It’s the sound of a big truck downshifting to go uphill that haunts me this week.
Living thru a natural disaster and its aftermath in your city is disorienting at best, haunting and nauseating at worst. Even when you’re one of the ‘lucky ones’ who didn’t lose a house, a job, a car, a pet, a loved one; soldiering on with life in the debris of a natural disaster isn’t something you can prep for. Today, and for the last 2 weeks, there’s been a new sound in my post-disaster ecosystem.
Fall comes suddenly on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and when it finally arrives we open our windows with abandon letting in 6 months of fresh air, autumn breezes and sounds we’ve forgotten. After 20+ years living in a craftsman bungalow just north of downtown St. Petersburg, FL, I’m accustomed to all the neighborhood sounds. All the bird songs are recognizable. I know the sound of each of my neighbor's cars. I expect to hear the kids on the block playing in the backyards after school.
But after the strongest hurricane in over a century blew through the city just 13 days after the wettest hurricane in city history flooded us with storm surge levels never before seen in Pinellas county; all the sights, sounds, smells and feelings are unfamiliar.
St. Petersburg was a city of many majestic, old canopy trees. One benefit of these protective trees is to act as a sound barrier against city traffic, neighborhood noise, and weather disruptions. Suddenly, with so many trees missing, sounds are much more acute. I’ve never before been able to regularly hear traffic sounds from 22nd Avenue N., just one block away from home.
But for the last 2 weeks, beginning at 7 a.m. every morning and continuing until sunset, there is a frequent and constant sound of big trucks downshifting, downshifting to go up a hill. It’s just a 30 foot hill, but for flat Florida, it’s rather steep and sudden, and requires a lower gear in trucks and trailers that are loaded heavy. In the past, there was never much truck traffic on 22nd Avenue N. It’s just a feeder street for the large low-lying neighborhoods to the east. But now these trucks contracted from out of state are running every day, all the daylight hours. They’re trucks without any markings, each a huge oversized dump truck pulling an equally large trailer. All with high sides to contain and hide the debris. Many of our lives have been reduced to debris piles sitting on the curb waiting for a truck to come take it somewhere out of sight and out of mind.
So all day long, for nearly two weeks now, it has been the sound of one truck after another downshifting to come up the 30’ hill on 22nd Avenue N., one block away from my house. All these trucks are loaded heavy hauling away the contents of the thousands of homes that flooded in Snell Isle and Shore Acres during Hurricane Helene, and thousands of trees blown over by Hurricane Milton. Trucks heavy with all the furniture, appliances, drywall and every single other thing that touched flood water and is now being unceremoniously hauled away. Plus other trucks overflowing with branches, limbs, entire root structures of thousands of trees that used to protect us from storms, sun and sounds.
Throughout the city, there are debris staging areas; currently unused land now filled with hastily built mountains of debris. Tidily separated into piles of appliances and furnishings, then another pile for trees; these mountains are 5-6 stories tall and as long as several city blocks. These mountains of debris, the trash of our lives, waiting to be hauled away somewhere, somehow; as it's reported our city waste facility can’t handle it all. Sometimes when running errands, you’ll happen by one of these pop-up debris sites and be overwhelmed by the sheer size and magnitude of it all.
Soon, as we’re all hoping, our city will look much cleaner on the surface, all the debris will be removed from the streets and sidewalks in front of our homes. The pop-up mountains of staged debris will be gone. But what happens to all the memories and lives built from the contents of that debris? What happens to a city after a hurricane cleans out the heart of homes, blocks and neighborhoods? What will remain? How much have we already lost? And what do we have to look forward to?
For now, there’s that damn truck sound, downshifting to get up the 30’ hill that protected me from the worst this year's hurricanes had to deliver, the hill that made me into one of the lucky ones.
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