“I’ve lost everything.”
—Same comment by multiple people in Florida after Hurricane Ian
Back in 2008 I was hired by an insurance company to shoot video footage and interviews following the EF-5 tornado that tore through Parkersburg, Iowa destroying hundreds of homes and killing seven people. I took the above photo in the wreckage, and the sign I’m guessing was put there by the homeowner who lost their home.
It’s hard not to be spiritual in times of crisis. And while I didn’t talk to the person that put up that sign, it is a direct quote from the Bible (1 Thessalonians 5:18). I was in Orlando as Hurricane Ian hit Ft Myers Beach in southwest Florida on it’s way through the center of the state. While it was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it left Central Florida it left unprecedented flooding. The National Record Service said that the storm help make the month September 2022 the wettest on record for Orlando. A total of 22.42″—when the yearly average is 51.” And much of that was in a 24 hour period. (New Smyrna Beach an hour north east of Orlando got over 21 inches alone from the slow moving tropical storm.)
The stories of those in the path of the storm are heartbreaking, including one family that lost their home in the 2018 Woolsey Fire and decided to start over by living on a boat— in Ft. Myers Beach. Looking like they’d lost their home and physical belongings again, they were thankful just to be alive. Others weren’t as fortunate. It looks like it will go down as the deadliest hurricane to hit Florida since 1935. (And possibly the most expensive ever to hit Florida.)
I was in LA when the Whittier earthquake hit, in Orlando during part of Hurricane Charley’s $16 billion damage trail, and drove through Miami and the coast of Mississippi not long after Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina devastated those areas. There are harder times than others to be thankful. But I’m always thankful in times of loss because I know it could have been worse. Then I take stock of things to be thankful for—starting with just seeing another day.
In the 2011 Bastrop County Complex Wildfire in Texas that burned more than 1,500 homes, filmmaker Richard Linklater lost a building and an estimated $500,000 of film memorabilia and irreplaceable personal mementos. He said it made him less materialistic, and added this perspective;
”It’s all gonna be dust someday anyway. It reinforces my notion of the utter impermanence of not only life, but things. Thrift stores are full of stuff that meant something to someone’s grandparents. At some point in the future, there’s no one who remembers the connection. And the same goes for all of our gravestones. Eventually there’s no one alive on earth who ever knew you.”
—Writer/Director Richard Linklater (Boyhood)
Grantland article ”Golden Boy” by James Hughes
It’s been hard to think about screenwriting in the last week. But storytelling has a way of getting to the truth. I was reminded last week of the 1980 TV miniseries Condominium, based on the novel of the same name by John D. MacDonald. I seem to recall a scene where instead of fleeing the storm, people had a “Hurricane party.” That didn’t end well for them. While fiction, MacDonald addressed in his book over 45 years ago the dangers of greed, corruption, and poor planning in the face of powerful storms.
Even much further back than that, Jesus told the story of the foolish man who built his house upon the sand, but that’s a different story/sermon for a different day. Let’s just focus on being thankful today.
Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles
Screenwriting from Iowa 