Right Turn Clyde Charley
After seeing this image of Charley abruptly making a right turn at Sarasota seemingly in pursuit of the hundreds of people who fled his orignal path, and reading this incredible first hand account of his visit and the fear he incited and respect he demanded from a tough Road Warrior as the Category IV storm swept across Florida, I was reminded of my pre-combat boot days living on Siesta Key, Sarasota.
I had dropped out of college and was working at several restaurants on the east end of Long Island as a semi-accomplished cook and friendly bartender for about a year when, during a frigid, relentless snow storm, I picked up the phone and called my high school buddy Mike who had settled down in Florida after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, instead of dropping out, a year earlier.
“Hook! How are you buddy?” he asked, a happy, carefree tone in his voice.
“I’m good Mike, snowing like a bastard up here, how’s the weather there?”
“Oh man, you gotta come down, it’s paradise here. I’ve got a small apartment right on the beach on a key on the gulf coast and the women run around in bikinis all the time,” he excitedly described.
Mike and I had been friends since the second grade and during our college days visited each other a few times. He was a fraternity brother in one of the big name fraternities at UPenn and did his best to live up to the reputation of our nation’s collegiate greeks. I was not a member of any secret society, but I did like to party, just usually with the same crowd of friends from class or work. I recall one night coming home to my apartment after an evening spent with a group of friends at the Junction, an easy going pub on Syracuse’s M-Street, hanging out, listening to music, shooting a little pool, sharing a few pitchers of beer and a couple plates of “out of this world” cheese fries, and getting into several deep, philosophic conversations ranging from a certain professor with blonde hair and blue eyes and tight sweaters, to world peace, basketball, and of course our futures. I unlocked my apartment door in the cold, dark night, the porch light needed changing, still, and stepped into my humble abode to find a half dozen fraternity guys wearing UPenn sweatshirts passed out across the floor of the living room and on the sofa. Mike was in town. Quietly stepping over sleeping bodies, I made my way upstairs to my thankfully, empty room and grabbed some Zs myself. Sometime during the middle of the night, my roommate’s girlfriend, wearing only a t-shirt, came into my room and woke me up. “There’s someone at the door for you,” she said in a raspy, annoyed voice, her hair a mess. Making my way downstairs to the door I was reminded of my house guests as I again stepped over sleeping bodies to find out who was knocking in the middle of the night.
“Hi, is Mike here? They left me in the car,” Someguy said.
“Come on in, find a spot and crash, I think Mike’s the one on the couch,” I replied, closing the door to the freezing cold Syracuse in January night and made my way back up to bed. I remember thinking that Someguy must not have been very liked or extremely drunk to be left out in the car in that cold. And then I wondered how he knew which apartment door to knock on.
Anyway, that was Mike. Later in life he would visit me in Italy, without his fraternity brothers, and stay for several months but that in itself is another blog entirely. So, as I watched the snow continue to fall outside of my window, I told Mike about how dissatisfied I was with working my ass off at three different restaurants to pay off student loans I had taken out to finance an education I hadn’t completed while I watched the damn snow falling.
“Hey man, why don’t you come down, really? I’ve plenty of room and you can find work here, maybe start back up with school. Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes buddy,” he offered.
After a long pause I decided, “what the hell” and agreed. After hanging up the phone, I gave my two-week notice at my various places of employment and started packing.
When I crossed the Florida state line I did indeed feel a change in attitude sweep over me. I reveled in the warmth of the sun, the smell of the sea, the poetry of the swaying palms, and the ridiculously cheap price of a beer. Siesta Key is an eight mile long island off the coast of Sarasota and has one of the most beautiful stretches of beach I’ve ever seen and the sand is a white powder the likes of which I’ve never before encountered. I shared an apartment with Mike across from beach access No. 9, right on Beach Road. We lived here…
…in the Ringling Beach House named so because it had been a part of the Ringling Brother’s, of the famed circus family, Florida estate in the 1920s. What a fabulous place for a young man to go to find himself and work on setting some goals in life and getting his future back on track. We partied our asses off for the four months that I lived there. I don’t know when or why it happened, but one day I woke up and decided that I’d had enough of soul searching in paradise and joined the Army. Mike and all of my newfound friends thought I had lost my senses, I thought I had found them. Nonetheless, they threw me a huge “he lost his senses” party before I shipped out.
One of the other residents of the Ringling Beach House had a brother who played in a very well known band in the area playing at all the popular drinking establishments along the gulf coast, the Hurricanes, and in a downright neighborly gesture, arranged to have them play at our party. We started around noon with a couple of kegs of beer in the front yard of the pink beach house with a handful of people standing around talking and listening to music blaring from somebody’s stereo. The Hurricanes arrived later in the afternoon and set up on the roof of the apartment building. The plug pulled on the stereo, our group turned our attention to the band on the roof as they started in with a Bob Marley classic, No Woman, No Cry. They were fantastic. It didn’t take long for cars to stop, parking along Beach Road, their occupants getting out and walking over to our Pink Beach House and suddenly our small yard was packed with people jamming out to the music, eventually spilling into the street halting traffic along the main road to Siesta Key’s beach access.
Like a scene out of a U-2 music video, the police showed up halfway through their third song, Buffalo Soldier I think, and asked for the host of the party. We of course didn’t know who that might be and kept moving with the reggae beat. With traffic completely stopped, the mob shouted with delight as the guys started banging out I Shot the Sheriff. The police suddenly materialized on the roof in performance of their civic duty to stop the show and restore order to Siesta Key. The shouts of delight turned into protests from the crowd below as Sarasota’s finest grabbed a guitar from one of the musicians while another got on the microphone and instructed everyone to leave. Yeah right. Mike and I each grabbed a side of one of the kegs and nonchalantly carried it across Beach Road, which was bumper to bumper with parked cars, and down to the beach via access No. 9 where we spent the rest of the night wondering what was to become of the world.
I returned to Siesta Key for a visit a year and a half later after my Army training was complete. Mike no longer lived in the Ringling Beach house, but shared a dwelling a couple of streets away with two young women in some sort of real life version of Three’s Company. I flew into Sarasota International Airport, though I didn’t know that Sarasota had and airport nevermind an international one, vowing to not let the steady rain ruin my week’s leave. Mike met me at the international airport informing me that a hurricane was on its way but vowed to not let it ruin my week’s leave. That night, as 90 mph winds drove the rain sideways, Mike and his roommates hosted the mother of all hurricane parties switching to battery power and candles sometime around midnight when power was lost. The eye of the storm came through shortly after midnight and a group of us decided to head down to the beach to see how she fared and maybe catch some waves in the normally calm Gulf of Mexico.
After several minutes of drunken body surfing, Mike discovered a large sea turtle on the beach and yelled for me to come over. The beach was littered with fallen trees and scattered palms and the wind continued to blow but with nowhere near the intensity of earlier and waves crashed loudly onto the powdery white sand as I ran over to see the sea turtle. She was huge. I’d guess about two and a half feet in height to the top of her barnacle covered shell, and two feet wide, longer if you account for her flippers, and maybe three feet in length, again longer if her neck was sticking out. She was desperately trying to get back out into the gulf, but kept getting pushed back up on shore by the incessant storm fueled waves. Mike and I decided to help her out. There we were, a drunk soldier on leave and an equally drunk rocket scientist (he really is a rocket scientist by the way) pushing this beautiful creature of the sea through wave after wave until we got her deep enough that she could swim on her own.
The remainder of my vacation was spent without electrical power and often helping folks clean up after the mess left by the tropical tempest who’s name I cannot remember. Still, it was yet another fond memory of my time spent in Siesta Key and I hope she managed to weather Charley as well as she did Mike and I. Sgt Hook out.
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This post is filed under: Mother Nature
