In September of 1950 when I was three and a half years old a hurricane blew in from the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Florida coast around Cedar Key. With the unlikely name Hurricane Easy the storm broke national records for most rainfall (38.7 inches in 24 hours at Yankeetown) that stood for years and is still the Florida record. 

My family was right in the middle of things.

The year of the storm my mom and dad had opened a café in Chiefland, Fla. they called the City Grill. It was on US 19 where it came through the center of town. There were sidewalks in front of the block-long strip of stores that nestled up tight to either side of US 19. On the opposite side of the street my father’s father ran a hardware store.

The City Grill was open three meals a day. Breakfast and lunch found a lot of locals sitting at the counter or hunched over tables but for dinner most locals were at home and it was folks traveling north and south on US 19 that stopped to eat. The jukebox stood ready to take your nickels, and coffee was a dime.

Things were going pretty well as summer slipped out of August and into September. In those days there was not the complicated early warning system we now have for big storms and Easy crept up the coast with little initial warning.

It dumped torrents of rain on Yankeetown south of Gulf Hammock and on the way up caused the tide in Tampa Bay to rise by 6.5 feet flooding north Tampa with two feet of water.

When the warnings were sounded in Cedar Key (situated 29 miles southwest of Chiefland) some people left and others decided to stick it out. The storm swept into Cedar Key with 125 mph winds and then made a big counter-clockwise loop out into the Gulf, all the while gathering moisture, dumping rain and putting Cedar Key in a siege-like state of enduring sustained winds of over 100mph for nine and a half endless hours.

Those who remained in town huddled in the high school. Out of 200 buildings in Cedar Key, 150 lost their roofs and a full 90% were damaged. All 100 of the boats in the town’s fishing fleet were destroyed.

My father was in Gainesville when it all started and my mother was in Chiefland running the café. I was in Gulf Hammock in a house my grandfather built down a sand road back in the woods. We didn’t know what was coming.

My mother says that as the storm really kicked in people swarmed from Cedar Key and the many homesteads out in the swamps and woods and along the Suwannee River into Chiefland, the nearest town looking for shelter and food. My father drove down from Gainesville and they kept the café open and fed everyone who pushed through the door and out of the rain and wind. After a while they stopped giving people checks for their meals and just kept cooking and putting out hot food and hotter coffee while the winds howled outside.

I don’t know what everyone knew or when. I was just a small child but I do remember being in that house and the sound of the wind thrashing the trees and scratching at the house looking for a way in. I was scared but I was also curious. I later heard someone say that the wind was so strong that it took a pine needle and buried it four inches deep in a tree. It was such a vivid statement that to this day I believe I saw that very thing though it’s likely I did not.

What I do know is that at the height of the storm, when it had made its loop and hit Cedar Key for the second time and started inland that my father came for us.

He drove down US 19, dodging tree limbs on the road, the rain almost horizontal and the night so black that everything wet shone like silver. When he got to Otter Creek, midway between Chiefland and Gulf Hammcok, the State Police had closed the road because of flooding and the danger of downed trees and power lines that followed the road. (Three people died in Easy, all from electrocution from downed lines.)

“Sorry,” the State Policeman in his slicker said, “you can’t go through.”

My father told him. “My little girl and my wife’s parents are down there. I’m going to get them.”

The police must have pulled the barricade aside because he did come and get us. We bundled into his car and he drove us back to Chiefland through the furious night.

They kept the café open until no more people came in looking for help.

The next day, like most days after hurricanes, was sunny and despite the damage all around us it was almost like it never happened.

The only thing I know for sure is that for the rest of my life I always remembered that my father pushed past the police and drove through the crazy black night and storm to save me. That’s what fathers do.

I recently met a cool biologist named Benny Luedike who works for the state DEP and he sent me some photos of a project in Ft. Pierce within the Indian River Lagoon to create a series “barrier islands” to protect the city operated harbor. 

Humans have tried to protect what they consider theirs for as long as they could figure out a way to do so but they didn’t always think about unintended consequences. We built dams and caused downstream marshes and wetlands and their incubator essence to be lost. We took down forests to grow a better cash crop and threatened the diversity of our planet. In Florida we drained the Everglades to grow beans and tomatoes in the verdant muck and though we have changed direction on the wisdom of that decision, much of our food (and OMG the sod farms stretch out forever) still comes from large farms ringing Okeechobee. Don’t forget big sugar either.

We hailed DDT as the miracle that would let us feed ourselves better and cheaper. Turned out to cause cancer and nearly killed off the bald eagles.

Florida has busy sucking as much water out of the ground as possible for golf courses and developments or to sell as “spring water” and all the while our aquifer has been dropping lower until our fabulous springs are being threatened.

As a nation and a state we are finally taking a harder look at what we want to do and are trying to make sure that, like a doctor, we first do no harm. That’s a big part of what Benny does, he reviews proposed projects to see if they can be done without causing harm whether unintended or not.

In this case, the Ft. Pierce barrier island proposal was subjected to a lot scrutiny to make sure it would not cause erosion problems further down the shore or that it would cause the seagrass (another big incubator) to silt up and disappear. FEMA, the organization that provided partial funding, said an ecological component had to be included in any harbor protection plans. What is being created seems like an elegant solution. 

The 11 acres of islands will not only protect the harbor by breaking up incoming tidal action and wind driven waves, it will create a new series of habitats that will include an island that’s perfect as a shorebird nesting habitat, a mangrove habitat and oyster reefs. This protection will then allow the marina destroyed in the ’04-’05 hurricanes to be rebuilt.  

One part of me looks at parks and restored lands and thinks, but this isn’t nature in the raw, much the same way some cute historic towns are really not Old Florida. And it’s not. But neither is it the Disneyfication (no insult meant to mouse and co.) of a natural area. It is the nurturing of an area to create something that nature itself could have and might have created given enough time and protected from enough detrimental human action.

All over the state nonprofit groups and grassroots organizations are working hard with government agencies on the nurturing side of things. We are seeing increased protections for our waterways and shores and coming to new understandings about land use. Turns out cattle ranches are pretty good for our prairie-like lands in mid state. Who knew?

So the next time you paddle around the bend in a little river and feel like you are the first human to ever see this piece of glorious land and water give a little smile and know you probably are not. And you probably wouldn’t have had that experience if a lot of other dedicated folks hadn’t worked to keep it just like that. People like Benny. People like you.

Gulf Hammock is barely more than a wide spot in the road these days but it used to be a busy place as my mother tells it. It was strung out all over the woods when she was growing up and had more people and a mill that was owned by the Paterson-McInnis lumber company that ran the town. She remembers boardwalks snaking through the woods following one lane roads to houses tucked back from US 19, the hard road that ran north to south full of truckers and people in a hurry to get somewhere else.

Like any good company town there was a commissary that offered almost anything you might need including the post office that took up one corner of the big square building ringed with a porch on three sides. There were two other stores, Peek’s and Gavin’s, both small side-of-the-road mom and pop places with basic groceries, hard candy, ice cold drinks in a big square cooler filled with water so icy it would hurt your hand when you dug around for the coldest soda down in the bottom somewhere. On the side of the cooler box was the opener where you popped your soda’s metal top off. There was a satisfying snap of a sound and the metal cap fell down among the other tops. I don’t know what happened to them when they were cleaned out but I have seen bottle caps used like washers when nailing things together.

There was even ice cream and Popsicles. Well, what a choice. To have the small Dixie Cup of vanilla with its own little wooden spoon or the double barreled banana Popsicle. Whichever one you picked was bound to melt before you finished it in that heat. And even though you might want to linger and savor the cold and the flavors, a prudent person wouldn’t. 

Gavin’s sold flour in 20-pound bags and also in smaller amounts from flour kept in a big barrel. They kept all the flour sacks, cotton with some sort of decorative print on it, and sold them to women who made clothes out of it. I had some flour sack outfits myself, mostly little shirts or shorts.

It was always a few degrees cooler in the store because of the refrigerated cases and the fact that they were smart enough to keep the windows and doors shut down against the heat of the day.

One of my favorite things was the knives for sale. There were pocket knives and every man had a good one that he took care of really well. They were cleaned and oiled and sharpened and considered essential. I really wanted one and as a tomboy was eventually given one.

It was easy to be a tomboy in those days, cute even, but I imagine it would not have been easy to be a little boy who wanted to do girl things. Years later as a teenager I lived next to a boy who played with dolls. His name was Jerry and I made fun of him like everybody else did. With years behind me of seeing how people are different and yet wonderfully valuable all over the spectrum of human experience I can only say one thing to him and nothing in my own defense. I’m so sorry, Jerry.