When Hurricane Ian hit Fort Myers, Florida, a group of neighbors bound together to get through a harrowing night of high winds, rising waters, and careening yachts.
Adam Rayhart is a flair bartender at a cocktail spot in downtown Fort Myers, Florida, the largest town on a seven-mile island that sits on the Gulf of Mexico. He moved there last year from Lehigh Acres, sixteen miles inland. The move was mainly to be closer to work, but having views of the water, he said, “were a plus.” The tattooed and bearded thirty-two-year-old has lived in Florida since he was four and has experienced a lot of hurricanes.
“You could hear the wind out the door and through the windows,” Rayhart told me, describing Ian’s arrival. “It seemed like a typical hurricane. Waters were getting wavy and stuff, which was to be expected.”On his final walk outside to relieve his dogs, he tripped and broke a toe, but that problem was soon forgotten. He noticed that the barnacles on one of the river’s piers, visible the day before, had disappeared below the waterline. “I was, like, ‘O.K., water is rising up a bit,’ ” he told me.
Rayhart could see his lanai’s roof paneling coming undone, and a few tree branches were falling. He was wearing jeans, in the pouring rain, trying to figure out if he should wade to his first-floor neighbor’s window. As he was thinking, Stebbins leaped into the water, made it to the window, and brought back suitcases in one hand while holding the leash with the other. Stefanie followed him: this time the man handed her a baby through the window.
As dusk was falling, Rayhart heard Stefanie scream, “There’s a boat!” An unmoored yacht, visible in the wind and rain, was coming toward their apartment. It shifted slightly as it drew near, instead passing over the apartment’s pool, and ended up wedged between two buildings. “A close call,” Rayhart recalled. Then another yacht appeared. “Like, a million-dollar freaking-big yacht,” Rayhart said. “This time it’s coming directly for my living room.
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