Storm Warning Too Late

My daughter Mary is vacationing on the Gulf of Mexico along the “panhandle” of west Florida. She sent me the photograph featured here. Along this borderland many dramas have played out as journeys of exploration and clashes of empire. The region is rich in a history and culture little known and seldom taught outside the lower south.

Many families from bordering Georgia and Alabama have deep memories of this paradise, inspired by the beauty and romance of sailing, seafood dinners and saltwater fishing. Many also know the fearful price exacted when nature’s angry power rides the gulf currents and crashes into coastal towns and strikes deep into the back country.

One such storm came ashore in the form of Hurricane Kate in November of 1985. After she slammed Cuba with 125-mile an hour winds, Kate wallowed around the gulf for days. A high pressure front deflected her back eastward and she suddenly turned onshore, passing directly over Tallahassee , Florida and nearby Thomasville, Georgia.

November 22nd was a balmy, warm day. My family and I lived on a plantation about half way between the two towns. Thanksgiving preparations were underway while we kept an eye on the weather forecasts. When the storm warnings finally arrived it was too late for us to do more than shelter in place.

“Place” in this case was Pebble Hill Plantation, an historic old plantation that had been opened so the public could experience first hand how the wealthy plantation owners had come to build or restore remarkable homes and indulge their love for the long leaf pines, gun dogs, shotguns, horses and warm winters over the past century. There are about seventy such “plantations” around Thomasville that double as winter vacation homes and quail hunting preserves. I was in charge of the place.

Often these sanctuaries have been inherited across generations from the late nineteenth century “Robber Barons” and “Captains of Industry,” many of whom were early investors in Standard Oil. The quail -shooting season does not start until after Christmas, after the late-summer and fall hurricane season has passed.

Kate passed right over Thomasville in the night as we took what shelter our clapboard farmhouse could offer, cramming pillows and blankets into a hall closet and closing the door behind us.

Our home was at the end of a circular drive and surrounded by enormous yellow pines, ancient sentinels that began to crack as the wind rose. The electricity failed when the first high winds downed trees along the main highway. We were afraid to leave our safe place until morning and spent a fearful night filled with the sound of raging winds, lightening strikes and crashing trees.

The early morning light revealed that at least seventy good-sized trees were down around our house, and dozens of pines lay like giant fiddle sticks across the length of our drive. It was amazing that our house was untouched. A smaller frame house only a hundred feet away from ours was crushed when a 75-year old long leaf pine fell, cutting the house cleanly in half. Mercifully it was unoccupied at the time.

We were without electric service and running water for more than two weeks while caring for two small children and two older girls. Mary (our photographer) was three years old and her brother Joseph was about to celebrate his second birthday. Like the days of our our current coronavirus epidemic, it was a time for family bonding and the mounting tedium of enforced isolation.

Our consulting forester over the next few days reckoned that more than a million board feet of lumber had been downed in the storm on Pebble Hill’s three thousand acres. Pebble Hill included only about 3,000 acres and was among the smallest of all the plantations. Imagine the devastation on the larger holdings, where Kate had claimed tens of thousands of trees.

The result was a forced harvest of fallen yellow pines that glutted the lumber market sending nationwide prices tumbling. More tragically, Kate had felled entire stands of old-growth long leaf pines and damaged much of the fragile ecosystem, home to red cockade woodpeckers, wild turkeys and myriad plants unique to the “Red Hills” region above Tallahassee.

Months of work lay ahead, clearing downed trees from the network of a hundred miles of privately owned service and farm roads on Pebble Hill. Debris had to be collected. Many trees died after the storm. Rain had softened the ground and Kate had spawned tornadoes that literally twisted trees from their root system. Other trees that had appeared to be intact, would die from their internal wounds.

It was a warm November in 1985 when all this occurred, and the days that followed the storm are memorable because they were mostly cool, clear, and bright. The weather was mild so we managed without air conditioning or heat, boiled water and cooked on a charcoal cooker. A friend connected a small generator to our home electrical supply system to give us lighting at night.

I spent a lot of time on foot trying to meet with those who were available to work and to help restore some order to the place. Timber crews and heavy machines worked for days to open our drive and haul away the logs. Miraculously, none of the thirty or so people who lived and worked at Pebble Hill were injured, though we would need to replace almost every roof on Pebble Hill’s thirty four buildings during the next two years. The main house, despite its classical design, was built of brick and concrete and suffered only minor damage.

Hurricane Kate is forgotten these days as our memories of later, more horrific storms plaster over the events of that terrible night. But Mary’s wonderful photograph of a storm brewing along the gulf coast awakened my memory of the night when she huddled with her family in a closet while Kate devastated so much around us, yet thankfully left us all unhurt. Ironically, a tornado would pass over Pebble Hill just two months later. But that is another story.