Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Hurricane Dennis

After the storm, a long road back

For some people along U.S. 98, Dennis proved especially harsh. A road trip from Navarre to St. Marks is a drive through anger, heartache and endurance.

By BRADY DENNIS
Published July 17, 2005

	[AP photo]
	A bird's-eye view of a section of beach near Panama City Beach shows erosion that was escalated as Hurricane Dennis passed through the area on sunday.

It wasn't as bad as Ivan. That was the easy thing to say about Hurricane Dennis.

And in many ways it's true. Fewer people died. Fewer houses crumbled. It brought relief to hearts once occupied by misery. But for some poor souls along the battered ribbon of U.S. 98, Dennis proved far worse.

We traveled the length of the highway in one long, slow, detour-filled day, from Navarre on the west to St. Marks on the east.

The drive took more than 12 hours and covered more than 200 miles.

U.S. 98 is a highway made unwhole by Dennis' wind and water, a road with washed-out homes and mountains of debris. A road heavy with the smell of mildew and loud with bulldozers and clanging hammers.

Along the way, we encountered defeat and determination, acceptance and anger, heartache and happiness. And an important lesson: Every storm, big or small, alters lives.

This is not the Navarre of sun-kissed mansions and sugar-white beaches, where television crews flocked to survey damage after Hurricane Dennis made landfall here a week ago.

Joan Davis, 58, moved here six years ago. Just sold her house in New York, quit her job as a hairdresser and turned south toward paradise.

Her neighborhood, inland along the Intracoastal Waterway, is made of modest homes and modest people.

"I thought I could come down here and live comfortably," she said. "It's been nothing but a struggle."

The storms have hurt.

Hurricane Ivan ripped away the screened porch outside her home on Suncrest Street, a dirt road off U.S. 98. She replaced the porch, but Dennis took it again. This time, she also lost much of her roof. The rain soaked walls and ceilings and left an inch of standing water on her floor.

There, in the soaking, twisted mess of her dream, Joan Davis also has faced a different kind of misery. Doctors said her mother, Mary, who suffers from Alzheimer's, will die within a week.

Davis knew she must say goodbye, even as her house crumbled around her. Late one night, still without electricity, she sat by her mother's bedside and wondered how she could hold a funeral and start rebuilding at the same time.

She sat there in the darkness, surrounded by the heavy night air, and wept while her mother lay sleeping.

Cheryl Jones stands on the edge of the cliff that has crept within feet of her home and stares nearly 50 feet down to the beach below. She just stands there, the wind in her hair and tears in her eyes, saying nothing.

She and her husband, Brad, bought this home between Destin and Panama City a quarter-century ago and grew to love it more with each passing year.

"Wherever we go. . .," Brad Jones says, and his wife finishes his sentence, ". . . we always want to come back here."

They spend more time here now than in their native Ohio. They've seen their family grow here - three children, 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren - and say this patch of land holds decades of priceless memories.

But the land keeps disappearing. They said storms in recent years have weakened the cliff below them and rendered the beach defenseless.

"We never had a chance," Brad Jones says.

Ivan took the stairs that led down to the beach. But nothing battered this place like Dennis. It swallowed the stairs again, plus part of their deck, 12 feet of their back yard and 10 feet of the beach below.

Their home now teeters on the edge of, well, they'd rather not think about that.

They are both 67, and they'd rather think about the good times here, the faces of their children and grandchildren. They'd like to think that future hurricanes will spare them, that the surf below will retreat and leave them something to pass along when they are gone.

She didn't want to name the restaurant after herself. She wanted to name it Our Place.

But Sharon Shiver's daughter convinced her to name it Sharon's Place. For the past 14 years, that's what the regulars have called the little diner and seafood market that clings to a sliver of land between U.S. 98 and Apalachicola Bay.

Chances are, they've eaten their last meal there. Dennis' swelling waters wounded this tranquil stretch of the Panhandle more than any storm in recent memory. At Sharon's Place, it overturned chairs and tables, ripped out walls and left little of value, except maybe the Bible verses Sharon always hung on the wall urging people to love their enemies.

Down the road, the surge also flooded the house she has lived in with her husband, Coy, for more than four decades. They've been living in a camper in the front yard.

But somehow, while her business and her home and her life lies in disarray, Sharon Shiver seems at peace. When her friends or neighbors ask her why, she just smiles and tells them in her sugar-sweet drawl: "Honey, there is nobody dead. We've been blessed."

She said she will miss the regulars, the ones who came year after year. But she won't miss being tied to the place, hardly ever seeing her husband.

She is 57; he is 59. They celebrated their 41st anniversary this week.

If they can weather the financial struggle ahead, she said, maybe they finally can take a trip together. They've always wanted to see Alaska. "While we're still able," she said, smiling.

He stands by himself on the road, or what used to be the road, the only man in sight for miles. He just stands there shaking his head and looking at his neighbors' houses, or what used to be their houses.

One house has crumbled completely. The rising waters brought by Dennis washed away others up and down this small barrier island that sticks like a thumb into the gulf more than 100 miles from where Dennis made landfall. Sand has nearly swallowed cars whole and covered the roads 2 feet deep in places.

But Norman Lassiter, 69, just keeps staring at his neighbors' houses.

"They are wonderful people," he says. "We didn't expect anything like this. I wouldn't have believed it till I seen it."

He and his wife are the first on their block to return. Their home survived, but he dreads the sadness he must see in his neighbors' faces when they return, too.

"Our neighbors have really suffered," he says, almost with a tinge of guilt. And just like that, he straightens up and turns to walk home.

"They are resilient; they'll build back," he says. "This was a little bit of heaven down here. It will be again."

The years and the wind have shaped William Young's face, the one he keeps hidden behind that red bush of a beard. He is a fisherman, plain and simple.

And this is his home, this little speck of a town south of Tallahassee, squeezed between two rivers that feed out into the Apalachee Bay.

Young, 49, lives with his wife and son above St. Marks Seafood, right on the river and just above the boat that carries him out to sea, month after month.

No storm he can remember has crippled this town as badly as Dennis.

The floods here, which swelled as high as 10 feet and almost reached his second-story apartment, wrecked the seafood house and melted all the ice. It kept the fishermen out of work all week.

But Young has bills to pay; he is not a rich man. So in the morning he will take to the sea again in search for grouper, in search for a living.

"You don't know if you're going to win or lose," he says. "That's fishing."

This time, for the first time, he will bring his 16-year-old son along for the trip. They will leave just after dawn.

But it is sunset now, calm and peaceful and quiet here by the river. He turns his blue-gray eyes toward the bay, thinking about tomorrow's trip and hoping that the sea will give something back after all it has taken.

Brady Dennis can be reached at 813 226-3386 or dennis@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 17, 2005, 01:26:29]