Hurricane Ivan roared into the Gulf Coast during the wee hours of Thursday, September 16, 2004. The eye went ashore around Gulf Shores, Alabama, not far from my sister in Perdido Beach. My sister and brother-in-law fared okay; they of course lost power (and probably won’t get it back for weeks) and had limbs down, but none through their house, and the storm surge didn’t affect them since the eye virtually went right over them. Our parents to the east in Milton, Florida, however, didn’t fare as well. Shit, that’s the understatement of the year.

My parents expected to maybe get a foot of water in their house. The forecasts had the eye of Ivan going up Mobile Bay and the worst of the storm surge not affecting them. Wrong. All day Thursday I was wondering how bad it would really be. Then Thursday night I got a call from my parents and my Mom told me “Chad, we don’t have a house anymore”. My heart sank and I had to sit down. I asked “What do mean?”, all but knowing exactly what she meant. She said, “It’s gone, it filled up with water and exploded”.

I immediately decided I was going down to Florida the next morning. What normally is a 12 hour drive turned into 17. By the time I made it to southern Alabama, it was dark, and I mean damn dark. Eerily dark; like you know it shouldn’t be this dark here. Maybe if I was in Montana it should be this dark. But not here. It’s not supposed to be this dark here. I ran over downed power line after downed power line. I can still hear the sound they make under the tires as you run them over, like a metal whip being cracked on asphalt.

As many of you have heard or read, Pensacola and Milton bore the brunt of the storm; reports of the storm surge range from 10-30 feet depending on who you talk to. I do know this much; in my parent’s yard, the water was about 7 feet deep. And they live about 15 miles inland. Their house is about 1 foot off of the ground. You do the math.

Saturday morning we got up and started out for the house. We were going to clear a path up the driveway so we could fish out my Dad’s flat bed trailer, which survived unscathed. The light of day exposed to me what I had missed the night before on that insane drive; I was in a place where everything looked familiar, yet it looked so foreign. This is the place I grew up, or is it? Shit. Cars, out of gas, abandoned on the side of the road. No traffic lights, and I mean none. Most were in piles lying on the street corner. National Guardsmen directing traffic at the busier intersections. Am I in Milton, or some sort of DMZ?

We drive out of town and make our way closer to Mom and Dad’s. And the damage just gets worse and worse the closer we get to the water. We turn down off of the highway and soon the road goes from two lanes to one; the one lane barely cut out of the fallen trees, power poles and downed power lines by my Dad and his buddies the day before, just so they could get down to see the house. We get to the house, except you can’t see it through the carnage. We park on the street, barely, and make our way to the house. It’s in six pieces. The den and office are completely blown apart. The office is missing the south and north walls. The south side of the entire house is completely ripped to shreds. The back shed is blown apart. In the barn, my Mom’s John Deere mower is upside down stuck in the side door from where it floated upside down in the flood waters. Inside, the whole house is about 3 feet deep with shit. Furniture (some of which isn’t even theirs) is piled everywhere. The place stinks like shit from the layer of mud caked to everything. It’s a total loss. Everything my parents have ever worked for, gone with 7 feet of water and 130+ MPH winds. Gone. Just like that. But yet it’s still there. There for us to look at and lament. There for us to smell. There for us to sift through and hope to find something that isn’t totally broken or that got wet. There for us to look at and relive memories. Memories that on Thursday September 16th were brought to an end.

We found some photo albums that had survived on the top shelves in closets, some bells from my Mom’s bell collection and some of my Dad’s Nascar collectibles. That was about it.

All artisans have their mediums; some have canvas, some have clay. My Father’s medium was that house. He bought it from my Great Grandmother when I was nine. We remodeled it as a family. I remember, on more than one occassion, calling my parents on New Year’s Eve, only to find them wallpapering their bathroom (which became a tradition for them). That house was his work of art; a work in constant progress. But that asshole Ivan stopped his work.

You see things like this on the news and read about them in the newspaper. Families whose homes have been destroyed and lives have been ruined by natural disasters and they are left asking “Why?”. I never before fully understood or related to those people. Not anymore. Not now that I am one of them.