REVISITING HURRICANE HUGO, 1989

Pictures won't tell you......

        

So many vicious hurricanes have hit the United States recently that it can be hard to imagine what it’s like to endure and survive such events. Here is a piece I wrote for the New York Times Sunday Magazine after Hurricane Hugo ravaged my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina in September 1989.

         Charlie Hall had been the weatherman on Channel 5 since the early 1950s, when Charleston’s first television station went on the air. A silver-haired man with a rich voice, Charlie was a local celebrity, a highly respected figure, and the reason WCSC had continued to dominate local news ratings. He was also my friend.

         Charlie told me what it had been like on the afternoon of Sept. 21, 1989, when he was trying to deliver the forecast. His voice broke on the air. “People had been calling the station all day asking, ‘Where is Hugo going to hit? What they meant was, ‘Where is the eye of the storm going to come ashore?’ But it didn’t matter. This was a monster storm, a killer. Hugo was bigger than the entire state, and it was coming straight toward us.”

         I grew up in Charleston, and like many Southerners, I considered myself hurricane savvy. At my home in Connecticut, I had watched radar as the storm moved toward the South Carolina coast. “It won’t hit us,” I kept saying to my friends, forgetting where I now lived. “It’ll swing up, you’ll see. It’ll hit Myrtle Beach or North Carolina. No big deal, this has happened before.”

         Like my family and friends living in Charleston, I could not take in the enormity of what was happening.

         Hurricane Hugo was one of the most destructive storms ever to hit the continental U.S. It arrived in Charleston near midnight, near high tide. The eye went up the mouth of Charleston harbor. Winds were officially clocked at 139 mph, but no one knows for sure, Charlie told me, because the local equipment broke at 119.

         The storm surge, a mound of water moving rapidly, reached 10 feet coming into Charleston but was closer to 20 feet a few miles up the coast, in the village of McClellanville. In McClellanville some 600 people who had retreated to a brick school as a shelter found themselves huddled together for many hours in blackness, water up to their chests. They had torn the paneling off the ceiling and stuffed their children into the air vents.

         Disasters are often rated by body counts and property damage, and the news about Hugo was soon eclipsed by an earthquake in San Francisco, where the body count was higher, although property loss and homelessness were not as severe.

         At first I didn’t want to go. My family and friends were physically unhurt. Yes, there were trees on the houses and cars smashed, but everything was fixable, and I had worked for many years to put Charleston behind me. But, like many displaced Charlestonians, I remained obsessed. By the time Hugo hit, I had lived in California, Boston, Vermont, and New York, yet I continued to divide the world into South Carolina and not-South Carolina.

         Two weeks after Hugo hit, I was on a plane. My sister had phoned me, speaking slowly. “Nothing you’ve seen on tv, Blanche, will prepare you for this. Pictures can’t do it.”

         The plane landed in the afternoon because the night lights along the runways had been destroyed. In my rented car I missed the entry ramp to the interstate because the sign was gone and the landscape looked different. “Everything is so oddly bright,” my friend Ross had told me. “Because of all the trees that came down.”

As I drove across the Ashley River, everything was oddly bright. The Lowcountry had always been a shady place full of graceful, dense stands of pines and huge live oaks draped with moss, but now trees had been snapped off or overturned everywhere I looked, and those left standing were nearly denuded of leaves. All along the interstate I saw roofs that were torn or smashed, windows broken and boarded over.

         This is not so bad, I kept telling myself, more amazed, in a way, at what was still intact than at what was damaged. The river was wide, steady, and serene, looping through the wavering marsh grasses, and if many of the houses scattered along the water had bright blue tarps instead of roofs, the sight seemed picturesque from a distance.

         My mother’s apartment downtown was still uninhabitable, so she was staying with my aunt and uncle and cousins, who were all crowded together in a house with a tree through the roof. I stayed with Ross.

         Ross’ house was intact, but her street was a tunnel of debris with one lane cleared. Extension cords ran across the pavement because power had only been restored on one side of the street, and neighbors were sharing.

         Ross is a native Charlestonian who grew up in the downtown historic district, where many of the houses are hundreds of years old and there is a distinctive style of architecture. A small, olive-skinned woman, Ross has the placidity and graciousness that represent the best of Charleston. Put off by the self-importance and pretentiousness that represent the worst of Charleston, she had chosen to live in a small housing development west of the Ashley River.

         After I located her house, we rode together out toward Folly Beach. On every pilgrimage I make to Charleston, I like to go see Folly Beach.

The hurricane of 1938 tore the front houses off Folly, which created a class effect, since the most expensive houses were gone and much of the beach itself was washed away. The houses remaining as beachfront property were generally small, and, at high tide, some had waves breaking against their pilings. Wooden breakwaters had been built out into the surf to try to save the sand, but they hadn’t helped much. “The day will come,” my grandmother used to say, “when the Folly River and the Atlantic Ocean will join, and Folly Beach will exist no more.”

         Folly’s atmosphere of precariousness and ruin has always attracted me. Charleston is a city in love with its own history, its own myth of gracefulness and restoration in the eye of destruction. The Lowcountry had survived the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, hurricanes, and earthquakes. As a child I was told that Charleston was not burned by Sherman during his Civil War march because the canny residents put up warning signs about measles, so the Union army burned Columbia instead.

         The highest point in the historic district of Charleston is 17 feet above the average low tide, and many streets downtown can flood at high tides, now called ‘king’ tides. “Earthquake rods” are visible in houses that survived the 1886 earthquake. Charlestonians are as proud of their bumpy streets, their cobblestones, the crazy angles of their settled houses, as they are of their walled-in gardens, their tiny alleys, their brilliant flowers, and the descendants of slaves selling handwoven baskets made of marsh grass to the tourists. In Charleston, the horses that pull the tourist carriages wear diapers. When Charlestonians talk about “the Holy City” they are not being particularly ironic.

         Nowhere is the area’s fragility more apparent than on its barrier islands —Sullivan’s Island, the Isle of Palms, and Folly Beach. Although Folly was not, when I was growing up, a place where affluent people lived, developers moved quickly into the area, and large houses began to appear again. On the Charleston side of the Folly River a condominium complex had replaced a funky restaurant where you could sit at carved varnished tables and eat buckets of boiled crabs. At the end of the road onto the island itself a large hotel had been built right on the beach, where several piers had been destroyed.

         Ross and I both hold the opinion that Charleston has been overdeveloped and over-restored. We’ve resented not only the outside developers but the careful grooming of downtown, which makes it seem a bit like a Disneyland mock-up. We miss the sweatier, messier Charleston of our childhoods.

         The main building at the condominium complex looked ruined now, and we could see daylight through the body of the hotel. “I have to admit I feel like cheering.”

         Ross was hanging out of the car window, taking pictures. “I guess,” she said.

         There is a thrill to any destruction, the natural electricity we all feel in the face of an enormous force, and my first glimpses of the destruction in the Charleston area were weirdly satisfying. Charleston was like a lady wearing too much makeup, I told myself. Hugo had blasted that makeup right off, and I was getting once again to see Charleston’s scarred, lovely face.

         We parked the car where a stretch of road had been washed out and went sightseeing through the debris of people’s lives. In an exposed kitchen with the refrigerator door hanging open, I saw Lean Cuisines and melted chocolate ice cream, and in a bedroom torn open and sitting in the road I saw water-stained pictures of a family, an oil painting of an ocean sunset still hanging on the wall, and a broken record of Lawrence Welk’s Greatest Hits on the shining wood floor.

         Ross was beginning to catch my mood. “You know that place they call the washout? It washed out.” We both began to giggle.

         On the eastern end of Folly Beach is a sharp curve in the highway where, at high tide, waves break against the rocks guarding the road. You can see clearly there what happened in the hurricane of 1938, that the front beach was washed entirely away. The island at this end is thin and mostly marsh and road.

         We got back in the car and made out way down to the washout. The National Guard wouldn’t let us take a vehicle in, so we parked and walked. Bulldozers were trying to repair the road, and power company crews were stringing wires along the new poles they’d put up. Past the washout, some of the houses on the marsh side of the road appeared unharmed. A sunburnt man in a bathing suit was talking to a power company man wearing a hardhat. “If I can get power to just one house on the island today, I’ll be satisfied,” I heard the man in the hardhat say. The man in the bathing suit nodded to us. “At least it’s a beautiful day,” he said.

         “Home is the sacred refuge of our life,” Dryden wrote, but home is also where you can get stuck, by birth, or economic dependence, or love. Home can feel safe or horrible, lost or portable, and home can dredge up anguish, the way any attachment can.

         By the time I got to my cousins’ house that night, my exhilaration had faded, and home had begun to dredge up my anguish. I was beginning to comprehend the personal loss that Hurricane Hugo meant for each person in its path.

         I sat with my mother and aunt and uncle and my cousins Samm and Glenn around the kitchen table, and they did what many Southerners do: they told their painful tales humorously.

"I swear I'll never be that scared again," Samm said, deliberately echoing Scarlett O’Hara’s famous line at the end of Part I of Gone With the Wind, “I’ll never be hungry again.” We were all laughing as he continued, “You should have seen us huddled there together in the hall! When that tree came through the roof, Glenn and I crawled up the stairs and put a trash can under the hole to catch some of the water. Then we crawled back down." He made dramatic crawling motions with his arms.

They told me that the rivers were turning black from spilled sewage and mentioned the loss of trees in their yard, the destruction of the woods across the way, and the inexperienced people using chainsaws. Many people were getting injured, and one man had died. "But the man that lives behind us? He's found his calling," my mother said. "He does love that chainsaw!"

"Daddy's car got harpooned first," Samm said. "Then it got flattened."

"I'll tell you this," my mother said, "I never want to see another damn pine branch Christmas decoration in my life!"

They discussed the storm as if it had an anatomy. “When we passed through the wall of the eye,” Glenn said, “those thunder cells around it began to explode, and that’s when all the trees started popping. Inside the eye was pitch black, but we went outside, and everyone was calling up and down the street, You all right? I’ve got a tree through my roof! Everybody on this street had trees on the roof.”

"Did we tell you about the sheet lightning?" Samm said. "The whole sky would light up this powder blue color for maybe 10 seconds, and you could see everything, and then you couldn't see anything again. The glass in the windows was bulging out. You could feel the wind sucking by the door. I was afraid the house might explode."

Some houses did, in fact, explode. An apartment in my mother's building blew outward, moving the bathroom into the hallway.

The coffee we were drinking tasted terrible. Two weeks after the storm the water in Charleston was safe but it was nearly undrinkable: pine in the water supply from the downed trees made it bitter, medicinal.

Glenn, who was a state senator, mourned the loss of the Confederate Museum, down by the City Market. Sadly he said, "The Secession flag was lying in the water." Then he remembered his humor. "They had a lock of Robert E. Lee's hair there, too. Well, I guess that got washed!"

"I'll tell you this," Samm said. "We're 13 miles from the water, so somebody had to stay and take care of the house. It seemed like the right decision. But when Charlie Hall broke down delivering the weather report, I thought: Maybe we've made a mistake.”

Southerners like to tell stories not quite the way they happened but the way they should be remembered, and over the next few days I would hear that Charlie Hall had sobbed on the air, that he had thrown his papers on the floor, that he had turned to the news director and said, "Goodbye, Bill." At the time I visited, the station could not locate the videotape, and Charlie has been unable to find the paper containing his "last words." Several people confided in me in quite serious tones, "He knew the winds were over 200 miles an hour, and he didn't want to tell us.”

Hurricane Hugo was not a 15-second encounter with death, as was the San Francisco earthquake, and it was not a surprise, other than in degree. Hugo was prepared for, faced, and endured, and it lasted many hours. Every person I talked to admitted wondering, at some moment, whether he or she was going to die.

After any near-death experience there is the euphoria of being alive. For Charlestonians, this phase lasted several days. Then, slowly, the reality of all the destruction settled in. Ross compared it to being in a terrible automobile accident. “First you think, ‘Hey, I’m alive,’ and then you notice your arms and legs are broken.”

A similar process happened for me. I spent a day walking around Charleston, another out at Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms, and then I began to cry. I smiled a lot and talked with people and took lots of notes, but in the privacy of my rented car, I often seemed to be crying.

On the Battery downtown, a postcard scene of Charleston’s pride, bricks had been torn off the fronts of some houses, the roofs off others. The houses had been flooded, not just with salt water, but with slimy “pluff” mud. A woman showed me the ceiling fixtures in her living room, corroded from salt. Her car had just died from salt damage. “We are so lucky,” she said sadly.

On Sullivan’s Island I talked with a man whose 1882 Victorian beach house was off its stilts, lying crushed nearby. His eyes burned with a kind of shame. “Don’t use my name, Miss,” he said, “and please don’t take any pictures.” I asked if this was a summer house or his regular residence. “Summer,” he said, staring at the ground, “but my other house is wrecked too.”

I found a house I had lived in once, a brick house on the front beach. It had been torn nearly in half. An octagonal house I’d also lived in remained intact, but now the house that had been across the street rested right up against it. I tried to find my friend Charleen’s house, but the roads on that end of the island were too torn up for me to recognize anything. Arbitrarily I chose a lane to the front beach, and there I met Helen Ray.

Helen Ray was walking around the lot where her house had been, trying to salvage something. An attractive older lady with blunt-cut white hair, she was wearing rubber boots and gloves and placing carefully, on a piece of concrete, her finds: a nickel, a bottle of artichoke hearts, an unbroken plate from a set of eight. In the trunk of her station wagon was an antique chest she'd found several blocks away. Her Mercedes sedan was lying crushed, upside down against a tree. "It was garaged," she said, pointing to a shingled roof nestled among two houses off their stilts, farther back from the water. "That's the roof of my garage over there."

Helen Ray did not even have the satisfaction of surviving Hugo; she was in Maine when the storm hit. Her husband, a Navy chaplain, had died the year before, and Helen lost a lifetime of their carefully collected treasures. She had also lost all her papers, having taken them out of the safe-deposit box shortly before the storm. "I'm not dealing with this well at all," she said lightly.

Her house, designed by an architect, had been built in 1971. She showed me the metal hulk that had been her spiral staircase, the black hole where her goldfish pond had been, the bright patch of grass that had been her walled-in garden. "It was nice here," she said. "We had the sunrise over there, and the sunset over there."

Another woman drove up to the empty lot to visit her. This woman was maybe 10 years younger and had short, frosted hair. "We lost our house too," she said, "but I wanted to see how you're doing."

"I'm not dealing with this well at all," Helen Ray said.

"I'm doing O.K.," the woman said, "except when I find a picture of the children, or something."

The last day I spent in Charleston, I was supposed to visit one of the razed forests and then ride up to McClellanville, but it was raining, and, anyway, I didn't have the heart. Instead I went to my brother's business, near the airport, and waited for a plane.

It was raining through the corner of the roof of my brother's office building. Water was gushing down the stairs. His secretary kept saying, "Charlie, we've got to do something about this.”

“Wilma,” he said, “what exactly do you expect me to do?”

My brother has chosen to live inside his inheritances in ways that I have not. The business he was running belonged to our dead father, and he plays golf, like our father.

         Charlie is a tall, thick-shouldered man with sweet, guarded eyes. He told me how, during the eye of the hurricane, he’d gone out of his house barefooted and nearly stepped on a raw wire. So he went back inside and got his shoes.

“Charlie, what good did you think your shoes would do?”

“I don’t know.” He said he’d tried to get through the branches of the tree that had fallen across his car to see how bad the damage was. “It was a good thing I couldn’t get to it, because there was a huge wasp nest right where I was trying to crawl, and if I’d gotten there I’d have been killed. It would have been the most ignominious death of the hurricane.”

Charlie had bought a generator to keep his house powered during the storm. He had assumed the electricity would be off for a day or so. It had been off at his house for two weeks now. He rested his chin in his hands and smiled. “It’s kind of depressing, you know? You wake up every day and it hasn’t gone away.”

I SURVIVED HUGO was printed on many teeshirts I saw in Charleston, and on the plane back to Connecticut I was thinking how someday the wearers can tell their grandchildren about the time the biggest hurricane came and the forests blew down like weeds. They can recount how the water was bitter and the rivers ran black and the sky turned powdery blue at midnight. They can say how the weatherman cried.

Where there is destruction there is also the story of destruction, and the story of destruction requires narrators, requires survival. Soon, Charlestonians insisted to me, the Lowcountry will start to look almost like it used to. For now, they were just hurting and smiling and going on.