You look at a community differently when you are waiting for a hurricane.
Photographer Michael Spooneybarger and I spent the night driving on Sanibel and Captiva islands trying to get a feel for the area before the storm. It was a pretty normal night. People were out to dinner, going for walks, biking. We trolled through dark neighborhoods, imagining what they might look like after a wall of storm surge washes through.
“That whole area would be gone,” I’d say, drawing a nod from Spooney.
We also looked for areas that might be good, safe places to ride out the storm, assuming it makes landfall somewhere near here. We want to find people who will ignore calls to evacuate. We want to be safe, but we want to be where stories are. We don’t really want to weather the storm in our hotel, though that is an option. We spent a little time looking for safe places to hide our Chevrolet Suburban during the storm. We can’t tell if storm surge would be a problem at out Fort Myers hotel, which looks to be about a mile from water. It looks safe, but you can never be too sure.