Memorial Day marks exactly eight months since Hurricane Helene flooded Anna Maria Island.
Many friends have left the Island since then, and it was not anyone’s first choice, nor did any leave on their own terms.
My friends, mostly older, had a variety of reasons.
Their kids were concerned about them evacuating before the next storm and staying alone in a hotel for days, weeks or months. Many friends moved closer to their adult children, which is often inevitable – but many left before they were ready.
Some left because it proved too hard to evacuate for days and weeks with dogs or cats or birds; in some cases, there were pet casualties.
Some left because of the likelihood of huge impending homeowners association assessments to pay for damage, and the inevitability of higher monthly dues, forcing out those on fixed incomes.
Some left because a developer shut down their trailer park.
Some left because developers have been snapping up distressed properties after the storm and intend to build three stories on both sides of neighbors who don’t want to live in a shadowy concrete canyon.
Many had so much damage to their homes they couldn’t afford to pay for it, leading to further gentrification on AMI. Everyone has heard the insurance companies’ 2024-25 mantra, “It’s not covered,” followed by citations to obscure policy provisions that no one ever reads before signing, because everyone was just happy to be able to qualify for any flood insurance on a barrier island.
Even some investors I know are planning to leave, because while they were safe and sound with all their possessions in their northern homes during Helene, they were terrified of losing their investment properties watching national news about AMI.
Most people I know made a list of pros and cons before deciding to leave.
On the pro side, there’s the beautiful, sparkling, magical Gulf of Mexico with its dolphins and manatees and sunsets, its sea turtles, shorebirds and coquinas, its reef fish, waves and clouds, its moonsets, peace and beauty.
On the con side, there’s the raging, unpredictable, fierce Gulf of Mexico, with its floodwaters pushing several feet of sand into our homes, its theft of protective sand dunes, leaving the beaches flat and unappealing, its slaughter of sea oats and sea grapes and palm trees and saw palmettos and yellow beach sunflowers and purple railroad vines, its insidious approach closer to beachfront properties – and that’s not an optical illusion.
Many of us spent a lot of time trying to identify all the lesser cons to justify our decisions to leave – the Island’s horrible traffic problems during season, the loss of Old Florida to mega-mansions, the red tide, the difficulty getting and paying for insurance, the already-dwindling supply of friends and neighbors.
But let’s not kid ourselves. All of that pales in comparison to the trauma that everyone experienced to one degree or the other, according to our temperaments and the extent of our bad luck, after Helene and Milton, which – in case we missed the prophecy of Helene – came two weeks later to underline it.
When you boil it all down, it’s hurricanes making everyone flee the Island.
Including, after 23 years on the beach, me.
I was the last person in the world my neighbor thought would ever leave, and she was the last person in the world I thought would ever leave, but, to our mutual surprise, both of us are leaving.
The Gulf looms in my mind as a potential danger now, not the haven it always was since my childhood, when crossing the Manatee Avenue bridge to the Island and watching the pelicans glide over the bridge’s edge always promised a happy day of surfing, sunbathing and fun with friends ahead.
Now, it’s a blackhearted lover who lulled us into a false sense of security while planning a malicious betrayal behind the scenes that left us in pieces.
The Gulf never promised us anything, but we decided that it was good and true and beautiful and could never harm us. We wanted it to be so with all our hearts and thought that our faith and deep love for it would make it so.
But in its depths, it held the power to destroy our lives, homes and businesses, and with the dispassionate approach of an executioner, with no opportunity to have a trial, plead for mercy, or even say goodbye, it did.
So goodbye, beach, with your wild, creative and destructive beauty; goodbye, lifelong dream of a lifelong beachfront cottage; goodbye backyard surfing and swimming and sunsets.
We who reluctantly leave graduate on to the next thing, whatever that may be, as survivors – stronger in some ways, weaker in others – but always, always Island girls and boys in our hearts.
