In the midst of destruction, Americans show true grit

This column has been written in text, on a mobile phone in a room lit only by a candle. The temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

No air-conditioning because the electricity is off. Drinks are lukewarm, since the ice ran out yesterday, around the same time as the ice cream turned to sweet soup in its tub.

No power means the petrol stations can’t pump the gasoline they have into the cars that need it. It also means customers are allowed into the 7/11 convenience store one at a time as an earlier customer exits: the closed circuit TV camera cannot do its normal surveillance job and the cashier can take on potential muggers only in single file.

On Friday and Saturday nights a 7am-7pm curfew kept drivers - and potential looters - at home. Even though the severity of the immediate post-hurricane rules is relaxing traffic at night. Thin, and tentative, particularly at major intersections normally governed by traffic lights, where guesswork and extreme courtesy replace the usual stop go sequence.

Outside, the insect-loud darkness is as smothering as a warm damp blanket. The all-pervasive evening smell is of barbecue, as residents, unable to cook in their darkened kitchens fire up the charcoal in the poolside metal grills instead. The resultant meals are enormous and varied because of the need to utilise the contents of freezers awash in melt water before those contents spoil. Steaks, burgers, chicken breasts and shrimp jostle for space on the hot grill bars. Laughter echoes around the darkened pools as diners toast each other in warm beer: “we survived Hurricane Charley”.

When they go to bed the quiet is eerie. No televisions blaring out sports results or soap operas or the latest from the presidential election.

At dawn, by contrast, the cacophony is overwhelming as tractors and earthmovers clank into position, ready to shift aluminium sidings sheared off buildings by the wind or pull away metal structures warped beyond recognition or utility.

Ladders clang against guttering as men in shorts with tool belts hanging heavily around their waists climb onto roofs to count how many shingles are missing. A wood chipper begins to devour sections of fallen trees sawn into edible chunks by workers, their grey T-shirts already - at 7am - blackened by oval sweat stains.

There is no talk of body bags going in to Punta Gorda, although the same reports on radio which tell of the president’s arrival here today, Sunday, mention somewhere between 20 to 60 deaths there. That’s a problem, and, as philosopher Santayana once said, Americans don’t cherish problems, they leave them behind. If there’s an idea they don’t like they allow it to die of inattention while they talk about something else.

The fact that people died in Punta Gorda, which had never been mentioned as being in the path of the hurricane is an unwelcome reminder of the random and of the uncontrollable. Neither are profitable subjects for discussion.

Whereas Irish tourists, post-hurricane, talked wonderingly about being moved from one resort, supposedly in Hurricane Charley’s direct route, only to find they’d been shunted directly into its altered path. Residents spoke with pride of the scale and efficiency of the evacuation.

What the authorities could control, they did control. What they couldn’t control, they worked with. They moved the equivalent of one-third of the population of Ireland (some of them as far as 500 miles) in 36 hours.

Those who refused to move were warned by loudhailer of the dangers they faced and then left to their own devices. When the winds died down, residents who had failed to comply with the evacuation crawled from under stairwells and from out of bathrooms and went to work. Hammer and saw noises replaced the recent roar of nature.

Long before evacuees were allowed back onto the islands those who had never left for the mainland got started on fixing what had been damaged by the high winds and the surging water. The obstinate elderly joined with the ornery, the alcoholic and the eccentric in remarkably effective ad hoc repair teams.

The last time twin hurricanes of such force swept through south Florida was more than a hundred years ago, before theme parks, trailer homes and retirement communities, when the population was a fraction of what it is today. The storm nonetheless left hundreds dead, some not found for months after the sea broke over the low-lying ground and surged inland. Disease was everywhere.

This time around cars and ruthless traffic management allowed an orderly retreat in the face of threat and an early return after the storm had done its worst, although for some, even the return posed its own challenges as big cars inching along for hours trying to get onto a causeway or a bridge soaked up more and more battery power to keep their air-conditioning and radio operational.

The idling engines failed to keep their batteries charged and so several cars stopped in mid-procession, requiring help from the hard-pressed AAA (equivalent of our AA) before they could be persuaded to resume progress.

By mid-morning on Saturday the airports were open again releasing a day’s worth of dammed up travellers into the system from JFK, Newark, Pittsburgh, Detroit and other hub airports. When a woman in a hurry in Philadelphia ran through security and disappeared into the terminal crowds without being searched this breach of the new systems brought the airport to a three hour standstill.

People who had already spent an expensive night in a hotel now standing in a mile ling queue quietly expressed hopes that the female involved might be located and sentenced to do serious time for delaying the already delayed.

Television always transmits essentially the same post-hurricane pictures. Typically those panning shots show families weeping at the edge of a pile of rubble that once was their home, decorated by some arbitrary icon of domesticity like a teddy bear or a teapot. TV cannot transmit the profound impact of darkness and of heat, neither of which Americans like.

The single most notable characteristic of the state-wide response to Hurricane Charley, however, has been an uncomplaining workmanlike acceptance. America is not big on blame: “shit happens” is more than a T-shirt slogan. It’s a summary of the stoic acceptance implicit in the relative isolationism of the USA which causes most Americans to lack a passport and top have minimal interest in Europe and other non-US governed areas of the world. America expects to help others and to be liked as a result of helping others. It doesn’t expect help for itself.

Individual Americans, in the aftermath of a hurricane expect to have to hammer wood over the broken glass, take a second or third job and get on with it. They have total self-reliance matched by positive expectations. The lights will come back on in due course. The rubble will be cleared away. And there won’t be another hurricane like it for decades.