Duty

I've been everywhere, man

I've been everywhere, man

Crossed the deserts bare, man

I've breathed the mountain air, man

Of travel I've a'had my share, man

I've been everywhere

-Johnny Cash

Thinking this morning of how a sojourner, a person from nowhere, responds to community calamity.

That person from nowhere would be me, and the calamity would be Hurricane Michael, now two years and a lifetime of transitions ago.

I truly am from nowhere. No real accent. Eighteen houses in my first eighteen years growing up (let's see if I can name the venues--Joplin, Springfield (MO), Kansas City, Moline, back to KC, Louisville (as I turned four), Charlotte, Key Biscayne, Marietta GA, Roswell, Tustin CA, Orange CA, Corpus Christi TX (three houses there in less than two years, a sign of domestic trouble on the horizon by the middle of 8th grade), Richardson TX, Plano TX, Hemet CA (two different homes), San Jacinto CA.

I guess that's nineteen, actually. Easy to lose count.

So it was an oddity for me to land in Bay County, Florida in 1991, right after the war, then spend 27 years, leaving only to attend law school and for a happy-but-truncated interlude as a law professor in South Carolina.

What happens in a small southern town when you're a college educated professional with military leadership experience? You join the vestry, and end up senior warden. You are president of the local orchestra, the Kiwanis Club, and the Inn of Court. You fundraise for charity, even create your own at one point, and show up at all the balls. You coach T-ball and soccer without much understanding of either sport.

I guess "you" would be "I". Look at me trying to distance myself from the story.

A friend of mine once referred to all this civic involvement as our "community tax" for the privileged lives we get to lead as big fish in a little pond. We are well paid and respected; we must give back.

For a nomadic son of a restaurant executive, who spent all my life in interchangeable suburbs where I rarely knew the people next door, this was not a natural experience. I guess it was the do-gooder seed thrown into my rocky soil, to adapt the parable.

That shallowness became manifest in October of 2018, when the world changed (mine anyway) forever after Hurricane Michael swept through Panama City. I was at the time our region of the state's representative on the Florida Bar's legislative body (of course), and away at a meeting at the Ritz Carlton Amelia Island.

The first communication I had with a neighbor and friend the next day, via Facebook because the entire county lost cell phone communication, was "Everything's gone. Don't come back."

Three days later, after enduring a long line of traffic to get through a checkpoint outside of town and into what was left of Panama City, I arrived around sunset at the house and saw what he meant:

Well, that doesn't look so bad. I mean, the house is still there.

The note on the door from the code enforcement folks was discouraging. Apparently the damage made entering the building too dangerous to contemplate.

Then I went around back and understood why.

And it didn't look much better in broad daylight, after they pulled the trees off the house. Not much better at all.

Peg's beloved corner condo on the bay fared little better. I can't show you any pics from inside because it was dark and boarded up. I can show you, however, the last pic I snapped before the storm, looking west from the balcony, not realizing that would be the last time.

The place is still boarded up today, two years and five days later.

My thoughts this morning aren't about the event so much as how I responded. Something deeply wired into my internal circuitry looked around at the devastation, considered my options, and without much hesitation arrived at the decision to move one county to the west, where life was jarringly normal. My law partner at the time urged that I rent a townhouse somewhere that hadn't been flattened, and stay in town for the excruciating rebuilding process to follow. I declined.

I rode back through the wreckage to the office for a few weeks, then moved my law practice to a firm located in my new home base. I continued to handle cases in Bay County, but the vibe was different now. They were all on a journey of anguish and occasional triumph as Bay County tried to emerge from the rubble pile it had become. I was the guy who left. The President of Everything took whatever wasn't ruined by wind and rain, and got out of town.

Eleanor Roosevelt one observed that we'd care less what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they do. This muse over whether I did the right thing isn't about my former neighbors--like all ethical problems, it is a conversation with myself, about duty. Did I have a duty to stay? Should I have been an example of fortitude by sticking it out in my own lean-to until things came back to life?

The easy answer would be "yes", but I don't think it's that simple. Our society counts on human capital moving to where it does the most good, not just for the community but for the person himself. My move maximized my own eudaimonia, and allowed my law practice to survive and thrive. My clients were better served because I was housed and fed.

And what would I have done as a homeless person in the mess that followed October 10th? Be a good example? No one is watching, Donk. Provide leadership as decisions were made about rebuilding? The same people who weren't watching weren't listening, given my fatally centrist politics and inability to toe the party line. My voice would have meant nothing.

How one responds to this particular ethical dilemma seems also to change with age. At 33, with kids in school and lots of personal gas in the tank, there may in fact be some duty to show a little grit for the good of the community. I was 54 at the time, however, with a empty nest and a dimming horizon in the late afternoon of my life. Perhaps one earns the right to be a little selfish.

Then there is the macro-ethic. In a world of rising temperatures and seas, does it make sense to stay and help rebuild something that faces inevitably another huge storm, then another? Bay County may be a scuba tourist attraction in a century. Several of those exist in the Mediterranean to this day, grand Roman and Greek port cities now home to fish and squid. Did those city fathers have an obligation to defy nature by rebuilding "bigger and better" as their doomed cities disappeared under the waves, or would real leadership have meant moving to higher ground and encouraging others to do the same?

In the end, Bay County will be what it will be, with or without me. And I will always be a sojourner, ready to load up the wagon yet again and leave disaster over my shoulder as P and I climb the next hill toward home. I've been everywhere, but am from nowhere.