7 million miles from Earth

That's where at least some folks are trying to change the future

An underwhelming view of life from between the ground-floor slats as Hurricane Ian terrified southwest Florida last week.

The replay – a series of black-and-white still photos, spaced one second apart – showed the ancient “moonlet” hurtling toward the camera at 15,000 mph. The details grew more spectacular with each tick of transmission speed. And the pineapple-shaped, Statue of Liberty-sized asteroid looked exactly like what you might expect from something not getting ripped to shreds in the cosmic vacuum – a fist of knotted rock and metal, compressed by primordial heat of a source and scale that defies visualization.

Mission-control engineers at Johns Hopkins University-Applied Physics Laboratory leaped and high-fived as their half-ton projectile, a kamikaze called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, smashed camera-first into its own destruction. It had taken 10 months and nearly seven million miles for DART to reach Dimorphos, and in the end, it missed the dead-center bullseye by an inconsequential 55 feet. Now we wait to see if our inaugural experiment to knock an asteroid off its path might someday cheat our sudden-impact appointment with joining the fossil strata.

The news of DART’s mission success broke early last week as more eyes, in these parts, were focused instead on a terrestrial cataclysm that cleared Cuba with Category 2 winds and churned north through the Gulf. I’d been through these metal manglers before – most memorably, Frances and Jeanne on Florida’s east coast in 2004, Irene over here in 2017. But I’d done so from inside fortified newspaper bunkers. And none of those storms packed the anticipated wallop of Ian.

This time, I was pretty much on my own, third-floor one-BR crib within cycling distance of an ocean glowing red hot on the water-temp maps. The Cone of Uncertainty kept swiveling its turret at the southwest coast and the meteorologists kept referring to the Gulf like it was trembling with fever.

Wagering on the Calusa Bubble

With Tampa in the crosshairs, everybody up that way kept hope alive with recollections of Charley from ’04. Charley was busting out with 150 mph winds and beelining for Tampa Bay when it took an abrupt jog east at Punta Gorda, cut a homicidal path toward Orlando, then left an exit wound at Ormond Beach before dissipating off New England. Could the fates again intervene? Down here, farther south, the locals turned to mythology, the Calusa Bubble, which held that the area’s early inhabitants settled along Sarasota Bay because it was immune to weather disasters. Save for glancing blows, history had borne the lore out. So far.

As Ian followed the scent of hot water and began banging northeast toward the near shores, bumper-to-bumper logjams began to resemble scenes from the other side of the world, where every last sane person in Russia was fleeing a psychopathic disaster in the Kremlin. Phone calls, emails, and texts began rolling in late Monday, shortly after DART crashed into Dimorphos. When are you leaving? The windshear experts said Ian was beginning to scratch Tampa Bay off its hit list and looking to bash any and all points south, from Sarasota to Naples. Do you need a place to stay? I visited the charts, checked the evacuation routes, the proximity of emergency shelters, performed due diligence, but the cold hard truth was, I wasn’t in a flood zone and I’m getting too old for this shit. You are leaving, right?

Bottled water and nonperishables were flying off the shelves Tuesday morning as Ian ballooned from a 2 to a 3. By Tuesday evening it was a straight-up 4 and narrowing its target aperture. I talked to more of my neighbors that day than I had in 15 years of living here. Whaddaya think? Riding it out or taking off? Where are you going? How long you gonna wait? Nice dog!

The sun never rose Wednesday morning and the banshees were beginning to howl when I turned on the tube. Overnight, Ian had mysteriously overhauled and reconstituted its own eyewall, expanded the reach of its core to 35 miles, and exploded into a 155 mph phenomenon, on the brink of Category 5. I kept changing channels for signs of hope, and the meteorologists were unanimous: This thing was grinding toward Charlotte Harbor now with “life-threatening” storm surges — but life here was about to go sideways as well. If you need to get to an emergency shelter, go now, go now, go now.

And there goes a bird …

The TV signal kept blinking off with abrasive bursts of static – “Powering up. This may take a few minutes” – and hurricane-force winds were kicking in. The talking heads were now repeating each other: Lock it down, shelter in place, stay off the road, freeze. I stepped into the covered breezeway to sample Ian’s special effects. To a soundtrack of rumbling thunder, cold bullets of lateral rain pounded the complex in heavy veils sweeping in from the east. The surface of the swelling retention pond seemed to be breathing, heavily, but the trees were what scared me. Their trunks throttled and wrung like stalks of broccoli, they looked animated with rage, lashing out, thrashing as if against chains, lurching against the roots that forced them to stand and take the violence.

The lights flickered again and the tube went down again. Would the ceiling hold? Out under the breezeway once more, standing there like a lunatic in perverse admiration of this massive roaring showcase of unbridled Earth energy. The speck of a bird flashed end over end, cartoon-like. Ian ripped and tossed off the arms of oaks and pines, palms flung shards of bark into parts unknown. Then the television went kaput for good. Paranoia in the info-blackout. My mind’s eye saw the roof peeling away and sucking me into a world of flying cows. Where was this freak show now – had it changed course again?

Buttoning up, grabbing a canvas bag, I took one last look around and killed the lights. Racing down three flights of stairs, clinging hard to the railing, I splashed through the stinging rain to the car and collapsed inside. The Hyundai rocked as I backed out, shifted, then sloshed toward a parking space three buildings away, where a neighbor had invited me to sweat it out on the ground floor. I pushed against the car door like it was vacuum-sealed and Ian pushed back and I shoved hard and made a slapstick dash for her place.

From behind civilization’s thin barriers, we just sat there and watched it spiral and swirl, waiting for something to fracture. Back at my place (another resident reported later), an alarm shrieked when the glass panel of a fire extinguisher shattered. Darkness came quickly. My hospitable neighbor’s electricity flickered off at maybe 10:30. But Ian’s tailwinds were receding, so I took my leave, hustled out to the car, and drove back to my place – where the entire unit was still powered up. Unbelievable.

The splintered and ravaged natural world crystalized Thursday morning amid bracing gusts, but Ian left behind not so much as roof leak or a ripped porch screen to cuss about. It would be two full days before connectivity was restored to reveal what the wind and tidal bombs had done to Fort Myers and everything around it. Up here, the Calusa Bubble, and superstition, prevailed once more.

This is what dodging a bullet looks like — the oak isn’t happy about it, but better you than me, pal.

Ronald Reagan famously wondered if, confronted by an extraterrestrial threat, the nations of the world would shelve their differences and put on a united front. Today, we’re not even sure if America itself has that capability anymore. Or, if we still do, how long can the glue hold before the pressure gauge behind the testosterone spigot ruptures and compels the infected to start waving flags and lobbing turds again?

It’s a question worth considering today as a lot of Floridians try to recover the remains of their lives. Like 9/11, Ian brought total strangers together, people who’d passed each other day after day without exchanging word one. But goodwill forged by mass trauma, psychic and physical, rarely endures. What we know for sure is, like Putin in Russia, the worst will happen again and again and again. Because it always does.

But every once in awhile, the skies clear and give us a glimpse of other possibilities. Very creative people, like the folks who dreamed up and executed the DART mission, do band together, in hopes of forestalling the inevitable, against long odds, for just a little while longer. Which is the most we can hope for anyway — just a little while longer.