Everything Must Go

Along a Battered Florida Retail Strip, Commerce May Have
Bent to Nature's Will but It Didn't Break

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page C01


PUNTA GORDA, Fla., Aug. 15 -- Among the things Hurricane
Charley took away from Charlotte County this weekend is the
familiar, if banal, identity of the strip. In becoming a
tragic somewhere, the area has lost the logos, signs and
indicators of the great nowhere.

Along U.S. 41 (a highway dedicated to war vets), there are
the box stores, fast-food joints, nail salons, tattoo
parlors, boating supply warehouses, discount carpet outlets
(oh, the very Floridaness of it all), and everything's
closed, shattered, gaping, boarded, spray-painted. ("Looters
will be shot," vows the spray-paint warning on a gun store,
almost hopefully, wishfully.)

The letters and words telling you where you are have mostly
been wiped clean, ripped apart and toppled -- perhaps giving
residents an even more vague sense of dislocation beyond the
more pressing damage to their homes. The content of
billboards has been peeled away like vinyl skin. Life is
closed for business, and it is difficult to recognize.

"Satisfaction Guaranteed" has been peeled from the side of a
Wal-Mart. (So has the word Wal-Mart.) A KFC is identifiable
only by its remaining red and white stripes. National
television crews are particularly enamored of a completely
demolished AutoZone a couple of miles north in Port
Charlotte, striking mostly for its curious recognizability
as what used to be an AutoZone. Someone has spray-painted
the remaining wall, helpfully noting that the AutoZone in
another town is open. (Subtext: America perseveres.)

The story here is largely about the destruction of trailer
parks and mobile homes -- more politely referred to here as
"manufactured housing." That's where the heartbreak is;
people's grandmas wandering around amid the debris of their
lives. It is possible to look across a neighborhood at all
the slices of metal wrapped like toilet paper around palm
trees and pine trees and telephone poles and conclude that
southwest Florida is made entirely of aluminum siding,
mattresses, splintered barstools and the remains of Beanie
Babies collections.

Yet the commercial strip is a kind of home all the same, and
folks need to buy stuff. All day Sunday, people called into
the Fort Myers ABC and NBC affiliates (broadcasting as one
during the aftermath, and simulcasting on FM radio) to share
news about where to get gas without waiting, where to get a
meal, and everything else available in the retailscape:

"There's free ice at the Publix," says a caller,
breathlessly relaying coordinates for a grocery store in
nearby Lee County. "And the Blockbuster is open, and the
Chili's. And the Beef O'Brady's. People need to know."

And another offers genius advice: "People are forgetting
Costco. You can buy gas at the Costco and there is no line."

"The Cracker Barrel is open," says a male caller. "Daniel
and 75."

The center cannot hold. (W.B. Yeats.) But the strip center
can. (John Q. Applebee.) "All of the ATMs are working in
Naples," a female caller says, somewhat guiltily
acknowledging that she has cash, gasoline, the freedom to
cruise around into air-conditioned stores and buy
refrigerated items. "I didn't know if y'all knew that. It's
really not that far of a drive" from Charlotte County.

Punta Gorda is the ephemeral Aftermathland, the Florida
tourist unattraction. The Convoy of Hope, a line of
Bible-thumping 18-wheelers from Springfield, Mo., has
arrived and begun handing out free water and other
essentials from a convenience store parking lot on U.S. 41.
Guys on Harley-Davidsons cruise up and down the damaged
strip, looking for ways to help. People drive around and
stare. When Wal-Mart opens in Port Charlotte, across the
Peace River from Punta Gorda, on Sunday morning, the people
flock to it.

Modern Florida exists as a matter of convenience: cars, air
conditioning, cheap food. Without these, things fall apart;
jungle rot takes over; a tribe of nomads in tank tops would
have to migrate back north, babbling incoherently about Cat
4's and mosquitoes and the "feels like" heat-index relative
to the actual temperature.

Luckily, the world has arrived to rescue southwestern
Florida.

David Schaknowski, who lives north of here in Clearwater,
works for a company called Coastal Disaster Response, which
means that he is now hammering plywood to what remains of
the windows of the Eyeglass World Superstore ("Buy 1 Pair
Get" -- well, who knows, the rest is blown away). When
Schaknowski and his co-worker Robbie Mills arrive on the
scene, the grass in front of the store is covered in the
sparkling, artful scattering of hundreds of pairs of
eyeglasses. They pick up what they can and throw it all back
in the store and begin hammering the facade into a plywood
fortress.

"Then we'll go to wherever they tell us to go next," he
says. They've been up and down the strip, "and you can
hardly recognize it. I don't think there's even a handful of
businesses that didn't get damaged in some way." His bosses
have told him to plan to stay for a few weeks.

"Or longer," he says with a sigh.

Down the road, the Walgreens has opened, on generator power.
The empty refrigerator cases moan like ghosts. There's a
long line of people, who all seem to be buying double-A
batteries. A man in line idly plays with a selection of
talking dolls, called Mr. Wonderful and Mrs. Wonderful.

Mr. Wonderful says: "I'd rather spend time with you. Let's
just cuddle tonight."

Then he squeezes Mrs. Wonderful: "You don't need a glass.
Just go ahead and drink from the carton."

Then he squeezes Mr. Wonderful: "Why don't we just pull over
and ask for directions?"

"Sir?" the cashier asks, waiting for him to move up in line
and buy his batteries and bug spray.

"Oh," he says, taken out of his trance. He is shopping, even
with all the detritus of consumer culture littering the
landscape.

The plastic furniture, the dirty mattresses, the twisted
metal. The broken Golden Arches, dangling off the roof of a
McDonald's. All the things to chain-saw apart, drag away,
throw out, and miss with a measure of remorse. A state
official again reminds people of disaster's three
touchy-feely "T's," a mnemonic grief process: Talk, Tears,
Time.

People keep calling into the "neighbors helping neighbors"
hotline, to report news of their beloved state blinking back
on: power's restored here, free stuff at grocery store
there. A Burger King is open, so you know we're all going to
be okay.

Fifty miles south, in Naples, some people are still waiting
for electricity. As sunset approaches, they sit in a Barnes
& Noble, in a palm-lined shopping center off Neapolitan Way,
flipping through magazines, refugees who find solace in the
benevolent realm of retail. This is the new Red Cross
shelter: Frappuccino and the latest Real Simple. Hurricane
or not, they'll let you sit here all day.


--
"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in
Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me -
you can't get fooled again." -George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept.
17, 2002

My wife is a builder so we didn't have a problem getting a big crane in here to
pull the trees off our house, then we went around helping others with the same
problem. We had a gang over there. The neighborhood is the best disaster
recovery team.