Ian made landfall 20 miles from their mobile home community. Left with scraps and debris, these longtime neighbors wonder what’s next

By Christina Maxouris, CNN. Photographs by Erica Lee, CNN.

(CNN) – There’s an eerie silence in the Picketts’ living room Wednesday night as the couple pack their bags to leave.

The sun is setting, and without power, the cramped two-bedroom mobile home on San Carlos Island will soon be dark again, barely lit by the couple’s few candles.

Next to the front door, 83-year-old Pat Pickett stacked a small cardboard box on a stool near his open fridge. It fills up quickly as she lists aloud to her husband, Leslie, what they will need to take with them to the shelter: washcloths, toothbrushes, a change of clothes. She also takes a bag of gummy bears. Candy helped her quit smoking more than two decades ago and still helps calm her nerves. And, of course, shampoo, for the first shower they will take more than a week. She is delighted, she says, to have finally put her hair in order.

As they follow each other down the hallway into the heart of the house, there is no mention of the chaos surrounding them. Most of the furniture was heaved and tossed about by Hurricane Ian’s floodwaters and is now scattered haphazardly around the house. An armchair balances on the dining table, a television set sits sideways against the living room wall, sea portraits hang askew. A thin line carved into each wall – about halfway up the ceiling – is a constant reminder of the height of the flood waters. On various pieces of furniture, coin-sized patches of bright green mold that have grown are only getting bigger every day.

CDs by Janis Joplin and Dean Martin lie on a muddy rug that covers part of the wooden tiled floor. Loose papers of family recipes are laid out on the surviving tables. The kitchen area that Pat keeps walking through, lit only by a window above the sink, is lined with debris and bowls from cupboards she tried to empty and dry out. There’s still a lingering smell she hates in there, probably chicken and shrimp that went bad when the flood destroyed their fridge. And everything is covered in thick, gray mud, much of which has dried, chipped and become dusty.

In their small hallway, Pat grabs a flashlight from the guest bedroom, where the two have spent the past week sleeping. The spare bed floated so high in the flood that her sheets and pillows remained dry and clean, she said. Some of those sheets are now stained with blood, from the cuts Pat and Les sustained on their legs after swimming in chin-deep water and wading through the floating furniture.

As they are packing their last belongings, they are back outside the front door. Above the entrance, a custom-made sign reads: “Patience is what the sea teaches”.

“I ran away,” Pat said, responding to the painted phrase.

A week ago, the couple was not sure of surviving. Leslie, 84, loves the nest they’ve created in Emily Lane Mobile Home Park over the past 18 years, and he didn’t want to leave. And Pat would never leave without him.

But staying was the wrong decision, admits Leslie. When Ian made landfall just over 20 miles from their neighborhood, just across the decimated island of Fort Myers Beach, the channel behind the couple’s porch overflowed and pushed the waters inside their home . They were freezing as they struggled to keep their chins above the water and in pain from the furniture that kept banging against their small frames. But for five hours the couple kept swimming, determined to stay alive.

“He said, ‘It’s not our time. God doesn’t want me yet,” Pat said looking at her husband. “I said, ‘Me neither.’ All we have to do is keep the faith.”

“And that’s what we did,” says Leslie.

“Thank you, my God”, adds his wife.

A next-door neighbor – and a lifeline

The sun has nearly set as the duo slowly descend the front steps to meet their neighbor Charlie Whitehead, who will lead them to a shelter for hurricane evacuees in Estero. The trip usually takes about 30 minutes, but has taken over an hour since the storm hit due to broken streetlights.

The three did not always get along. When the Picketts first bought their home in 2004, Charlie’s three children were still young and Pat would often catch them playing basketball in the driveway and stomping on his bushes. But the Whiteheads and Picketts have become like family now, she said. “He would help anyone, anytime, with anything,” Leslie says.

At this time of day, Charlie turned off the country music he had been playing on a small speaker earlier as he sorted through family photos on a white glass table outside his house. Like the Picketts – and most of their neighbors – he couldn’t salvage much from the house after the storm. He therefore devotes his time to saving what cannot be replaced: high school and college diplomas belonging to his children or to Debbie, his wife, photographs illustrating the first moments after the birth of his children, graduation ceremonies, birthdays, hugs with family members who are no longer there.

Charlie has spent much of his life here and knows the Fort Myers Beach community better than anyone. After moving to be with his grandmother in the 1980s, he spent more than two decades reporting for the local newspaper, served as Little League president, ran for county commissioner and served two once chairman of the board of directors of the neighborhood association.

“I have roots in this little trailer park,” says Charlie, 64. “Now I just pull out family photos, pull out clothes, try to salvage whatever memories there are.”

He had recently completed repairs worth thousands of dollars after Hurricane Irma wreaked havoc on his home five years ago. Just a few months ago, he finished renovating the kitchen for Debbie, who liked to spend quiet mornings there.

He therefore hesitated before leaving his home. But as Ian approached, he decided it wasn’t safe. He urged the Picketts to come with him, but they had decided to stay, he said. When Charlie returned a day later, he phoned his wife, who was visiting family in Colorado, asking her not to return. He couldn’t stand her seeing the damage.

“It’s biblical,” he said. “Whether you believe it or not, what happened here is the kind of stuff you only read about in the Bible.”

But tonight, there is little time to reflect. The Picketts – after days of refusing to leave their home – finally agreed to go to a shelter, have a hot meal, shower, sleep in a warm bed. He quickly cleans up his red van, emptying the snacks and drinks he had laid out in the back for passers-by, and prepares for the ride.

Charlie was the couple’s only means of transportation last week after both of their cars were inundated by the storm. He drove the couple to the emergency room a day after Ian made landfall, when Leslie’s blood pressure spiked. And he spent days trying to convince them to stay in a refuge to escape destruction.

Driving doesn’t bother him. Anyway, Charlie said, he’s heading that way anyway to stay at a friend’s house for the night.

“The end of a very long chapter”

When the sun rises the next day, Charlie, Pat and Les are back in position: he’s sorting through family photos and they’re sitting in their lawn chairs next to their house, discussing the day’s chores.

The refuge was not what they expected. It was crowded with other evacuees, many with anxious and restless young children, Pat says. Getting more than four hours of sleep had proven impossible. The long-awaited shower she was looking forward to never happened either.

They were told by staff members that a group of rowdy people had caused trouble in the shower room and forced the center to close the area until morning. Before sunrise, Pat called Charlie and told him they were ready to go.

A little after noon on Emily Lane, Charlie brings lunch to where the couple is seated: sandwiches in brown paper bags that a friend from Fort Myers Beach has just dropped off.

Next, Pat plans to clean the bathroom, scrub the floors, and pick up the debris so he can take a shower. The duo also plan to cut their hair – a tradition they started decades ago, mainly to save time, when their three sons were young and the couple worked full time.

Beyond that, the Picketts have few plans. They hope their youngest son, Tony, can get a car from Ohio, so they can go to a doctor’s appointment next week, get their mail and go to a local library to meet with FEMA representatives. Without transportation, electricity, and the Internet to complete the FEMA application online, all they can do now is sit and wait. “And, I’m not a babysitter,” Pat says.

“Other than that,” she adds, “life goes on, God is good, our sons are special.”

“And we don’t expect miracles,” adds Leslie.

That’s as far into the future as their conversations venture these days. The idea of ​​rebuilding or moving does not yet seem to be a priority. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Pat admitted earlier. Although their son has invited them to stay home, they both know how harsh Ohio winters can be. Maybe an RV, she said. Maybe rebuild, but it will take at least two to three years.

Charlie, who is back cleaning up photographs, is also unsure what will come next.

“Someone asked me yesterday what my plans were. And I told them that (at) tonight I’m going to have a cold beer,” he said earlier. “There’s really no way to plan further than that.”

Maybe they’ll move to Colorado with his wife. But Charlie raised three kids in the house behind him, and it’s hard to think of leaving. It’s hard to put into words what he feels and what he saw, and he wonders how he would describe what Ian left behind if he was still a journalist.

“It’s the end of a very long chapter on Fort Myers Beach, on Emily Lane,” he says. “Damn, I don’t know how I would write this story. I’m glad I don’t.”

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