by Dewey Davis-Thompson
I’ll admit I was naive and unprepared, both about Hurricane Helene and being a supernumerary in the opera Samson and Delilah. So I was flummoxed at having to deal with both at the same time. This was not my first opera, nor my first hurricane. I have been a chorus member and super with the St. Petersburg Opera Company for a decade, and I grew up on a sailboat in the tropics dodging storms yearly. But Samson and Helene, both took me by surprise.
Beep Beep Beep! My cellphone was insistent that I remove my person from our lovely hundred-year-old bungalow in downtown St. Petersburg. Beep Beep Beep! Evacuate Zone A! Our home, the Passionfruit Institute for Wayward Boys (We Need More of Them) is four blocks from Tampa Bay, and one block from Salt Creek. In 25 years of storms and tropical cyclones we had seen Salt Creek rise, but never past the curb in front of our house. Helene was different.
Samson and Delilah was new to me as well. I had performed in Carmen, Abduction from the Seraglio (I was a cover!), Turandot and knew many of the classics like Die Fledermaus, but I was completely unfamiliar with this new-to-me opera by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, nor did I know much about the biblical tale. I do not speak French, and did not have the same month-long instruction in the music that the chorus had. I was just a supernumerary, a non-singing extra. Just a Philistine Guard, hired to carry off the dead body in the middle of Act One and not much else. What are these people singing about? I had no idea what was going on, other than my own directions. We all knew that there was storm in the Gulf of Mexico, competing with opening night for anxiety.
We watched the cone. Hurricanes are uncertain, mostly, but if we are not in the cone, we are fine. I always say I if I am still in the cone three days out – I’m keeping an eye on the cone. If I’m in the cone two days out – I am packing, and if I am in the cone one day out – I am evacuating at sunrise, when I can get my four rescue conures into a travel cage and hit the highway for solace with the mother-in-law in Gainesville.
Beep Beep Beep! But I was never in the cone this time around. Still, I had this nagging feeling that maybe this time I should pay attention to the warning.
Instead I was in Hell Week, that last few days before opening night when lights, costumes and orchestra are all tested out, and Maestro Sforzini kept us all repeating certain phrases. My fellow guards and I had to wait in the lobby as he said Stop! Go Back! three times – just seconds before our grand entrance in Act Two, where we creep menacingly through the audience and on to the stage. Hell Week was cut short when our final dress rehearsal was cancelled. In anticipation of the storm, the theatre would be closed for two days. Just one dress rehearsal before our opening Friday night after the storm, God willing.
Glad to have a break from Hell Week, I did the usual hurricane or tropical storm prep. Water, candles, batteries, backup charges, canned food, Check Check Check! Every time I checked Helene on the pad, she was still going to be a hundred miles to the west. Ivan had been 50 miles away, and that was no big deal. I felt confident we might have wind and rain. The usual.
Beep Beep Beep! The evacuation warning was persistent, and weather folks warned that the storm surge could be severe. “See how wide the wind field is going to be? After the storm has passed to the north, around 7:30 the winds will change directions and start blowing Gulf Waters directly into Tampa Bay. Added to the storm surge and high tide, we predict five to eight feet of water above normal.” Beep Beep Beep! “Zone A. Get out!”
There was not much rain, and the winds gusted but never took on that continuous wail that comes when you are near the eye of the storm. But the sky was dark and ominous when I walked over to Thrill Hill, the little bridge that crosses Salt Creek a block from my house at six PM – just as Helene zipped past us in the Gulf of Mexico. The creek was a foot below the edge of the seawall, where I had seen it many times before. Third street was puddly but not flooded. I felt renewed confidence that it would pose no danger. Zoom.Earth weather predicted the worst winds were still to come, and the tide website said high tide was 2AM. So I knew there was still a chance I was wrong. And I was wrong.
One nice thing about hell week is that I began to understand the story of Samson, sung by the patient and amiable Jonathan Kaufman. Erroneously confident in his strength and devotion to God, Samson lost it all in one fell snap of the scissors. The actions of the chorus had confused me, but now I understood that in Act One they were the Hebrews, but in Act Three they were Philistines. They had orgies and teased the poor blinded Samson mercilessly. They fell over in partied out exhaustion after the orgy, then got up to sing some more before falling down again at the end. “Man, his fellow people are really mean to Samson!” I had thought. Now I understood who the chorus were and why they gloated – most deliciously by Delilah, sung by the powerful and kind Janara Kellerman. She and the Philistines partied to their disastrous end!
Never one to have a hurricane party, I have always been amazed at folks who think the best way to handle a potentially dangerous situation is to get debilitated. Walking back from Thrill Hill I had seen the neighbors on the other side of Third Street move their white Lexuses uphill. Their ally was predictably flooding with washed up sewer water. Black and grotty, the flow gushing up from below and was coming faster than I realized. By eight o’clock it had crossed the street and was swiftly working up our alley. I made the decision to move our own three cars a few blocks uphill. Just in case.
Just in case turned into just in time. By the time I finished moving the cars, the water was crossing the back gate and oozing into our yard. Out front was no better. Oh my god, it was over the curb. It had never gone over the – oh my god. How high was this going to go?
The night had become dark and terrifying all at once. All night Mikee had the TV tuned into a glitching digital channel with old school rabbit ears, listening to story after story about unprepared people, ignoring the evac notice, trapped on the barrier islands as the waves washed their homes into the ocean. Reports came in that communities to the south of us were overwhelmed, inundated with storm surge.
Mikee began to pace back and forth through the house, grabbing the flashlight from the refrigerator to peer into the darkness, trying to see how far the water had come
through the yard. Steve sat calmly reading a book, as if it were any other completely normal night. I started to consider how I would evacuate the birds to the top floor. I went into the office to check on them in their big cage, and our oldest bird JayJay was having another seizure. He had fallen off his perch and was all twisted with one leg back, one wing out and his head turned sideways. So I scooped him up and held him close, whispering, “Good Bird, It’s OK.” He has had a few seizures now, and takes medicine, but the birds had been skittish all day, and now here he was again, shuddering in my hands. “Good bird. It’s OK.”
Distracted by this avian emergency, I pretended to ignore the threat closing in from all sides. By ten o’clock the surge was rushing in. Out front swirling water had crossed the yard and was rising up the stairs, one by one. In back the water had already come inside the house. Our ground level laundry room is on the same level as the now-undersea yard. The rest of the house was a foot higher on too-short stilts, but the deluge continued. Soon the washer and drier stood in a few inches of water and the step in the laundry room was under the black menace.
Once JayJay was out of his fugue and back in the “big house”, I went outside onto the front porch where the birds have an enclosure to get a smaller cage that I could use to move all four of them upstairs. While I was on the porch, I saw the less dirty – nevertheless horrifying – water overflowing from Salt Creek coming up one more step. The ground light shining on a tree had gone out, and Mike said he had watched the lights in our back yard wink out one by one like the Titanic.
I moved my computer on top of the desk. I moved my passport and other documents upstairs and put valuable books on the top shelves of the library. At midnight the water was still rising. If we made it to two o’clock, I knew we would be ok. But that was hours away. I was terrified at the inky wash, and decided the only thing to do was to play a video game. Civilization always distracts me from my worries. Now if only I could get Mikee to stop pacing with that flashlight. And how was Steve so damned cool when certain doom lapped at our door?
The power flickered, and I had to restart my game a few times, but we are on the same electric grid as the Coast Guard station and usually keep power in a storm. We were lucky to keep our power. We were also lucky when the water finally stopped rising.
At 1:30 Mikee stopped pacing and announced, “It came within four inches of the floor, but it looks like it is receding!” The back step was visible again in the laundry room. The top step out front was damp but clear.
“I think we dodged a bullet,” said Mikee, who promptly went upstairs and fell asleep. I sobbed into Steve’s shoulder for a moment, relieved at our reprieve and JayJay’s recovery. It had been a long night.
Checking my email for the first time all day I saw a notice from our stage manager, Stephen M. Ray Jr. “I am glad we all weathered the storm” he had written at six o’clock, when it looked like Helena had safely passed up by. “Be on time for our show tomorrow!”
“I think he wrote this letter one hurricane ago,” I joked. I stayed up until 3 am unable to sleep until I was absolutely sure I could see the salty menace clearly draining off my sidewalk in a swift flow. Even then I tossed and turned for another half hour before finally finding escape in narcolepsy.
Indeed, our opening night was cancelled. All of the bridges to St. Pete were closed after the storm. Many of our orchestra had lost their homes. Like Samson at the end of the play, Helene had pulled down the walls of our Philistine temple, crushing us all with cruel vengeance of Mother Nature.
The next morning, when I went to collect our cars, I found our garbage can halfway up the alley with all the others, showing how far the inundation had risen. Our recyclables were strewn over the much-covered street. I found a dead fish in the alley and fed it to the egrets that come to my house every morning. They usually get frozen sardines and hot dogs, so they were happy for a fresh fish! But the yard was trashed, our cabana crushed and a layer of salt muck was causing havoc with our trees and plants. I picked up the trellis and hosed out the laundry room. We lost our washer and dryer and some power tools in the shed. But we survived!
Samson and Delilah did finally premiere on Sunday. Somehow, we pulled together and did two shows at the Palladium, even as we collectively dug out of the sand and waited for power to return and cried over lost homes and cars and dreams.
On Wednesday, once the show had closed, a week after Helene, I finally got to work on cleaning up the front of the house. A two-inch layer of flotsam – mostly leaves and sticks and palmetto bits – was still layered over the front step, and walkway, and across the sidewalk and easement. It was late afternoon, and as I shoveled the debris into a pile, my headphones played the theme from Peter and the Wolf. It is a lighthearted tune, brightly facing danger in the darkness. I found my work was not so hard.
The music of Samson that had been looming in my psyche for a week, just like Helene, was fading now, replaced by a new tune with incomprehensible lyrics in Japanese, but with a great hook. I smiled and sang along “Gonna Have a Nice Day. Nice. Day. Gonna have a nice day.”
—