My grandparents moved down to Florida in 1972, shortly before I turned four. They chose a new retirement community west of Ft. Lauderdale in Broward County called Vanguard Village, about eight miles inland. It was a charming little development of modest houses built on modest lots, along an array of fairly narrow, numbered streets with plenty of cul-de-sacs. No sidewalks, though, but there was so little traffic that it wasn't much of an issue. There was a central clubhouse with a pool and shuffleboard courts, which was always bustling with activity; my grandparents were part of a shuffleboard league in the first few years they were down there. The streets had canals running between them, most likely to prevent flooding in the case of heavy rains.
They bought their own house in the village, built to their specifications from a choice of floor plans and options. I think the proper term may be "manufactured" homes, but over time they all held their own better than most new constructions I've seen out here in Minnesota. Amazingly, we unearthed a promotional flyer for the actual floor plan that my grandparents chose! It shows a price of about $23,000 for the house, with options for a screened-in porch on the patio or a "Florida room" - a term I've never heard used outside the context of these houses, but one that means a sun room, with an entire wall of sliding glass doors. The houses had a master bedroom and a guest bedroom, so with the sleeper sofa in the Florida room, there was usually enough sleeping space for a visiting family like mine.
The houses all had their own lots, and had a satisfying sameness to their looks, but without all being clones of each other. They all had a centralized lawn service to cut the grass, which was a different species than the grass from the northeast and was far less soft on the feet. They all had a centralized sprinkler service, which pumped water from the canals and didn't use any city water. My grandfather was on the city council and actually helped set up the sprinkler system - neat! Nearly all of them had a concrete driveway that was tinted to match the color of the house. My grandparents' driveway was green. There were palm trees everywhere, and cute little lizards that sometimes found their way into the house.
The entire development was maybe a half mile tall by a quarter mile wide. It spanned about five blocks by five blocks: NW 63rd St to NW 68th St, and NW 70th Ave to NW 74th Ave. But not a typical rectangular grid of streets - there were enough twists and discontinuities to make things interesting for a visiting grandkid like me. I'd constantly ride around on Grandma's tricycle, or later, Grandpa's motorized bike. (Literally, a bicycle with a teeny, tiny gas motor attached to the front wheel. Maximum speed: mighty small.) Our trips down there were during the era of Pac-Man, and I remember trying to trace out an efficient, Pac-Man-like path through the streets. Came close, but always had to double back on myself a little bit.The village had outlet streets, like the Pac-Man game, that emptied onto University Avenue to its west, McNab Road to its north, and Commercial Boulevard to its south. Those streets are horrendously busy nowadays, but weren't even finished when they moved down there. I can clearly remember riding the tricycle out to the edge of the construction for McNab Road; this probably explains my love for the giant paving machines. The outlet street to the east was paved, but had no houses on it and was closed to automobile traffic. It was still open for bikes, though, and was my favorite place to ride. In the years since I was a kid it's since been developed with newer condos.
To me, Vanguard Village was a perfectly normal place to retire. Everyone was old and friendly, and if there were other kids there, they were somebody's grandkids, just like us. We used to go down to visit every year or two until I was around 14 (in 1982), then there was a gap of at least 15 years until my next visit. Lately, I've been down about once a year for the last four or five years. You can imagine my surprise on this particular trip.
None of the four hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004 affected Broward County much, and I got the feeling that many people thought they were pretty much immune to hurricane damage. Hurricane Wilma, however, was a category 2 storm when it passed through the area, and did some substantial damage as it moved from west to east on October 24, 2005. Surprisingly, it's not getting much media coverage, and I attribute that to saturation with hurricane coverage, with Katrina demolishing New Orleans in September, and Rita causing substantially less damage about two weeks later.
The eye of the hurricane passed right over the village. I talked to a gentleman that wandered outside to talk to his neighbor across the street during the twenty minutes that the eye surrounded them. He said that inside the eye, it was perfectly calm, blue skies, as if nothing was wrong. But the back edge of the eye had an amazingly sharp edge, and the winds went from zero back up to 110 miles per hour in about a second. The gentleman said that had he run back inside only two seconds later, he would have been pelted by some large debris that blew up and over his neighbor's house.
Everyone I talked to down there mentioned the incredible noise of the wind during the storm. Normally, the sound of a tree falling outside your house would normally scare the pants off you, but the wind was so loud that it drowned out the falling trees. Amazing. I think my grandmother may have missed the bulk of the storm because she didn't have her hearing aid in - probably a good thing.
The design of the houses in Vanguard Village made them especially susceptible to wind damage. The roof of every house had an aluminum sheet that protruded around the entire perimeter of the roof. The wind peeled back a corner of the aluminum, then peeled off the entire roof as if it were the top of a yogurt cup. This happened to probably 80 or 90 percent of the houses in the development. There was plenty of damage to other roof styles and windows throughout Fort Lauderdale, but in Vanguard Village, the storm caused almost exclusively roof damage. There were bits of tar paper strewn everywhere, and they'll certainly be finding tiny tar paper bits on the lawns for years to come.
The power was out for the entire area for about a week, which was enough to ruin everyone's supply of food in the freezer. Initially, people were told to boil their water, which was laughable since there was no way to boil anything with the power off. It took a few days to clear the roads of trees, which must have been quite a task. During those first few days, most of the traffic lights were out, causing enormous delays in getting from one place to another. Two weeks after the storm, there were still some traffic lights that were blinking red, or were just plain missing, having been blown off the wires by the wind. There were plenty of road signs that were bent over by the wind, and plenty of street-side signs for businesses that were completely blown out, leaving only a frame. A lot of businesses had banner-style signs outside their storefronts, usually with a "now open" exclamation. A lot of PODS ("Portable On-Demand Storage") units outside people's houses. It must have been pretty unpleasant right after the storm.
So this was the environment we entered. My mother and I arrived at the airport in Fort Lauderdale at about the same time on a Wednesday, a little over two weeks after the storm. We were lucky to find a rental car, because most rentals were taken by people attending some car show or other down there. We drove around in a giant Dodge Caravan minivan - unwieldy and butt ugly, but at least it was something to drive around in. My mother had made arrangements to stay with friends down there, because there were no hotel rooms to be had at any price. She stayed with Hugh and Carol (Carol was my grandmother's cleaning lady) in an RV on their driveway. I stayed in a surprisingly undamaged house in the village, which belonged to some relatives of another of Carol's clients. They were all in walking distance of my grandmother's house, so it made the logistics fairly simple.
The damage to Grandma's house was pretty typical. Roof ripped off, leaving not much more than plywood on top of the house. A few small panes of a window blown out. And a very soggy interior, including the carpeting and all the flooring in the kitchen and bathrooms. Well before we got there, Hugh had secured tarps to the roof, had boarded the broken window, and had cut the wires to the lighting fixture in the kitchen, which had fallen under the weight of a large amount of water. (I can only imagine what the house looked like when he initially found it.) Apparently, tarps were mighty hard to come by in the days following the storm.
So rather than refer to the place as "a war zone" or some other cliché, I'll try and describe some specifics. Very clear water damage along some seam lines in the ceilings. Very apparent water damage and mold spots in the carpets underneath those seam lines. Black mold dots on the walls, each about the size of a dime, working their way down from the ceilings by a foot or two in some rooms, up from the carpet by about a foot or two in other rooms. Squishy carpets, some locations worse than others. Fallen ceiling tiles in the kitchen and bathroom, which had apparently taken on more water than they could hold. A few panels of very soggy, very moldy pink insulation in the ceiling above the kitchen. Some translucent ceiling tiles in the bathrooms still retaining rancid water over two weeks after the storm. (Eww!) I noticed two distinct kinds of mold - a green mold, like what you'd get on old bread in the fridge, and a more sinister-looking black mold. I'm pretty sure the black stuff is what you never want to see in your house, because it can be toxic.
Mom brought a 50-pack of surgical masks down there, which worked great once I figured out that one edge has a wire that bends to conform to the shape of your nose, and the opposite edge tucks under your chin. It took about a day for me to figure that out. We wore the masks pretty much constantly when we were in the house.Boy, the first few minutes inside the house were pretty nasty. The windows were shut, the air conditioners were off, and it was humid. You can imagine what the mold smelled like, even through the masks. If I actually believed in hell, it would probably be humid, moldy, and stagnant, rather than the fire and brimstone I've heard so much about.
The first order of business was getting some fresh air into the house so we wouldn't die. This involved opening all the windows and doors in the house all at once. While opening the windows is undoubtedly a routine occurrence for most people living in a lovely climate where it's 80-85 degrees during the day and about 70 at night, as it was during our week down there, I'm certain that it never occurred once in the 33 years that my grandmother was down there. She'd often tell us that she was cold at night so she'd have the heat on, then got hot during the day so she'd have the air conditioning on. Well, whatever made her happy. Once we opened everything up, we got a nice breeze blowing through, which made our work a little less unpleasant. Ironic, I thought, that the wind that did so much damage two weeks ago was such a lifesaver for us.
The job responsibilities fell quickly into line. Mom took on the tasks of sorting and assembling what we'd try to save from the house, and I dragged the wet building materials and damaged items out to the curb. Mom also had the task of dealing with Allstate (ha!), and with finding a mover to pack up and move the stuff we rescued.
Working in the house wasn't exactly fun, really, but it really wasn't all that bad. The water worked, so we had working bathrooms. The electricity worked, so we ran fans and did laundry. Over the course of two days, I managed to wash (with plenty of bleach), dry, fold, and bag Grandma's entire linen closet. We didn't actually send any sheets or towels to Grandma, but gave everything to Carol, who will keep what she wants and donate the rest to the Vietnam Veterans' thingy. We were lucky - there were quite a few houses in the neighborhood with the dreaded pink and green flyers on them, informing them that it wasn't safe to turn on the electricity. See? Could have been much worse.I always had a bucket of bleachy water at my disposal and an oversized sponge, so I could easily mop up any wet things. Always fun to play with bleach!
I learned a hierarchy for what grows mold. Fabric of any type is the worst - I think it will grow mold if you just look at it wrong. Wood is a little bit better - the mold grows a little more slowly than on fabric. Plastic is even better, and metal seems completely resistant to mold. Clearly, then, they should be making houses entirely out of metal, with no fabric whatsoever.
For the entire week, during daylight hours, you could always hear the background noise of circular saws and chain saws. Something always being cut down or cut down to size. It was a comforting sound after a while, like the sound of the ocean or a babbling brook.
The wind in the neighborhood must have been something fierce. We found a tin cap from a neighbor's house embedded in the exterior wall of Grandma's house! Some of the roof debris on Grandma's lawn had a color that was clearly not from Grandma's house, and sent me down the block looking for the house where it came from. I even found a piece of tar paper in the shape of Minnesota.
The day before the movers showed up, I'd dragged as much as I could to the curb. I should mention that the old foam mattresses, which were originally from my mother's bedroom set when she was a kid, absorbed a ridiculous amount of icky water, and were remarkably heavy for their size. We went through just about two full packages of 50 big plastic trash bags. That's nearly ONE HUNDRED bags of trash hauled out of the house to the curb. And Grandma's house was nearly empty in terms of personal belongings - she'd been shedding her possessions for fifteen years, since Grandpa died. (I should point out to my mother, who tends to err on the side of the pack rat, that she'd better do some thinning of the herd before I have to clean out HER house...)My goal was to have the biggest pile of curb junk in the entire village, and I think I came pretty close near the end. I had dragged out a few chairs with moldy bases, which disappeared by the next morning - someone trolling the neighborhood must have nabbed it. I can't imagine that anyone would want a set of soggy, moldy chairs, but I'd be wrong.
The routine for most days was pretty much the same. I'd get up early (basically when the sun came up, since I had no timekeeping devices whatsoever in the house), open up the house, pick up Mom in the RV, grab breakfast, go back to the house and work until lunch, work some more until it got dark, grab dinner, drop Mom off at the RV, go back to the house and shower, then go to bed. Before the showers, I smelled like both mold and bleach; you'd think that one would have countered the other, but no. After the showers, I just smelled like bleach.
In some respects, the house where I stayed was nice - no TV, no emails or other electronic distractions, and a whole house to myself. One night, I went scrounging around the house for something to read, and I found a newspaper from September 25, 2005, with the headline, "Rita Rocks Gulf Coast", featuring a big section on the hurricane relief effort. Hmm.
The house itself was clearly owned by a retiree. It was pretty easy to tell, with the presence of dozens of knick-knacks, like the plastic frog with the sign that read, "People who think the dead never come back to life should be here at quitting time." Or the combination lamp/planter, in which the base of a desk lamp has some soil in it, and the lamp fixture protrudes upward from the center of the base. A lamp/planter?!?
That house also had a plumbing problem, which could have turned out to be rather severe. I turned on the water in the bathtub, just to check things out, and it wouldn't turn off. It was clearly a mechanical problem with the faucet, and one that I couldn't fix. The faucet was like at a hotel, where you pull a thingy out to turn on the water, and rotate it to change the temperature. I pushed in to shut off the water, but it just popped out all by itself and turned on again. Repeatedly. Oh dear. While that could have been disastrous, I quickly discovered that by wedging a Marks-A-Lot marker through the handle in the faucet, I could force the handle into the off position. The notch on the Marks-A-Lot cap was exactly the right size to hold the temperature notch in the handle. In my exact words at the time, "I'm a freakin' genius!"
Breakfast was either some fruit that I'd bought at the supermarket, or a black and white cookie (brought down from the Rockland Bakery in NY by Mom), or a sit-down breakfast at the Orange Tree, a little breakfast-n-lunch place that was walking distance from Grandma's house, and was almost certainly never patronized by Grandma. Lunch was usually a sandwich that I'd pick up from some local places - a pastrami sandwich from one place, or a Cuban sandwich from a really good place way across town. Dinners were all over the place, but always at a restaurant where I invariably ate too much and slept like crap as a result.
I think it was the black and whites that did me in. For those of you not from New York, they're giant-sized cookies, with half vanilla icing and half chocolate icing. The consistency isn't really a cookie - it's more like a dried-out cupcake. And they're 640 calories each. I'm convinced that the reason old Jewish men are fat is black and whites - we're powerless before them.
The Colombian restaurant near Grandma's place was still there (thank God!), and they're just getting better with age. (“Tierras Colombianas”, at Commercial Blvd and 66th Terrace in Tamarac, FL) I misidentified a show that was playing on a TV in the restaurant as a Mexican soap - one of the other patrons corrected me by pointing out that it was a Colombian soap, being shown on a Colombian station. My bad! Nice guy - he, too, was from New York, and he turned me on to a great dessert at the restaurant: "nata", which is similar to rice pudding.We had dinner with a wonderful woman named Esther, who worked with my grandfather back when he was still working, throughout the mid-to-late '60s. She told stories that pretty well confirmed what I had suspected - Grandpa was a great guy to work for, and was very well-liked by his peers. It's one thing to hear that from family, but it's very different to hear it from someone who worked side by side with him for years. He had worked for Longines, the watch company, and he was the accountant that started and ran their Longines Symphonette mail-order record division. (The same entity name-checked by They Might Be Giants in the 1990 song, "Birdhouse In Your Soul".) I knew Grandpa was an accountant, and now knowing that he was involved with these mail-order records may help explain my fondness for records. Maybe. Perhaps.
There used to be some terrific book/record stores in the area. There was a chain of three stores (“All Books & Records”) when I went down there three years ago. Two years ago, they were down to two. Last year, it was just one. And now, the last one closed. Dang it! One fewer reason to go down to south Florida.
The night before the movers came, it rained. One would think that with tarps on the roof, all would be well. Not quite. Apparently, the tarps collected all the water that fell on the roof, like a giant bowl. The water then seeped between the tarps onto the plywood, then came through in the same places that received the most water damage. Six hours after it stopped raining outside, it was still raining inside. Now this is obvious, and probably doesn't need any explanation, but it had not once occurred to either of us that we should probably store stuff away from the severely damaged portions of the carpet. Fortunately, we only had to dry off one pile of pictures. The movers came and moved everything without incident, but boy was the carpet extra squishy. Yuk.
There is a chain of convenience stores in south Florida called "Kwik Stop". At the corner of University Avenue and NW 82nd Street, there is a Kwik Stop with its sign clearly reading, "Kiwk Stop". I got a picture of it.With exceptions for Hugh, Carol, and Esther, I got a pretty negative impression of the older population down in south Florida. We ate at a few delis, Mom shopped a little at TJ Maxx to blow off steam, we spent a significant amount of time at a UPS store, and we visited some of Grandma's friends and neighbors in the village. That's a lot of exposure to some old folks, and I have to say that I wasn't impressed. I saw a lot of insane dye jobs - why would women deliberately do that to their hair? Huge balloon umbrellas in just a tiny drizzle. Gossip. Exaggeration. Lack of turn signal use. Berating of family members. Berating of other people's family members. Haranguing of a clerk at TJ Maxx. Yelling at the poor guy behind the deli counter at a supermarket. Overall, a general incivility to others, as if they're entitled to something that the others aren't. I couldn't help feeling that the entire old, Jewish population in south Florida was looking down on everyone else. This may explain why the longest I've ever dated a Jewish girl is four days. At the end of the week, I was relieved to come back here to Minnesota, where we can still look down on others that are different from us, but we have the decency to keep it to ourselves.
So I learned four things from the trip:
- Always store everything of importance in plastic zip-loc bags.
- Never get a house with a flat roof. Unless it's completely contained in a plastic zip-loc bag.
- Don't spend more than three days with your mother. In my family, it's called the "three day rule", and I probably shouldn't have agreed to spend a whole week down there. It's a miracle I didn't kill her.
- Bleach cures everything.
This is Hugh, Mom, and Carol.
Three views of a giant tree stump, with giant root pattern that got ripped out of the ground when they fell. This is easily eight or ten feet tall.
Four different views of a different stump.
A view looking down a block in Vanguard Village.
And finally, some extremely old cleaning products I found in Grandma’s garage. If you look closely, you can see “15 cents” stamped on top of one of them.
Stay warm and dry, and may you never have to go through this yourself.Ron
