Hurricane Hugo: "Them Deer Heads Are Hard to Come By"

Hurricane Hugo from space

From The Salisbury Post | Another Remembrance
National Weather Service Hurricane Hugo 25th Anniversary Site

The (Columbia, S.C.) State's anniversary coverage

 

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I stayed up late into the night on Sept. 21, 1989, watching CNN and baking apple pies. A bunch of my friends had gone to the Rowan County Fair, but I was trying to prove to a co-worker that I could replicate my mom’s award-winning creations in the kitchen. I don’t think I succeeded.

I was too distracted by seeing Hurricane Hugo make landfall on Sullivan’s Island, S.C.

Little did I know that just a few hours later, the storm would smash into the inland town where I lived and I would get my first chance to cover a real natural disaster.

I don’t pretend that what we experienced was at all similar to my friends on the South Carolina coast, where Hugo killed 35 people and caused $6 billion in damage. I never understood why the storm had to take out most of Charleston, one of America's greatest cities, and leave most of Myrtle Beach and South of the Border relatively unscathed.

At least Lowcountry residents were warned to evacuate and expecting something bad to happen that night, and voyeuristic newsies like myself were eager to watch at a time when live weather coverage of major storms was still in its infancy.

At the time, I lived in Salisbury, N.C., some 250 miles from where Hugo came ashore as a Category 4 storm near Charleston. It headed straight up I-85 at a blistering speed and was still a Category 1 storm with 89-mile-an-hour winds when it crossed the Rowan County line.

None of us had any hatches to batten down. So when the lights went out and the brick chimney in the apartment where I lived collapsed in the middle of the night, it was unexpected.

The trees were still bent and misshapen when the eye of the storm passed over and I went outside to see the damage. I was living on Fulton Street near downtown. Locals will know exactly what I mean when I say three doors down from Mrs. Hanford, where Liddy grew up.

The storm hit around 6 a.m. and the worst of it was gone in less than an hour. I was able to drive nonlinearly to the office, avoiding downed trees and live power lines, in my little red Honda. It had been a bad year already for storms in North Carolina. That spring, an F4 tornado tore through my hometown of Vale, killing four people and taking out an eight-mile swath in the landscape.

The funny thing was, I showed up to a mostly empty newsroom. There were two other sportswriters, Steve Phillips and Horace Billings, and two or three news reporters and a couple of layout artists. One of the guys who ran the presses lived in the apartment above me. While much of the county was without power for weeks to come, our skeleton crew that morning was able to get out a full noon edition of the paper, unlike most of our competitors in the area.

The damage and misery notwithstanding, it was a glorious day to be a newspaper reporter.

Rowan Memorial Hospital lost its phones. The county’s 911 services were out. The Emergency Operations Center even lost its backup generator. Trees blocked Fulton Street and chainsaws were buzzing all morning long.

I somehow ended up at the hospital, checking on injuries around town. As I recall, the only one reported there was a man with a severe ankle injury. He slipped while running in flip-flops to answer the phone. It was his wife calling him to be careful, there was a storm coming.

Seriously.

Other reporters, Steve and I spent all day Friday running around town, dictating reports to the newsroom for Friday’s special edition and Saturday’s regular afternoon edition. I shared a frontpage byline with Martha Yates about the damage done to the city and the sadness it caused. I have no idea who got this gem of an anecdote that appeared in Saturday’s paper, but if there has ever been a better quote about surviving a natural disaster, I haven’t heard it.

Jimmy Carpenter had just moved from his recliner to a sofa when a tree crushed half of his mobile home. Carpenter was safe, as were his wife and pregnant daughter, but the taxidermy trophies on his wall were destroyed.

“Look at that…It crushed my deer heads,” Carpenter said. “We can replace the trailer, but them deer heads are hard to come by.”

It was the biggest story of the decade and the first time I ever participated in award-winning journalism. Our staff took first place in our division for spot news coverage in the North Carolina Press Association awards. A judge noted that we did exceptional work getting out a paper that day, when few others did. As Steve says, “Not really. We were just lucky that we had power.”

Soon enough, though, we were both back to covering sports.

Hugo hit on a Friday morning. High school games were canceled throughout the area, but the NC State-North Carolina football game was on as scheduled Saturday afternoon. Steve and I drove to Raleigh for the game, which the Wolfpack won 40-6. Driving back into town late that night was like entering a war zone.

The next few weeks were a grind, trying to live without power and work and hearing the heartwrenching stories from South Carolina about those who survived the storm, those who didn’t and all they endured.

A few months later I was offered a job at the Myrtle Beach Sun-News to write about golf on the Grand Strand, but I couldn’t bring myself to take it. The entire area was still decimated.

I’ve made it through a surprising number of hurricanes since that early morning experience 25 years ago. I played golf Hope Valley Country Club in Durham with Steve Elling, Dave Droschak and Chip Alexander the day Hurricane Fran hit Raleigh in 1996. The last three holes were the soggiest I have ever played. 

Two days later, the airport was still running on generators when I flew to Syracuse to cover North Carolina’s win at the Carrier Dome. NC State played Georgia Tech at Carter-Finley Stadium that day on about half of its electricity.

From the window of our resort hotel, my wife and I watched a minor Category 1 hurricane hit the beach at Aventura, Fla., snuggled up with no electricity and food from the defrosting hotel kitchen. They didn’t even bother to charge us for everything we took from the minibar that night.

When Floyd hit in 1999, I went to Greenville to cover the massive flooding around East Carolina’s campus. The entire eastern part of the state seemed to be under water. 

 

I even went to New Orleans a few years after Katrina for a week-long Habitat for Humanity project, funded by the Manning family of St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church (Archie, Eli and Peyton), to rebuild a neighborhood.

Hurricanes still scare me and, because of Hugo’s unbelievable wrath, always will. 

Who Did This? Hooligans?

The bad thing about renovating a bathroom yourself is someone is going to sit in there long enough to notice all the blemishes.

Whether it’s a family-taco-night-gone-wrong or bad crab dip at a Super Bowl party, a guest or family member eventually is going to come out of there after an excessively long time and say “Did you know there’s a patch on the wall with no paint on it?”

This is progress?

That’s when your wife will give you that I-told-you-we-should-have-hired-a-professional look.

Admittedly, I don’t do well with home improvement projects. The general reaction from guests who see my handy work is, “When were you vandalized? Will insurance cover all this damage?”

I have a little more time to take on such projects, and I rarely like paying people to do something I think I can do. I get that from my dad, an engineer who added a family room to our house, put on a new front porch and made me help him build back patio out flat river rocks that we dug out of an actual river. He generally can do any kind of necessary home repair, usually in the same calendar week that he starts it.

Clearly, these skills were not passed down to me. It usually costs more to fix my improvements in the long run, but I sometimes feel good about myself, despite my wife’s deflated reaction to the completed project.

Our house was built a while ago. I’m not saying it looks dated, but it is clearly time to replace the disco ball in the foyer, as well as to retire my white leisure suit.

We’ve been here since 1999, and the day the realtor showed us the house I knew I hated the color of the kitchen cabinets, the fireplace hearth and the banister in the foyer. She assured us it would be easy enough to change, and, now, just a short 15 years later, we are finally doing something about it.

We are having professionals do most of the work of re-facing the cabinets and replacing the counters in our rather large kitchen. We have this hulking centerpiece in the middle of it that is too big to call an island. It is a full-sized continent, our version of Australia floating around in Oceania where we wash dishes, make pancakes and inevitably cover with too much junk. We know it’s too much when the red lasers come out of the matriarch’s eyes.

A bathroom straight from 1992.

I wrote three books and hundreds of stories on that kitchen counter, so I would have quite an emotional attachment to it if it weren’t so ugly, so dated and so susceptible to Kool-Aid stains. It’s time to make some changes. We ordered darker cabinets, some quartz countertops and new light fixtures. We didn’t think too much about the powder room until I realized the stuff in there would no longer match the new stuff in the adjacent room.

When I told my wife I was going redo the bathroom while getting the kitchen ready for its remodel, she looked deeply into my eyes and said lovingly, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

In her defense, she’s seen all my previous do-it-yourself projects.

In our first house, we tried to strip the dated wallpaper out of the dining room. The paper came off, along with large chunks of drywall from the unprimed walls. It took us longer to patch the holes and put in new ugly wallpaper than we actually lived in the house (about four months).

Once, when she was out of town on a business trip, I decided to surprise her by taking out the wallpaper in the guest bathroom and paint it a lovely color I knew she would like. For an entire weekend, I took everything out of the bathroom, chipped away at walls and primed, sanded and painted the walls. I took off the toilet tank to get all the paper off the wall behind it.

When I tried to reinstall it, I tightened it too much, broke the ceramic tank and bowl and flooded the kitchen below. I installed a fancy new toilet that bragged it could dispose of 23 golf balls in one flush – something I never knew was necessary.

The long-awaited retaining wall.

It took longer than expected, and I needed the help of a plumber, a neighbor and a veterinarian, but when my wife got back from her trip, it was all done. Instead of the hug I expected, she mentioned, rather excitedly, that the peach-colored paint was a little too peachy. It was like taking a bath inside the water tower in Gaffney, S.C.

So, I started over, this time not worrying too much about the wall behind the toilet tank.

I once built a retaining wall in our backyard that helped stem the flow of runoff from the neighbors, and it only took two years. In the grand scheme of things, I thought that was timely.

There have been some successes. I installed some permanent bookshelves in the upstairs office. I built a shed for the backyard that is still standing, if not completely water-tight. Last year about this time, I stripped the deck and recovered it with a special deck paint. It was empowering.

Three non-matching bulbs is a nice touch.

For the last week, I’ve been removing the outdated brass fixtures and counters, stripping wallpaper and patching walls in preparation for repainting the bathroom. I’ve successfully replaced the light, but that’s about it. Right now, I sanding the walls, something that will eventually land me with a state-provided room in Butner.

I’m to the point I will do anything to get out of working in that room. Clean the garage. Cut the grass. Write a blog. Spend time with the children.

I have to soldier on, though. The new kitchen counters arrive next week. The new cabinets get here in two.

And my wife just volunteered to host our supper club in the next month or so. I just hope no one brings crab dip.

The O.J. Chase and Why Moms Can't Trust Daughters-In-Law

I’ll never forget O.J.’s slow Bronco chase. Mainly because I never saw it in the first place.

Twenty years ago, Elizabeth and I were celebrating our first anniversary. Neither of us had ever spent much time in the New England, so we took a grand driving adventure from Boston to Maine. We hopped from bed-and-breakfast to bed-and-breakfast, from Boston proper to Cambridge to Portsmouth to Camden to Bar Harbor.

We saw a Red Sox game, mostly. I actually tried to watch, but was hampered by the obstructed view seat along the rightfield line. That’s what you get from buying tickets on game day along Yawkey Way. Elizabeth, one of the two non-sports fans who lives in our house, spent the entire nine innings reading a book. She took no interest in the Green Monster, the Citgo sign or the fact that all my baseball heroes – Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Dwight Evans, Wade Boggs, Al Nipper – played on this very grass.

She was more interested in seeing Paul Revere’s workshop and the battlefield at Bunker Hill and all the other sites of New England's largest city. We later drove up the coast, stopping off in Salem to check out the witches, going to Strawberry Banke, taking a sunset cruise and rocking on the front porch of Whitehall Inn.

We stopped at every lobster pound we could find on our way to Bar Harbor, but weren’t brave enough to try the lobster ice cream they sold in a downtown tourist shop. We had perhaps the smallest bathroom in the history of the world at the Cleftstone Manor, so cramped that I twice had to go outside just to change my mind.

We took several drives around the loop of Acadia National Park, watching the sunset over Cadillac Mountain, listening to the roar of Thunder Hole and eating popovers at the Jordan Pond House.

The only bad thing about the vacation was that it occurred during an unusually intense Northeast heat wave. And since most places up there don’t invest in air conditioning, we were miserably hot for the entire nine days. It was actually hotter every day in New England than it was in South Carolina, where we lived at the time.

On our way out of Bar Harbor, we bought a dozen or so live lobsters to take home with us. Too bad no one told us when we got home that we should cook them before we put them in the freezer. Instead, they died in their own horrible Hoth, with no Echo Base to return to. And then we had to throw them all away.

Otherwise, it was a perfect getaway – until the last day.

On June 17 – today’s anniversary of the famed slow Bronco chase -- we had to drive from Bar Harbor to Marble Head, Massachusetts, where we were spending the last night before flying home out. We checked in to a whitewashed B&B and my stomach began to rumble. Then it began to explode. And then the cool white porcelain and tile of the bathroom became the best friend I ever had.

Now some say the decisions I made earlier in the day might have had something to do with it. It was a long drive, about five hours. I was starving. It had been a while since breakfast. So I dug around the back seat for the leftovers from our drive up the coast, and I ate a piece of sausage pizza out of the cardboard box. That had been there for two days. In a heat wave. Over the vehement protests of my loving and caring bride.

“That’s going to make you SICK,” she said.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

I can’t say for certain that slice (or two) is what gave me food poisoning. We did stop at Burger King about halfway down the coast. It could have been the Whopper with cheese. Or the French fries. The personal injury lawyer I called about a lawsuit told me I probably shouldn’t pursue it, so we’ll never really know.

For sure, however, I was in no shape to catch the live news coverage of the Bronco chase, along with the 95 million Americans who reportedly watched every glacial second. I didn’t even know it happened until the next day, when my wife asked “Have you ever heard of O.J. Simpson?” I’ve never been so sick.

There wasn’t much sympathy from my traveling companion. Al Cowlings was probably a more empathic co-pilot. It’s been a source of family discord ever since. It didn’t help that when we got home and told my dear mother about what happened she hugged me, told me she hoped I felt better and then turned to Elizabeth and said sternly, “I can’t believe you let him eat that.”

Yep, it was all her fault.