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A Flood of Frances

Continued from page 3

At 2 p.m., the owners of the Hong Kong Café on Indiantown Road pull the plywood shutters off their front door. They fire up their gas grills and, in half darkness, begin stir-frying what might be the only restaurant grub available in Jupiter. Word of the Chinese food blazes through a nearby Hispanic neighborhood, and by 2:30, the place is mobbed with Spanish-speaking men deeply tanned from farm work.

A half hour later, the owners of a Citgo convenience store a few blocks east yank the plywood off their front door. Like cats hearing a can opener, the roving curfew-breakers -- who now number in the hundreds and ignore the police like New Yorkers disregard panhandlers -- flood the parking lot. Forty-five-year-old William Kernodle, with an unshaven face and newly buzzed head, is standing in a line of 25 or so. He's almost made it into the store, almost passed the plywood gates of heaven, when the owner looms at the door and pronounces, "We're closed for business," then locks himself in.

Kernodle takes it well but clearly feels he's been cheated again. Early this morning, he'd driven 20 miles through heavy rain, wind, and fallen trees into Martin County, where rumor-mongers had sworn there was an open convenience store. There wasn't.

He lives out in the western part of the county but wanted to be closer to the coast when the hurricane hit because he's a volunteer with the county's community emergency response team. For now, he and other volunteers are supposed to remain off the streets.

"I've been staying with seven Guatemalans up the street," explains Kernodle, who's small-framed but possesses an impressive gut. "Man, you'd think that these South Americans would understand hurricanes," he marvels. "But they had nothin' when I got there. No food. They had a generator but no gas. Jesus. They didn't have anything to put on their windows, so I pulled the plywood sheet off my pickup bed, and we nailed it to the biggest window."

The line has dispersed at the Citgo, but Kernodle notices a small human swell at a Shell station half a block down. "Gotta check this out," he mutters, fleeing toward the Shell.

Most of the tin-can houses of Kokomo Mobile Home Park near Lantana survived Frances intact. Not so Lucille Price's porch. Wind forced open the tacked-on, screened-in room, splitting and caving in its front as if a plow had moved through a snowdrift.

Outside, at 4 p.m. Sunday, Donna Schuler tries to figure out what to do. She lives a couple of doors down from Price. Her ex-husband, Jim, is visiting, so she enlists his help.

"Lucille's 83 years old," says Donna, her red-brown hair pinned close to her scalp, as she peels metal away from the gaping dent. "She's in New York right now. We need to do something to keep the elements out."

"We can't do anything," says Jim, a stocky man with white hair and a round nose. "Someone's going to have to repair this."

"She can't even walk up steps!" Donna shouts. "You think she can fix this?"

"No," Jim says. "I'm just saying, we can't do anything."

"I hope someone cares for me when I'm elderly," Donna says.

"That's why you have kids," her ex-husband replies.

There isn't much to be done for the battered home. Donna finds a rusty three-iron and props it against the door, which is reclining to about 60 degrees off the floor. The bottom of the golf club slides on the carpet. It won't hold anything.

"This is terrible," Donna says.

"Of course it's terrible," Jim replies. He fumbles at the back of the porch, near a folded-up wheelchair. "Ah, rope!" he calls. He lashes the door handle to part of the wall. The front is still a loss, but at least the porch will no longer be a metal windsock.

He drives away in his truck, and she returns home, where the wind has sheered the front three feet of ceiling off of her porch. Inside, past the tidy living room decorated in cream and yellow, she has arranged pans in the hallway to catch leaks. Rain has invaded a hole in her roof. Brown spots fill the panels overhead. The water impregnated the ceiling until it retched insulation and debris into her bathroom and middle bedroom. Detritus still hangs like Spanish moss, dripping into her shower.

Her son is a roofer, so she won't have to pay for more than materials. "That's the only reason I'm not standing in a puddle of tears," she says as she stands outside her home, fondling an unlit cigarette as light seeps out of the sky and the wind picks up again.

At 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Tommy Bender is walking backward along Military Trail in Riviera Beach with his thumb out. A car stops for the 27-year-old, curly-headed butcher and his taller, crew-cut friend Jonathan Payne, and they clamber into a southbound car and profess amazement that anyone would stop. They have been walking about two miles and have maybe ten more to go, through the destruction in northeast Palm Beach County.

"We got stuck in a flood going to make sure his brother was OK," Bender says. "The car stalled out."

"He was fine -- my stepbrother was fine," Payne says. "My house in Lake Worth was fine. Watch out for this -- it'll screw your car up." Payne points to a minor pond that has sprung up on the roadway.

"I've been through two of these already," Payne continues, discussing the storm. "Last time, we were playing football through the hurricane. It wasn't too bad. See, look at the street signs. The lights are missing."

All the stoplights are out. Gas station canopies lie crumpled and useless under steel girders. Trees bend into roadways.

"Port-a-potty," Bender says, motioning to a blue plastic heap in the median.

"See these railroad signs?" Payne asks as the car approaches train tracks. "In Lake Worth, these are all down, wrapped around things. See these billboards? All the billboards are down."

"The water park's probably destroyed here," Bender says as they near Rapids Water Park in West Palm.

"Naw, dude. They're pretty well-built when you have 400-pound kids going down the slides," Payne says.

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