pulled into our quarter-mile-long driveway we were almost immediately blocked by another fallen tree. We could look ahead and see tree after tree in the driveway. Things were not looking good. As mentioned above, our house itself is in the very back of the property, so the first thing we had to do was chop enough of the mess away to be able to walk back to the house. We grabbed a chainsaw, axe and loppers from the van and began to hack our way back.   Along the way we saw trees down everywhere, including in both of our vegetable garden plots, in our herb garden and across one end of our pond. Finally, we made our way to the back of the property where the house, studio, and other buildings are located. There were five or six large trees down among the buildings but, amazingly, none actually on top of any of them and no apparent wind damage to the roofs. Even the ratty old toolshed that I was sure would be torn up was just as we had left it. One massive oak that probably would have flattened the house had been uprooted but another oak caught it as it was falling. The tree that did the catching is still standing. Its neighbor, just a few feet away, turned out to have been partially hollow and got snapped off three feet above the ground. If they had both been hollow, we wouldn't have a house   If I were a new-age kind of guy I'd say that there was some spiritual significance to our buildings' miraculous survival, but I don't have a new-age bone in my body so I believe that, as they say down here in Bubbaland, we musta been holdin' our mouths right.

As soon as we got over having been the beneficiaries of a minor miracle we started clearing the driveway so we could get the vehicles back to the house, a job which took the rest of that afternoon and most of the next day. Then we began working on clearing the fallen trees, limbs and other mess in the immediate area of our house, a job that we're still working on. All total, I would estimate we've lost well over a hundred large trees, but I'll probably only try to clear the handful that are actually obstructive in some way. We don't actively use a large portion of the property so we'll just let Mother Nature dispose of most of the downed trees as she sees fit. I'd like to get the walking paths (which are currently impassable) cleared again, and we're talking about moving our veggie garden to the new clearing just south of the house so we won't have to walk so far for a couple of tomatoes. There are several large trees near the house that are still standing but have been nearly uprooted and are leaning precariously. They'll have to come down soon before another storm gets a chance to knock them the rest of the way over. It's sad to have lost so many of the trees that were the reason we bought the property in the first place, but we were incredibly fortunate that trees were all we lost. Hell, we left our five cats to fend for themselves while we were gone and they all survived though they did seem a bit dazed, confused and pissed off for a while. They were back to growling, hissing, fighting and being their usual ornery and ungrateful selves within just a few days.      

We were without power for ten days but the emergency folks did a good job of making sure everyone had plenty of ice, bottled water and MRE's (Meals, Ready-to-Eat). Some of the MRE varieties are downright good while others make you understand why military types joke that "MRE" stands for "Meals Rejected by Ethiopians". I suspect that a couple of varieties are little more than cleverly disguised SPAM, but they all beat hell out of beans and franks. Someone's been running an advertisement in the local freebie classifieds asking folks to donate their leftover MRE's for charitable use. We suspect that there is no such charitable organization and that the ad was run by Bubba and Jim Bob who have visions of opening an MRE restaurant. They'd never had Chicken Tetrazini before and have fallen in love with it.

I didn't get into Pensacola itself until a couple of weeks after the storm. It was a major mess, but considering that it's practically on the Gulf of Mexico, I was expecting worse. Other than waterfront areas where damage was due to both wind and water, Pensacola was not noticeably worse off than towns much further inland. (Please see comment above about Ivan forgetting to read the rulebook.) By comparison, 1995's Hurricane Erin, a category one storm that hit Pensacola dead on, trashed the city pretty well but did little damage to inland areas except where isolated tornadoes touched down. We only lost two trees during Erin so, by our standards, Ivan was a hundred times as bad.

I've also been to the Mobile, Alabama, area (actually to Fairhope, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay) and the contrast between the heavy damage done to Pensacola and the minimal damage done in Mobile is remarkable. Ivan's eye went midway between Pensacola and Mobile (they're only 45 miles apart) but it looks like the two cities were not even hit by the same storm. I knew that the east side of a hurricane is the bad side, but I never realized exactly how much worse it can be. Mobile caught the west side and the only major damage I saw there was to waterfront structures like docks, boathouses and seawalls. There were no waterfront homes washed from their foundations and flung into the bay like there were in Pensacola.

About half of the houses in our area have sustained roof damage and are still sporting the now famous FEMA blue tarps for temporary roof repair. Almost all of the gasoline retailers in the area lost their overhead canopies and any business with an intact outdoor sign is fortunate. A high percentage of churches seem to have been badly damaged, though I imagine it's more a matter of them having large, susceptible roof areas than any kind of message from a higher power. In fact, one of our biggest fall season arts and crafts shows is sponsored by a church and it was cancelled because that church was severely damaged. That's a big chunk of change that won't be going into my bank account, but at least the church refunded our booth fee. Several other shows in the area cancelled as well but they decided to keep the exhibitors' booth fees. Fortunately, we weren't scheduled for any of them.

We do heat with wood, so some of our downed trees will be put to good use. Problem is we live in Florida. Yeah, it's northern Florida, but it's still Florida. We don't even use a cord of firewood per year and I stacked a cord of three to six inch diameter stove-lengths from the limbs and smaller trunks I cut up during the first day of serious cleanup. The trunk sections from the larger trees are stacked up un-split and will probably remain that way unless I do something radical like start doing wood-fired pottery instead of electric-fired. Do they make wood-burning air conditioners?   

The most extreme examples of tree damage are found in the tree farms where pines are grown for lumber and paper pulp. Many farmers with a few extra acres have planted pine trees instead of regular crops and many such plots don't have a standing tree left in them. Ironically, while many of the downed trees are salvageable, there have been so many harvested since the storm that the market is currently glutted so harvesting is at a standstill. Even if the landowners give the trees to the loggers at no charge, the loggers can't get enough for them to cover the cost of taking them to market. And, anyway, an experienced treecutter can make a lot more money doing residential cleanup work right now than he'd ever make cutting timber. I know of one couple who paid $8,000.00 to have three big oaks removed from their yard shortly after the storm. Can you say "price gouging"?

By the way, the storm blew most of the leaves from the trees it didn't knock down outright. As a result, they all put out new leaves and it looked like spring around here for a few weeks. Some of the flowering trees like saucer magnolias and smoketrees that bloom in the early spring got fooled into blooming in October.

It's been almost two months now since Ivan smacked us and some people are a little tired of looking at piles of debris and listening to the whine of chainsaws. We've invented an affliction from which those people suffer, called "Post Ivan Stress Syndrome", or "PISS" for short. People who exhibit obvious symptoms like becoming impatient when a cleanup crew blocks a roadway for a few moments or pointing a gun at a tree removal crew that's accidentally damaged a fence when a wayward limb didn't fall the way it was supposed to are said to be "PISSed off".   

Our first post-Ivan art show was near Birmingham, Alabama, two weeks after the storm hit, and our trip northward on Interstate 65 coincided with the homeward trip for many of the crews that had come to our area to help out. From the time we got onto I-65 north of Brewton, Alabama until we got to Montgomery, a distance of about ninety miles, the right-hand lane of the highway was a continuous unbroken stream of utility and tree service vehicles headed home. They were driving pretty slowly to keep their convoys together so everybody else had to drive in the left lane the whole way. It was a unique experience. It was also nice to spend a few days in the Alabama hills where most of the trees are still vertical and the houses all have shingles on their roofs instead of blue tarps.

All in all, it has been a very interesting couple of months and it ain't over yet. If anyone wants some free firewood, just come and get it.