Some mobile home residents have had dreams of an affordable Florida retirement shattered.
By Associated Press
Published October 10, 2004
BAREFOOT BAY - The mobile home at 411 Plover Drive - the one that today looks decidedly more like a squashed dollhouse - was, for most of 10 years, Patsy Gibson's little piece of Florida heaven.
Mornings, her habit was to sit on the screened porch with a cup of tea and her macaw Ali Baba and watch the sun lift out of the Atlantic in a bonfire of mauve, rose and orange. Evenings, she'd return to her Florida room, feeling the wind on her face and listening to the fronds of the tall, coconut palms crackling in the night.
"I'm from Harrisville, R.I., but I've always felt that I was home in Barefoot Bay," she said. "Here, by the sea, I always felt safe, tranquil, at peace with nature."
Until Hurricane Frances paid a visit.
That tempest reduced dozens of mobile homes across this 175-acre, 4,988-unit community to piles of crunched walls and furniture. Gibson, who evacuated, returned to find the carport gone, her roof missing and the front wall of the home split and sagging.
There was still enough of a house to fix, though, and she, like many of her neighbors, set out to start over. Within a few days, power was restored. A few days after that, contractors came out. Not long after that, she filed the paperwork to get a new roof.
And then Jeanne came.
The hurricane ripped away big things like her Florida room, and little things like an antique frame that held a photograph of her Polish grandmother, her daughter's Easter bonnet and Gibson's very first doll, a 20-inch, hand-painted toy crafted in 1940.
All four exterior walls were left spread out in the mud. "The coup de grace," Gibson said. The Treasure Coast, as they call this storm-gouged coastline between Daytona Beach and Vero Beach, is now full of such stories. Like so many other places in Florida, the first state to be hit by four hurricanes in one season since Texas in 1886, it is short on hope, long on fatigue and increasingly concerned that the current hurricane surge will be the norm, not the exception, for years to come.
Scientists, in fact, have confirmed those fears: They say marine and atmospheric conditions have shifted into a "stormy phase," as will happen every generation or so, which means Americans can expect multiple hurricanes to slam the Gulf and Atlantic coasts every year for the next 10, 20, even 30 years.
That's too much for Gibson, 63, a bartender at the Disney Resort in Vero Beach. Like so many transplants from the northeast and Midwest, she moved to Florida's east coast for the sunny lifestyle, and now makes a living by catering to others who come for the weather.
The day she first surveyed the wreckage that was once her home, her cell phone rang. It was her daughter, calling from New England. "She said, "Mom, isn't it time you came home?' " Gibson said. She sighed, tears gathering in her eyes.
"I'm a survivor," she said, "but then I started thinking, do you want to subject yourself to these type of emotions again and again? You know, the anguish, the fear?"
The answer was no. Gibson says she's going to sell her property and move back north.
* * *
Marie Schmitt, 74, native of Buffalo, N.Y., born-again Christian, owner of a 24-by-48-foot mobile home in Barefoot Bay for the past seven years, serves as Barefoot Bay's chief volunteer roof adviser, which is no slouch job. She must listen to a litany of tragedies, answer questions that cannot be answered ("Why us? Why our house?"), reassure the suddenly destitute that somebody still cares, and to fill out every line on the work-order applications, even though, in many cases, the victims' home telephones are no longer in service.
On this, her first day on the job, two weeks "A.J." ("After Jeanne"), Schmitt has filled out 21 applications from roofless residents. One of the applications was her own.
"Have I thought about moving back to New York? The answer is yes, Schmitt said. "Will I do it now? No, not now. I'm committed here. I'm committed to helping these people. They've been through so much."
She pauses. "But, I'll tell you, though, if this kind of stuff keeps up, I just might."
