The eerie chill of the Monday after Milton | Column

Monday has never made much sense, what with its promise of newness steeped in the dread of alarms, commutes and punishing routine.

The Monday after back-to-back hurricanes made even less sense to the senses. The weather was chaotically perfect, the most ahh Tampa Bay has ahhed since spring. The cool, dry air felt like a perverse joke after so many people spent hours last week huddled inside closets with the walls and windows shaking.

The world outside was jostled, crooked and cattywampus like a Tim Burton film. Cars trucked south down U.S. 19 through a graveyard of billboards, so many signs ripped naked by Milton’s wind. Acrylic signage did not fare better, not at Trulieve or La Quinta or Dinettes Unlimited or Floor __ Decor with the ampersand punched out.

In downtown St. Petersburg, workers sucked vapes and plowed toward offices. Omnidirectional beep-beeps screamed that — like it or not — development was resuming, the towers now associated with destruction marching ever toward the sky. Clack-clacks carried workers up 400 Central, ensuring luxury condominiums with modern amenities could rise like an unstoppable sea monster. Gawkers pointed and took photos of a crane that had plummeted from its perch atop the project, still plunged into the chest of its smaller, older neighbor.

Metal stools clanked outside the bars on Central Avenue. Young women drank from cans of fruity vodka seltzer at the Crafty Squirrel, laughing above the din. The smell of espresso poured from the doors of Kahwa, where people on earbuds made loud dealings to secure capital for more projects.

Fourth Street returned to its natural state, with cars jockeying for position at Trader Joe’s and packing the drive-through for nuggets at Chick-fil-A. Troopers and fire trucks and oil tankers and septic tankers and utility rigs chugged toward the Howard Frankland Bridge.

In downtown Tampa, college students lugged duffels to dorms and jogged along the river in athletic sets, ponytails swinging. The Tampa Bay Rays’ stingrays moved into the Florida Aquarium, their old home ripped apart, their new home still a government-subsidized elephant of a concept in a city where toilets could only recently be flushed again.

Party music pumped from Sparkman Wharf. Port workers trudged to the parking garage toting lunchboxes. Vacationers paid $60 to park around this lifeline for fuel where a Margaritaville ship was bound for Key West and Cozumel.

Rush hour traffic built up, the bottleneck relieved a bit by school closures and broken offices. Chugging cars stopped and started on Interstate 275, emitting gunk into the air in this unwalkable region in this intractable state where storm trauma has calloused so many spirits. Where the governor stood in front of a crane’s gaping hole and said there’s nothing to be done, that developers should simply be more careful, that there will always be demand to live near the water, that you can’t regulate everything.

And so anglers cast lines at Rocky Point, sun glinting off the street lights. And across the Courtney Campbell, over the bay’s warming waters and down Drew Street in Clearwater, cars lined up for emergency fuel. And shoppers bought electronics at Best Buy across from apartments where days ago more than 500 people fled 6 feet of floodwaters. And a pink kayak teetered off a balcony.

And in a pothole-pocked parking lot around the corner, a lone observer stood before a shrine. Long ago, people thought a 60-foot tall apparition of the Virgin Mary formed on the glass building there. The lot became an international tourist attraction with guests weeping and collapsing in the presence of a miracle. Some time later, a troubled teenager took a slingshot to her head.

On this mild, stoic Monday after disaster, the bottom half of Mary still stood under the acrid smell of the highway. A giant set of shoulders. A perpetual shrug.

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