I was working at a tennis club in Palm Coast, Florida back in the summer of 1998. It was a simple job that required me to do minor custodial jobs like empty trash cans, sweep floors and refill the water coolers stationed at each of the courts.
The tennis club had two types of courts: hard courts and clay courts, and cleaning the clay courts was my favorite part of the job. During the matches the clay would be kicked around leaving footprints all over the court and I would have to hook up a large broom to the back of a golf cart and drive it up and down the court to smooth the clay out for the next set of players. Then I would hop out of the cart, with headphones on, and brush the clay away from the lines.
The summer I worked at this club in Palm Coast is the same summer that we had the Florida Firestorm, several wildfires that ignited on the state’s east coast from Palm Coast almost down to Titusville. I remember brushing the courts and looking up at this reddish-orange sky thinking it looked like we were on Mars or something. I would head into the clubhouse several times an hour to check the news on the TV and see if we were being evacuated yet.
After my shift, I would head home and see Ma glued to the news seeing if we were being ordered to abandon our home and get out of harm’s way. They feared these fires, started by lightning during an unusually dry summer, were going to merge and leave us with no way out.
I remember it being around the Fourth of July. I was at work, brushing a court, when it looked like it started to snow. I stopped the cart, got out and looked up to the Martian sky and realized the snow was ash. As I watched the ground start to turn a gray color, my manager came running up to me and said we were under evacuation orders. Leave the cart, leave the brush and just get home.
I got home to my family packing what they could in the short time we had. Clothes in garbage bags, important documents in a briefcase and several boxes of pictures all went into the trunks of our cars. Then we left not knowing if our home would be standing if/when we were allowed back.
The interstate looked like a warzone. Areas of trees were burnt to the ground, some were still on fire. We headed to Orlando where my grandparents lived. I still remember sitting on their living room floor, bags of clothes dumped out so we could sort and fold them, with Ma on the couch crying.
It was an image I’ve seen so much on the news recently with California’s wildfires. People grabbing what they can carry in their hands and fitting it into their cars. The chaos and fear, and more mothers crying and not knowing what will happen.
When we were able to return to our home, we found that the fires were stopped before reaching our neighborhood. Some people then and now were not so lucky. There are so many now who have and will return to burnt-down homes with nothing salvageable.
Please help, if you can, with a financial contribution to a nonprofit that’s helping victims. The American Red Cross, California Fire Foundation and United Way of Greater Los Angeles are all great places to do that.
Another way you can help, and I know people hate it when you make everything political, but vote! Climate change is having an impact on many of these fires — that and gender reveal parties — and with less than two months away from the general election we have a chance to decide whether we want elected officials who respect science and accept climate change is real or officials who think science is just made up by lizard people in the Illuminati who want to eat your babies.
Stay informed, help to inform those around you and help those who are struggling if you can.
In this issue, we look at the 31st Annual Tampa Bay International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival as it goes virtual for the first time in its history. We also preview Creative City Project’s “Bright Young Things,” an immersive walking play that takes you through downtown Orlando.
In Central Florida, U.S. Rep. Val Demings leads the way in Congress to end the FDA restrictions on LGBTQ blood donations and Central Florida Community Arts celebrates a decade of entertaining.
In Tampa Bay, we speak with a transgender woman seeking damages and accountability after she was jailed with male inmates in Pinellas County and Tampa’s City Side Lounge leads the way for bars reopening in the Bay area.
And in state news, former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum comes out as bisexual.
