"Are you the lady who's taking requests for ice?" a young girl came at me, asking politely.
No, I said, I wasn't.
A shadow of disappointment crossed her face. Her name was April Williams, and she and her mother had missed a Wednesday night delivery by some unidentified good Samaritan of ice and spaghetti dinners to Cinnamon Cove, where they have lived without lights, air conditioning and hot water since Monday night.
Across the parking lot of the north Tampa apartment complex, Michael Allen, a retired military aircraft mechanic, joked with his neighbors about when they might move from the dry second floor to the soggy first. Nobody laughed.
While the jokes fell flat, Deborah Stafford fanned herself. She has a tough, unpleasant job, but this week she looks forward to work. She cleans offices after hours. That means she is always in air conditioning, more than can be said of Cinnamon Cove.
Alex Riddell, a disabled veteran, talked about what he's been eating all week. Canned ravioli. SpaghettiOs. But mostly, he complained about the stress of this existence, with his life on hold and Hurricane Ivan possibly bearing down. He could hardly stand it. "I'm a worrier anyway," he said.
It's hard to take in what happened here, to so many at Cinnamon Cove and other apartment complexes in the University area. The people who live here, often on government subsidy, didn't have much to start with - and Frances took what little they had.
It was an event nobody could anticipate. Frances defeated even the Hillsborough County engineers who thought they had the drainage system for this part of town just right. They've spent $6-million to improve it since 1996. Apparently, even that was not enough.
Just east of Cinnamon Cove is a pond meant to hold runoff from the University Square Mall. Water is supposed to fill the pond and then move through pipes to the Hillsborough River and ultimately, the bay, according to a county spokesman, Steve Valdez.
During Frances, the water entered the pond, and several others nearby, much faster than it could be carried away. The water had to go somewhere. So it filled Fowler Avenue and some side streets, notably 15th Street, and coursed through the lives of the people of Cinnamon Cove and many others in the University area.
A couple of nearby complexes remain surrounded by water, water sullied by sewage, and, according to an official on the scene, snakes. (I didn't take it upon myself to test his claim. What if he had been right about the snakes?)
Yet there was - and you'll think I'm nuts for saying this - an odd beauty to the scene. The rear yard of a small church held standing water that was perfectly still and mirrored the ancient oaks and Spanish moss above.
You could think for a moment that this was old Florida, marshy with wetlands, dotted with oaks and cypress, and not the new Florida we have constructed for ourselves.
I talked to someone with a long memory, Hillsborough County Commissioner Jan Platt, and she said we have gotten what we asked for, whether we knew it or not, and that no stormwater system will ever be able to do what we expect in times like these.
"Florida was basically a wetlands before we showed up," Platt said. Developers fill in the wetlands and build on them, but the rain still falls. Water flows as it once did. Flooding becomes inevitable. Platt sees it as the landscape trying "to go back to nature."
So here we are, trying to live in places where, if nature had its way, we'd all be fish. Here we are, making a tradeoff between the pleasure of living in Florida and the risks, the risks we have seen played out in Charley, Frances, and perhaps - please, no - Ivan.
I know we accept the tradeoff. But now and then we have to be reminded of it, and just what it means. Like the people at Cinnamon Cove, we're really all just renters on the Florida peninsula. And nature will always hold the lease.
