People leave with the pillows and coat hangers. Our friend Lee across the street rents out his place, Almost Paradise, as do most of our Emerald Isle neighbors, and all of them have stories to tell. At first, Hugh went through an agency, but now he does it himself, through a number of Web sites. Like the Sea Section, it’s right on the ocean, but unlike the Sea Section it’s rented out to vacationers. It’s a single-story four-bedroom, perched on stilts and painted a shade of pink that’s almost carnal. The place that Hugh bought is ancient by Emerald Isle standards-built in 1972. “Now all we hear is ‘Marco!’ ‘Polo!’ over and over. “It happened to us ten years ago,” moaned my friend Lynette, who owns an older, traditionally sized cottage up the street from us. The size of these new houses was one thing-eight bedrooms were common, spread over three or four stories-but what came with them, and what you really didn’t want next door to you, was a swimming pool. His argument was that if he didn’t get it someone would most likely tear it down and construct the sort of McMansion that has become the rule on Emerald Isle rather than the exception. It’s next door to the Sea Section, and when it came up for sale, in 2016, Hugh disregarded my objections and bought it. Our other house, luckily, was relatively unscathed. Had ours been the only place affected, it might have been easy to have the repairs done, but, between the hurricane and the flooding, thousands of homes had been either destroyed or severely damaged-and that was just in North Carolina. So there were our beds, speckled with currant-size turds and tufts of bloated, discolored insulation.Īll the interior drywall would need to be replaced, as would the roof, of course, along with the doors and windows. It seems that rats had been living in the second-floor ceilings. Bermey took pictures, which looked so tawdry I was embarrassed to share them.
A large section of the roof had been ripped off, and the rain that had fallen in the subsequent days had caused the ceilings on both floors to cave in, the water draining, as if the house were a sieve, down into the carport. He found our doors wide open-blown open by the wind. Our friend Bermey owns a house-the Dark Side of the Dune-not far from ours, and went over to check on the Sea Section as soon as people were allowed back onto Emerald Isle. Hugh and I were in London when the hurricane hit, and was followed almost immediately by a tornado.
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