As I write this a large portion of South Florida is getting it's ass kicked by Hurricane Jeanne. It worries me. I have a lot of people down there.
I was watching live coverage from Ft. Pierce. When I was a kid we used to get up at four in the morning and drive to Fort Pierce to surf. That beautiful beach, lined with huge Australian Pine trees, along what was known then as "the jetty." It's probably lined with condos now. I tried picturing it as I knew it back in the sixties; standing there with my face into 100-mph winds. Just like Andersen Cooper! I think they are down there trying to shoot Cooper caught in a tropical cyclone, doing a 360 for a show promo.
Florida was paradise, still is I think, true paradise back in 1959 when my family moved to Hollywood from Pennsylvania.
Just now they showed Cooper and his man in the red slicker being blown nearly off their feet, from the sound of the TV in the next room.
They say Sebastian Inlet is getting a direct hit right now. Sebastian is a secret island paradise in Florida, not an island at all, but with everything beautiful that makes an island an island. I liked snorkeling through the inlet when the tide was coming in. The water pushes you over rock formations with schools of snook, some rather large, silvery and swimming along side of you. Sometimes you'll spot a loggerhead turtle, or a green turtle, a porpoise, and always yellow-blue-white-black-striped reef fish.
We were guests of friends at a summer house near Sebastian a couple of times. We went clamming just inside the backwater. Snorkeling off the beach at the house, a bull shark chased us in one day. It is a paradise.
I think about the people down there, like my good friends Mel and Jan Schack along the coast near Melbourne, and his daughters in Orlando, and Jack and Terry about five miles from the inlet. Hope they are OK. It's after one in the morning and the hurricane looks vicious.
