Fifteen years ago, on the afternoon of September 21, 1989, a Charlotte radio announcer warned that “tomorrow morning will be wet, wild and windy” — Hurricane Hugo was due to hit Charleston that night and then lose strength dramatically as it moved inland. Instead, after devastating Charleston, Hugo headed up I-77 and raked Charlotte with 90mph gusts and sustained winds of 70mph. Few people slept through the night as the eerie noise of the storm and a massive power outage had Charlotteans hunkered down, wondering what was going on and hoping it would end. The hurricane knocked over tens of thousands of trees, destroying homes and cars, blocking hundreds of streets, and cutting power for days; it was by far the largest natural disaster to ever hit the city. One regular CL contributor at the time, John Rodgers, reacted differently to Hugo’s arrival. He went out walking in it, taking mental notes, resulting the next week in a report that is still one of our all-time favorite CL cover stories. Originally published under Rodgers’ then-pseudonym of Xavier Ashe, the story is presented here as a remembrance of Hugo’s 15th anniversary and as an addendum to hurricane tales we’ve heard the past couple of weeks from our mountain neighbors.
Some folks slept through it. Me, in my 90-year-old mill house with a tin roof, well . . . Lying there in the dark with my home rocking and the trees rolling around outside, hey, it seemed like time to check it all out.
Hugo was upon us, it was early Friday morning and the last official report I’d heard was 12 hours earlier. He was going to hit Charleston, Charlotte would be in his path. And here he was. I was ready for a stroll.
Outside at 4:30am, the wind was already blowing hard, with gusts too strong to move against. I motivated over the hill and through the streets of Thomastown, the ghetto end of Plaza Midwood. It was the last of the power, as lights began to flicker off and the ghostly green glow of exploding transformers sent up sporadic luminous waves through the tumbling mix of rain and clouds which careened from east to west. The wind rose and fell, and I moved in time with that rhythm.
The perfect counterpoint, I became motionless when the trees began to rock, an immobility born of hyper-alertness as much as the impossibility of moving against the wind which met the trees and howled. I howled back, secure that, like my cantatas in the shower, this was for my ears only. Then I danced a ragged jig among the fallen trees, limbs and leaves which had begun to litter the streets.
And it was all just beginning. Moving down Thomas Avenue, two men and a dog emerged from a house with an umbrella, seemingly ready for a pleasant stroll in the rain. I soon left that improbable sight behind as I continued my travels, storming down the street.
Crossing the Plaza on Belvedere, it was obvious that the wind was continuing to pick up. The lulls became fewer and shorter. Hooking around to Veterans Park near Central Avenue and Morningside, there were, amazingly, cars headed toward town. Their lights, the only illumination, pierced thickening clumps of atmosphere, part vapor, part leaves, part unidentified fibers. It was exhilarating and absolutely elemental: it was uplifting and terrifying at the same time. It must be like this on Venus; a raw and primal kind of beauty, a perpetual fog occasionally glowing and rushing headlong quickly and nowhere, spitting and scouring all exposed surfaces. Too damp and ethereal to claim kinship to hell, this was more a visceral purgatory with promises of strange and mysterious, positively unearthly visual delights, before being blown up, down, or away.
I heard or maybe just felt something above the wind. Turning, I had just missed the falling oak which now lay across the road ahead of an approaching car which never slowed down, just jogged left and plunged on into the murky darkness. More trees began to go, while three fruit trees across the street lay against the ground and spun on their tap roots, digging circular trenches around their soon-to-be-stumps. In times of danger, they will come in threes.
Amazed, I moved to the leeward side of some buildings for a break from this mesmerizing sight and from the rain which had geared up its horizontal bop against my cheeks. At this point I was long since soaked and occasionally shivering, more from excitement than cold.
Out on Central Avenue, broken plastic and sheet metal were soaring, daring soft flesh to cut their flight short. Like a surrealistic behemoth, a tractor trailer pulled itself shuddering through the mist, inexplicably upright against the wind which was reaching its peak. And in a parking lot, a lone figure sat impassively in a car, watching mutely as I fought to stay upright against the winds which by then were gusting to 90 miles per hour.
Feeling like some time out might be nice, it flashed through my mind that John’s Country Kitchen would be open. I could take a break, get a cup o’ coffee and find fellow travelers to trade war stories and compare notes, like macho Don Quixotes. It was a shock to discover that here at 5:30, John’s had not, would not, be open. Some things have always been taken on faith. The sun rises in the east. And it does so to find the open door of John’s greeting the early riser. My faith was badly shaken. I tumbled down the street propelled by a gusting easterly wind and accompanied by various bits of metal and plastic, and a large trash can looking more like a rolling stone. And me, I was feeling like a street fighting man. Across the Plaza a car with lights shining sat empty. A police cruiser slowed down. Maybe, I thought, to arrest me for being an unsafe Thomastown traveler. Instead, he turned in, to rendezvous with the abandoned car, and I lurched on.
And on I went, wandering the back streets of Thomastown, listening to the sounds of oak against asphalt, metal against metal, shattering glass, and the ever-present orchestrated whistle, hum, and groan of the wind through the trees which were still coming down. I circled back and retraced my steps, kicking through more and more debris, sidestepping a thickening mat of trees and limbs, becoming ever more attentive to the creakings and complaints of trees forced, against their natural inclinations, into an increasingly radical declination.
Finally exhausted, I sat in my car, Red Dog, the original Detroit heavy metal, and listened to the only radio station I could find just in time to hear, “The eye of Hugo is now passing over Charlotte.” I felt like I was somehow being watched. Once past, it was evident Hugo was losing force minute by minute. As he wound down it seemed like time to rest. I slept. Hours later I surveyed the damage. It was devastating. In the darkness, what was semi-visible even when seen up close, and through strange vapors darkly, presented itself as a vista of destruction. And already chain saws were buzzing, folks were talking, and a party of sorts had begun.
And in a parallel universe, a few blocks away in Elizabeth, Rex Vinyl and Jeff Bergen had been on a similar odyssey. By 4am, they were on their porch surveying the situation. Vinyl explained, “That’s when things really began to tumble and we decided to head out. We grabbed flashlights, put on our hard hats and covered an area of three or four blocks. Sometimes our hard hats flew off. Then powerlines began to blow and transformers began to pop. And in all this we saw someone out, going from house to house. Turned out to be John Ball, the paper man, still delivering papers.
“We were out till about 8 or 9. Got a few people out of their houses, made sure they were OK. And then we cooked all sorts of leftovers for everyone — omelettes, coconut chicken, artichokes and garlic, coffee.”
Fortunately for them, their legendary neon-lit backyard hot tub was undamaged, sheltered on the west side of the house. “It’s funny,” Vinyl said, “there’s that huge oak tree out front and we never considered the fact that it could have blown against the house. We could have been destroyed.”
And there were others who were grateful through it all. Thomastown denizens Paul Sires and Ruth Ava Lyons rode out the storm with tiny Eden Arial, their newborn who had been home scarcely a day before being introduced to Uncle Hugo. They were awake and up through the brunt of the storm, being given their first lesson in Concerned Parenthood 101. “But you know,” Lyons said wistfully, “I really wanted to go out in the storm. It was exciting. If it were at another time in my life . . .”
So okay, Mother Nature got our attention. Nevertheless, those of us who have been here since the early Fifties have seen Charlotte grow from middle-sized Southern town where you knew every family on the block, to one where neighbors are often strangers, and where native Charlotteans seem to be an endangered species. It was good to see folks lending a hand to someone down the block trying to move a tree off the road, talking about . . . the weather perhaps.
This enforced blackout turned nighttime into something very unfamiliar without the strange familiar glow of televisions and VCRs blinking through the living room curtains. Folks have been sitting on their porches listening to night sounds, watching the stars and the distant lights of downtown buildings, or getting together and playing Scrabble by candlelight.
There was a tradeoff here, and an awareness of how dependent we can become on what we take for granted. Electricity and hot water, color TV and videos, and endless gas for cars; these are ultimate luxuries for a greater part of the world. Charlotte was given the opportunity to test her mettle in the face of awesome impersonal power and to experience a simpler way of living. We were fortunate to be able to experience ourselves as caring responsible people (except those breaking into gas lines or gouging the wallets of the desperate — you guys know who I’m talking about). Some folks are already waxing nostalgic about the blackout and they don’t even have their power back yet.
Me, I’ll continue to watch the stars come out from my front porch, until the ambient light gets too strong. Reminds me of the old days, sitting in the back yard as the sun went down — no streetlights, no sounds but floating notes of a neighbor playing sexy saxophone, and the crickets getting in their licks, and the lightning bugs blinking over and over, over and out.
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2004.
