Insurance probably wouldn’t help much, Crater said, but he and his wife planned to rebuild. We tore down some drywall together, then cycled around the eastern half of the island. Everywhere we went, fire alarms sounded and chainsaws buzzed. And, at every turn, we found someone Crater knew.
A deeply tanned man with a backwards baseball cap and aviator sunglasses was cycling towards Periwinkle Way, the island’s main thoroughfare. He introduced himself as Doug Congress, a CPA and former vice mayor of Sanibel who has lived mostly on the island since he was a teenager. Like about a thousand other Sanibel residents, Congress and his wife, Melissa, remained on the island during the storm. “I mean, my house is on stilts fifteen feet above sea level,” he said. “I have impact glass, rated 185. I have a metal roof that is only six years old. He had lived on the island for nearly thirty years, and evacuation had always proved unnecessary in the past.
At one point during the storm, it looked like the house of Congress might sink. “My wife said, ‘You know what, if we’re going to die, we’re not going to die in this attic,’ he recalled. They took six five-gallon water bottles, sealed them, and wrapped them around of a wooden bench. They ultimately didn’t need the raft, but Congress kept it. “Because I’m going to come back and put it in the ocean and see if it would have worked,” I was told. he said.
Congress is a car enthusiast and one of its prize automobiles was destroyed by the storm. He asked Crater for advice on how to get it properly appraised, before explaining to me that it really was the least of his worries. I asked him what he thought the future held for the island. “You’re rebuilding, I guess,” he said. At the very least, he added, he needed to put his house back in decent enough condition to rent or sell. But he worried about what the others would do – if a lot of people left, Sanibel wouldn’t be the same. And he feared that she would go bankrupt. “Mel wants to move to the mountains,” he said. “But we’ll see.”
“This is the future of Sanibel,” Crater said, stopping his bike a few minutes down the road and pointing to a house on our left. It was an average-sized house with a metal roof, Hardie board siding, and hurricane-proof windows. He sat on ten foot stilts. The area under the house had not been walled off. “It’s not rocket science,” Crater continued. “It’s about building to code, following it strictly. We can coexist with the ocean. He guessed that about one percent of homes in Sanibel currently fit this pattern.
Two men approached on foot as we rounded the next bend, past a house that had come loose from its foundation. “I adapt to flooding,” Gage Crowder, the younger of the two, told me. Crowder, an insurer, lives in Texas and has seen things after Hurricane Harvey flooded the Houston area, but said Ian’s damage to Fort Myers was the worst he had ever seen. I asked his colleague to rebuild on Sanibel. “Best practice is to raise it,” he said, referring to stilt houses, “but they’re still going to lock them up. They want to use the space. These people have money.
“They got ‘shit money,'” Crowder said. “Corvettes, Stingrays, sports cars – they’re all over here in some of these homes.”
Crater and I cycled until we came across two policemen who had just arrived from the neighborhood where my grandparents lived. I asked the officers what it looked like; they shook their heads. As we were talking, a golf cart pulled up carrying a woman in leggings and muck boots – it was Sanibel Mayor Holly Smith. “I literally thought it could have been someone looting,” she said, referring to Crater and me. Smith, who has held various civic posts in Sanibel for more than a decade, was almost incredibly optimistic. “How far we’ve come is extraordinary,” she said, adding that the important thing was to build “the Sanibel where everyone wants to come back.” She added: “Will there be any adjustments? Maybe there should be.
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