Saturday. News crews came out and appeared like stars at dusk all along the beach. This is Lowdermilk Park, site of Anderson Cooper's Immaculate Visit. For a small fee I can direct you to the piece of railing he touched.
Saturday. The beach had been much more deserted on Friday, but people came out more when it became apparent Wilma wouldn't arrive for another couple days.
Saturday. The Naples Pier was downright crowded. You could clearly see the long-period swells that are typical of a hurricane's presence.
Saturday. Looking north from the Pier. The very bright light is still another news crew.
Saturday. Looking south from the Pier. One of the main attractions of the beach was the surfers who tried to surf on four-foot waves without much success.
Sunday. Back again at Lowdermilk. The regular beach visits were sort of nightly entertainment. So was driving around. It was a sort of strange feeling, made possible by modern satellite technology. We all knew there was a hurricane coming. We knew it would probably not be too terribly powerful, but still--as you drove around Naples, looking at the preparations and at the strange, waiting stillness, you also had a little question in the back of your mind, would you see these places as they are now again? The bigger the storm, perhaps the more persistent the question. So as you looked around, you were also sort of anointing things, trees, buildings, landscapes, with memory, in case a day later, that would be the only place they resided.
Sunday. One of the smartest things the city did was take down as many traffic lights as possible, since the storm would just blow them down anyway. The dumbest thing people in general did was think that just because there was no light directly above their specific lane, they could still proceed. But red lights in Naples don't tend to stop motorists anyway, so there wasn't much of a difference.
Monday. These are just the gusts after Wilma passed. The trees moved more earlier. We figured the gusts we had at the most intense part of it were 100+ mph since they were markedly stronger than the ones we had for Charlie. They made doors whistle and the shutters on the screen porch creak some. It was possible to go outside around 2 p.m., when the wind was blowing just from the cold front. In the backside of the storm the temperature dropped into the low seventies, creating an interesting effect as pulling open the front door to look out went from a humid experience to a freezing one with rain coming in hirozontally once the wind came around on the northwestern eyewall.
Monday. There. Is. So. Much. Plant. Debris.
Monday. More yard pictures.
Monday. It rained over five inches in Naples during Wilma. So this tree went over as its roots lost their hold in a slushy puddle of sandy mud. First it just leaned. Then it leaned on a cabbage palm. Then it leaned on the well shack and the house.
Tuesday. What was interesting was how little damage this actually caused. There was a one-inch hole from the fattest branch and the rest was all just good visuals, though concerning during the storm.
Monday. An unexpected dual attack from a slash pine and cabbage palm. I was sitting in that room with Tess the black lab I was watching for her evacuated owners when the crown of the pine hit the shutter. It sort of went creak, thud, if you want to know what a tree attacking a house sounds like.
Monday. The red-bellied woopeckers loved this palm tree. But, at least my car wasn't hit by anything. The tree's now in pieces, but what a striking entrance it would have made.
Monday. Most of the driveway was a big debris puddle swamp.
Monday. Lots of cabbage palms will probably die later on, if their hearts are torn up like this. The interesting thing about this is how low to the ground this tree was and it still got a lot of wind.
Monday. The driveway looking wind-blown.
Monday. As usual for a big rain, the street flooded. And also as usual people in SUVs went too fast through it, tossing wakes at people's houses. That night, for the first time in over a year (Charley came through in last August), the stars really came out. With power out in most of Naples, you could stand in the driveway, look up, and see the Milky Way and a host of other pinprick stars that FP&L normally hides. I even looked up and saw a shooting star. It may have been the first one I've ever seen, or at least that I remember seeing.
Wednesday. Second Avenue North had a lot of branches down from its tree tunnel. Mostly Naples had lots and lots of tree damage, which of course damaged power lines, too.
Wednesday. The library's palm trees.
Wednesday. The beach looked really normal, except for the sand being sort of packed and the sea oats and other plants being coated with salt and sand. It doesn't look like much, but they should be greener.
Wednesday. Lots of intersections look like this. Lots of people also don't apparently know how to treat intersections missing traffic lights as four-way stops because waiting your turn and yielding are declasse in Naples.
Crayton Drive, which is a couple blocks from the beach, is lined by a bunch of fifty-year-old banyan trees...which don't do so well in a hurricane.
More banyan trees. Behind there somewhere is a house.
The screwy traffic light posts they've been putting in for the last five or six years worked pretty well, aside from common and sometimes comical torquing.
It's really not possible to capture in a photograph (especially a bad one like this) how much brush is piled in front of our woods.
And here's the other side of the driveway. Yes, it's ALL ours. Every twig.
Created November 2005.