Reporter in storm turns question on herself: What do I pack?

AP Photo/Chris O’Meara

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Tamara Lush is the Associated Press correspondent and multimedia journalist for the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, covering Florida’s Gulf Coast. She has covered 10 storms – including the recent Hurricane Harvey in Houston. She returned to St. Pete, where she’s lived for seven years, to cover Irma and soon found herself among Florida’s many evacuees as the storm moved west and put her home and family in danger. She’s filing occasional dispatches on her experience.

—

PACKING PRIORITIES

Noon Sunday:

What do you pack when you might lose everything?

It’s a question I’ve thought about during every interview in every storm over the years. I was even in the middle of reporting a story in Houston about flood victims’ relationship with their possessions when I was called home to Florida to cover Irma.

And this week, I got to answer my own questions.

Since I hadn’t unpacked one bag from my time in Houston – a suitcase filled with rain gear, a first aid kit, video equipment – I rolled it toward our front door to await the trip to our hotel. I washed my storm-chasing clothes from Houston and repacked those.

Since I had the luxury of time before the storm hit, I carefully considered what to take. What did I own that was truly meaningful? What would I need if our roof was torn off and we couldn’t live in our home for months?

I thought of what my former colleague, Ramit Plushnick-Masti, wrote when she had to evacuate her house a few weeks ago in Houston’s floodwaters. She packed jeans and her favorite moisturizer. So I packed a bag with my nicest professional clothes, and another bag with makeup and skin care. If I didn’t have a home to live in, I’d want some soothing, nice-smelling things to make me feel normal and beautiful.

The sentimental stuff was a bit more difficult. Which books, which photos, which mementoes of my life?

In the end, I filled two plastic tubs. The ashes of my mother went in first, then photos of her. Some reporter’s notebooks. My own published novels. Also, a first edition of “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” by Hemingway, a man who saw a few tempests himself.

“This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it,” Hemingway wrote in that book I packed. “It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it.”

—

NO BLUEPRINT FOR THIS STORM

9 a.m. Sunday:

I was in Houston a week ago, talking with a woman whose home had flooded during Harvey.

“Have you ever been in a hurricane?” she’d asked.

I nodded, telling her I’d covered eight storms. “And, I live on the Gulf Coast in Florida. So there’s always a threat. It’s not a matter of if, but when.”

As I type this, Hurricane Irma is closing in, and I’m sitting on a bed at a hotel in my city of St. Petersburg. My husband is next to me, watching The Weather Channel. Our two dogs are letting out little woofs and sniffing the bags that hold everything important to us.

Yeah, I covered them before. But now I’m a hurricane evacuee.

Like tens of thousands of Floridians, we waffled before leaving. Evacuating our home, at a whopping 22 feet above sea level, wasn’t mandatory.

But, Harvey.

I booked a room near home. Someone would use it, or we’d cancel … Irma would probably hit Miami in any case.

Then the hurricane veered west, and we considered the five giant oak trees towering over our house. They drop large branches during even small rainstorms. What if a whole tree crunched our roof?

The sun cast a sparkling, golden, weirdly ominous hue as we left home, hours ahead of the first wind and rain.

I’m hoping we’ll be back home soon. But I know enough about natural disasters to understand that there’s no blueprint for what’s coming.

—

Follow Tamara Lush on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tamaralush