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Ritual dances and relative calm as Wilma ambles along

By SUE CARLTON
Published October 21, 2005

At Trappmans seafood on Gandy Boulevard - just off the bridge on the St. Pete side, with the sign that says "Our Fish Are So Fresh They Have To Be Slapped!" - manager Brian Brown is in rubber boots, talking stone crabs and sushi-grade tuna.

The market is busy and, with Hurricane Wilma messing around down south, could get busier. No one wants a storm, but a hurricane can be lucky, for business at least.

Trappmans saw it when storms got close last year. Some people hunkered down and wanted to party, which meant lots of lobster, lots of shrimp. This year, Brown predicts, stone crabs.

"And they'll spend money," he tells me, wrapping up a piece of fish.

At the register, customer Ben Cafaro says he's confident about ducking Wilma. Scientific reasons. "We're in our own little nest egg that makes it difficult for storms to hit us," he says.

Not that he's going to be foolish about it. "I'm going to make sure I have plenty of gas," he says. "And plenty of crab legs."

East across the Gandy Bridge into Tampa, you have to park a ways out in the busy Publix lot. Inside, nearly every shopping cart contains flats of bottled water, jugs of drinking water.

This has become our annual ritual for hurricane season, maybe even our superstition to ward off storms: Buy water, get ready, cross your fingers, and then the hurricane will spare us.

Farther east on Gandy toward Bayshore Boulevard is a place that sounds like it's got to be lucky. Life O'Reilly, the sign says.

Set square on the peninsula, not far from water on either side, the Life O'Reilly trailer park is a cluster of white mobile homes trimmed in faded green, two short dusty roads running through it.

Life O'Reilly is old Florida, weathered hard by time and development. Scrubby but shaded by gorgeous oaks, it sits on some sweet real estate. McMansions tower behind it, businesses sprout up all around. It's like a tough weed surviving on a perfect lawn.

Cindie Chiarito, who has a perfect peach tattooed on one shoulder and rings on practically every finger, is outside trying to get a shelf painted before the weather comes, if it comes. Like the rest of us, she's tired of hurricanes.

She got here last year from Ohio just in time for the first one. "I was ready to go back," she tells me. But no. She loves Florida anyway.

She's worked hard to make it nice here, created her own little sanctuary of plants and bird feeders and statues of a cow, a buffalo and a pig between her trailer and the next. She tried to put down grass, but a hard rain turns her yard into a gully spilling out toward Gandy. Which makes you wonder what a serious storm would do. Anyway, she'll hold off on her fall arrangement of gourds and hay till Wilma makes up her mind.

"They're like living in a tin can is all it is," she says of the trailer. "Big gust of wind, and it'd be gone."

She knows. Last year, she and a neighbor were the only two left in the park when the effects of Hurricane Jeanne whipped through. They weathered it together in the neighbor's trailer. They watched Shrek and a DVD about Johnny Cash. At one point, they felt the wind go under the trailer and lift it.

Never again, she says. If Wilma comes calling - and on that, could we maybe have a little of that luck of the Irish that this place is named for? - she'll pack up her three kittens, her parrot, her personal papers and pictures, and the Harley-Davidson miniatures she collects with her fiance. They'll leave Life O'Reilly and head for higher ground at a friend's house in Brandon. Solid block.

"I'm not going to stay in a cracker box for something that devastating," she says.

For now, like the rest of us, she keeps an eye on the storm, on the latest on TV.

What's that Irish blessing? May the wind always be at your back.

Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified October 21, 2005, 02:15:38]