Early Tuesday morning, I felt the first mild rush of anxiety.
I was crossing the causeway from St. Simons Island to the mainland on the way back to Atlanta. You need to see these marshes in the early autumn light. In the sunrise the marsh grasses stood bright green with occasional hints of gold. Herons and egrets worked the muddy banks. These marshes inspired poet Sidney Lanier to verse 138 years ago.
I have a home in the middle of St. Simons Island. It wasn’t much when my wife and I bought it a few years ago, but we’ve worked on it to make it special and ours. I make the five-hour drive from Atlanta nearly every weekend and plan to spend the rest of my life there once I retire.
No one on St. Simons pays much attention to hurricanes, because they so rarely harass the Georgia Coast. No living memory remains there of the awful, helpless experience of a hurricane’s full force. It has been 118 years. In the St. Simons village, you can find old black-and-white photos of damaged buildings and other assorted destruction.
That’s not to say that we don’t see intense storms now and again. We do. But not hurricanes.
Having grown up in Fort Worth, I’ve had just two personal experiences with hurricanes. The first was in 1970, when my family moved to Gulfport, Miss., a year after Camille, a Category 5 that savaged the Gulf Coast. The damage was still fresh, the water off shore still mined with furniture and assorted debris. The people we met held its terrifying memory just under the skin.
In 1988 I covered the aftermath of another Category 5, Gilbert, on Jamaica. It killed hundreds and ripped apart homes across the island. I remember visiting an orphanage on a remote mountain. A dozen barefoot babies were forced to sit and crouch in a corner of a room for days, unable to move about because of the field of broken glass surrounding them.
This is what I learned about hurricanes – they destroy places and lives.
But the risks always have belonged to other people – people who live on Caribbean islands, the Gulf Coast or Florida. Of course, I am pained by their losses. However, I know them through a reporter’s cold lens, which is nothing like the full flush of personal experience.
These memories returned Tuesday morning as I listened to the news about Matthew, the latest killer cloaked in a friendly name. It was becoming clear that coastal Georgia’s run of good fortune was coming to an end. By Wednesday afternoon, my wife, who works in Glynn County, had battened our hatches heroically, thrown the dogs in the car and set out for Atlanta. While the thinking part of me knew they escaped long before the danger arrived, it is hard to express the relief I felt to see her pull her car in to our parking space in Dunwoody.
Now all we risk is our dream home. Just writing these words takes my breath, but we are well insured – including flood insurance – and can calculate our financial exposure.
Ours is a First World problem. What of all the people without reliable cars and warm beds in Atlanta? Georgia’s coast has starkly distinct communities of haves and have nots – the astonishingly wealthy and relatively well-off retirees and folks with second homes in one group, and in the other the many, many working poor, jobless and elderly whose problems can’t be calculated as the net of an insurance claim. Their situation already is fragile and almost certainly will worsen.
And people aren’t all that stands in Matthew’s way. Georgia’s 100-mile coast is shockingly unspoiled, with barrier islands, ancient live oaks, 90 miles of broad natural beaches, maritime forests and stunning marshes. For many years many people have labored to protect its immense marshes, keep the beaches free of high rises and its shores largely free of manufacturing. No stretch of the Atlantic compares to it.
It is rich with exotic birds, sea turtles and all manner of life. People say the water and beaches can’t match the white sand and clear waters of the Gulf Coast, and I agree. (Please, keep going to Destin, folks!) But take a walk on the nearly pristine beach of Cumberland Island and wander its hammocks and forests. Kayak in the nearly 400,000 acres of salt marshes under the deep black night sky. See the lemurs running loose on St. Catherine’s Island. Sit in a dark bar in the Sapelo Island community of Hog Hammock and have a Pabst with a few Gullah-Geechees, descendants of West African slaves brought to the island 300 years ago. Take a look at the abandoned mansions where Gilded Age tycoons wintered on the Georgia barrier islands.
What of these things will Matthew spare?
The question remained very much unclear Friday, as I finished writing this. The forecasts were conflicting and mind numbing and imprecise. Only the hurricane knows its deadly heart.
As we read the Sunday newspaper together, we will share a better idea of what’s left and what has to be done.
For once, I'll be reading as journalist and participant — perhaps victim.
For once, I hope to find our coverage utterly boring.
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