Getting Hammered in Florida: An Alternative Spring Break Diary
A Bostonia staff writer chaperones one of twenty community service trips - and takes us along for the (twenty-eight-hour) ride.
By Jessica Ullian
Photos by Vernon Doucette
Saturday, March 4
It is cold. The thirteen of us look one another over on a sunny Saturday morning in the parking lot of the Fuller Building at 808 Commonwealth Avenue. We load a week’s worth of clothing, bed-ding, and entertainment into the fifteen-passenger van that will be our home until sometime Sunday afternoon. (Nineteen other groups are doing the same.) We are driving 1,400 miles, to Pensacola, Florida, for Alternative Spring Break. There, we will volunteer with Rebuilding Northwest Florida (RNF) to repair homes damaged by 2004’s Hurricane Ivan. We will spend the next twenty-eight hours in very close quarters.
"The van," ASB veteran Dom Reuter says two days before the trip, "is like a pressure cooker for friendship."
By 10:15 a.m. each person's role is already clear: Matt Fleming, a senior with previous ASB experience and one of our trip coordinators, jokes about mixing up people's names and out-lines the rules against bringing fast food into the van. Kendrick Sledge, a freshman and the other coordinator, has already been nicknamed "Mom"; she is carrying a bag of snacks. Katie Ennis is carrying a tripod and camera equipment for a film class project; Stephanie Shimada arrives breathless and carrying all her possessions for the week in a paper shopping bag. "She's our hero," Kendrick says approvingly; we are already struggling to fit everyone's duffels and sleeping bags and pillows into the van.
By 10:30 we are driving west on the Mass Pike, and we don't stop until we get to a highway rest area sometime after New York. We doze through New Jersey and stop in Maryland, where Evan Goodman’s parents treat us to dinner at the Towson Diner
Sunday, March 5
At 5 a.m., I pull off of the highway in Charlotte to switch shifts. At 8 a.m. we stop at a Waffle House in Georgia for breakfast, and Kendrick, a North Carolina native, lectures us on the proper way to eat grits. Evan ignores her and pours syrup on his. Matt insists on playing "Sweet Home Alabama" as we cross the border into that state.
One time-zone change later, we hit Pensacola; it's one in the afternoon. We find our way to our lodging at the Mallory House Apartments, across the street from the Baptist Hospital. Kendrick leads a brigade to Wal-Mart on a mission to feed thirteen people — including one with an allergy to nuts, one with sensitivity to lactose, and two vegetarians — for the next seven days on something under $300. She returns two hours later, having spent $250. She is triumphant.
We have a quick dinner of macaroni and hot dogs, and thirty-six mostly sleepless hours after leaving Boston, everyone is ready for bed. ASB officially begins tomorrow morning with orientation at RNF headquarters.
Monday, March 6
At the Monday morning RNF orientation session, we learn that the organization was founded barely a month after Hurricane Ivan hit and since then has helped more than 700 families repair their homes or find new ones. Our site coordinator’s name is Daryl Ready, and he leads us to Terry Doran's house.
Terry waited out the storm on September 16, 2004, in his three-bedroom bungalow in Pensacola. He'd been through hurricanes before, having lived in the city since 1982, and it seemed he'd get through this one, too, until the tar-and-gravel roof blew off and water began pouring through the ceilings.
Since then, Terry and his ten-year-old daughter, Pamela, have been living in a FEMA trailer next door to their house. They get by on his Navy pension and disability for diabetes, hearing loss, and bad knees. His home is one of the 150,000 destroyed by Ivan, which blasted the Gulf Coast with 130 m.p.h. winds and caused $13 billion worth of damage in the United States.
Daryl hands out dust masks and safety glasses before giving us our instructions for the day: rip out the ceilings in three bedrooms and the bathroom, demolish the wall between the kit-chen and the living room, dismantle the wooden porch ceiling.
We divide into teams. Dan Leach-St. Germain and Katie tackle the bathroom ceiling and are quickly shrouded in plaster dust. Several others attack the wall between the kitchen and the living room. Kendrick, Beth Hewes, and I begin moving furniture out of Pamela’s room, carefully lifting the case of Beanie Baby bears off the wall and tucking a sheet of plastic over the loft bed. The white trailer that Terry and Pamela live in is parked at the side of the house, a few feet from her bedroom window. "This is just so crazy to me," Beth whispers as we work. "It's been over a year."
Everyone quickly settles into a rhythm. It takes twenty to forty minutes to knock a ceiling down; the process is helped by crowbars and hampered by air-conditioning vents. The gravel from the roof has settled above the plaster, and as sections fall debris tumbles down onto us. Dan narrowly escapes a falling piece of sheetrock and a few minutes later gets nailed in the shoulder by a hunk of plaster. Karen Benabou gets something, plaster dust or fiberglass, in her eye, and Terry drives to the commissary to fetch eyedrops.
By lunchtime, which we eat sitting on the curb, we've taken down all four ceilings and the wall. Plaster dust is in our ears, in our hair, on our lips. We wipe off our hands and sit down for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, chips, and fruit.
After we clean up, the final task is taking down the porch ceiling. Matt and Dan begin carefully removing each board with a crowbar; Amy Schweikert, who has built houses for a community service project in Jamaica, and Katie begin smashing away at the wood with a hammer. Their method, everyone agrees, is more effective. We stack the boards by the door, in case Terry wants to use them again.
The work is finished by 2 p.m., and Daryl tells us that the next site isn't ready for volunteers yet, so the rest of the day is ours. We decide that it should be spent on the beach, so we shake the plaster dust out of our hair, change into bathing suits, and head for Pensacola Beach, which is crowded with regular spring breakers, who, judging by the empty beer bottles next to them, have been baking in the sun for quite some time. We ignore them and pile into the water for a game of football. Tomorrow, Daryl says, "we’re going to be repairing a trailer or tearing a trailer down."
Tuesday, March 7
Today's job site is not the trailers we thought we would be going to; instead, Daryl leads us to a home two blocks from our apartment that he describes, aptly, as a jungle.
It turns out to be a double-wide trailer owned by Carolyn, the mother of four foster children, who has been living in a small house next door until the trailer is made habitable. The children are staying with another family temporarily. The backyard is overgrown with palm trees, weeds, and vines to within a few feet from the back door. Our task is to clear away eighteen feet of dense growth and spread new dirt by the front steps to level off the recently reconstructed wheelchair ramp.
Daryl drops off several machetes and a chain saw for the yard; Karen, the surfer/snowboarder/kung-fu artist, who has turned out to be some-what accident-prone, whoops with excitement. Dan looks wary, and when she heads out back with a machete, he follows discreetly.
We learn quickly that palm fronds are very sharp and very tough and that the vines here are thick and heavy. Everyone crouches down and begins hacking and hauling, dragging rotted boards and old cinderblocks out of the backyard and slowly thinning the brush. Waterbugs —the name given to inch-long flying cockroaches — are everywhere, and Daryl has warned us that it’s snake season. But Evan turns out to be a machete champion, Dan is a whiz with a chain saw, and by lunchtime the backyard is transformed.
It is only our second day of work here, and already the daily peanut-butter-and-jelly picnic has become a pleasant routine: Amy, who is badly allergic to nuts, fetches her turkey sandwich from a separate cooler; Matt sticks Doritos between the peanut butter and the jelly; Dan finishes my bag of baby carrots. The conversation consists of most-disgusting roommate stories.
After lunch, we clean the fridge and play one last round of Dumpster Monster, in which somebody climbs in the Dumpster to stamp down the branches and leaves, and everyone heads back to the Mallory Apartments.
We are living in two adjacent apartments, but only one of them, the one shared by Kendrick, Karen, Stephanie, Bekki Nodhturft, Evan, and me, has a working kitchen, so we host dinner each night. Tonight our meal is ninety-eight-cent frozen pizzas, which, we decide, are pretty tasty, although Amy notes that we're so hungry and tired that just about anything would be delicious.
Today, we all agree, things didn’t go quite as well as they did on Monday. After the rush of knocking down walls and working side by side with Terry, weeding and cleaning are a bit of a letdown. Plus, it's our fourth consecutive day in one another's company, and the relentless closeness has unleashed a few tempers. At least one "You’re not my mom!" incident was witnessed by more than a few people. But so far these things have blown over quickly. Maybe it's exhaustion, maybe it's maturity, and maybe we're all still glad to be here — just not every single moment.
Wednesday, March 8
The morning is typical — a frantic rush to get breakfast eaten, lunches made, and everybody out the door on time. We arrive at the site and the first two jobs are easy, thanks to our new expertise: we clear a patch of weeds from a telephone pole and we tear down a rotted porch at the back of a trailer.
Then the plywood arrives.
Our job, we learn, is to lay down new plywood walls and floors throughout the wrecked trailer, using four hammers, two crowbars, a circular saw and a gas generator, and moldy four-by-eight slabs that have been donated by a Washington, D.C., amusement park. It's about 9:30, and we're supposed to finish at noon and spend the after-noon at the beach. Unlikely, we think, and even more unlikely as we watch Daryl, our RNF coordinator, get ready to leave.
We don't have any nails. We don't know if we are supposed to remove the linoleum from the kitchen before laying the plywood floor. And only two people in our crew have used a circular saw before, and neither of them feels particularly expert.
But the good thing about RNF, we’ve discovered, is that when you have to, you get to make your own rules. And luckily, Vernon Doucette, who arrived on Tuesday to shoot pictures for Bostonia, has some ideas about rules to get us through the day. Vernon is a serious kayaker, a former Outward Bound instructor, and, we are pleased to learn, a pretty good construction manager.
The orders begin: sweep everything off the floor or the plywood won't lie even, bring two pieces inside and then measure how much you need to cut, wear goggles when you use a circular saw. At first, Vernon goes back and forth between shooting and sawing, but eventually, he hands the camera over to Karen and dives into the project. He, Dan, and Katie set down the living room floor and two-thirds of the bedroom, fitting the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. We don't get to the walls or the living room, but Daryl doesn't seem to mind. We are finished by 12:30 and crawl wearily into the van; next stop, Pensacola Beach.
Thursday, March 9
The ASB volunteers from Panama City, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama, come for dinner tonight. We've spent another day at the trailer, where things go more smoothly this time — we finish the floors in both bedrooms, lay down half the four-by-eights in the living room, and rip out the entire bathroom.
We leave the site at four to prepare dinner. Kendrick outlines the game plan. (Kendrick is a freshman — unusually young for an ASB coordinator, but no one doubts her competence or command; she's a little general.) She and Katie will shower first and begin boiling the water for pasta; then, while everybody else cleans up, they'll start the vegetables, salad, and garlic bread. Others can make fruit salad and bake cookies for dessert.
The plan fails almost completely. We run out of cookware immediately and have to borrow pots and pans from the Michigan State students across the hall. We cook the pasta too early and then burn it. Katie bakes the cookies and has to hide them until both groups show up, half an hour behind schedule due to traffic. We run out of fruit salad within twenty minutes.
We set out the food in our apartment and send people to the other apartment — belonging to Amy, Beth, Dan, Hayley Sher, Katie, Matt, and Rose Eger — to eat; forty people take up every inch of floor space, and the din echoes through the courtyard. Everybody has a story to tell. Matt has had an encounter with an ex-con who asked him to drop pennies on the ground so he could pick them up with his tongue. Sara DeRitter, the director of the Community Service Center and chaperone on the Panama City trip, says that so far, everything's gone very well. Only one student, out of all the 270-plus on ASB, has had to get a tetanus shot.
After we finish eating, the Mobile group jumps up, starts clapping in unison, and runs out to the parking lot. We follow, bewildered, and then Ride That Pony — a CSC standard — begins.
Everyone forms a huge circle, and a smaller group begins galloping around inside while the rest of us clap, and chant, "Ride that pony!" When someone stops in front of you and dances, you dance along and trade places in the circle. Evan gallops with all his might, and Dan swings his arms wildly. We switch to Ninja Lumberjack and Produce Master, more CSC games, before the group from Panama City leaves for the two-hour drive home and Mobile heads out to attend a midnight show.
Tomorrow is our last day on site, and we'll be back at the trailer. We don't know if we'll be able to finish — especially because Vernon will be heading home in the afternoon — but we all think that it would be a pretty great way to end the week.
Friday, March 10
Today, as usual, we have a plan: from 9 to 5, we work on the trailer, tearing away its aluminum siding and replacing the rotting wood framing behind. But when the rain begins, we toss our tools inside the trailer and run outside. Dan starts running and sliding through the mud, and we begin a game of blob tag; the person who is tagged joins forces with It and tries to get other people out. We are holding hands and running and laughing, and we are so dirty that Kendrick is threatening not to let us back into the van.
When the downpour stops, we lay some more plywood flooring and cover our new framing with tarpaper. From 5 to 6, we take a trip to Wal-Mart to buy snacks for the very long ride back to Boston; from 6:30 to 7:30, everybody showers and gets ready for our big night out at an Italian restaurant. In the van, we argue about who should take the first shower, and Kendrick and I repeatedly warn everyone that we have only one hour of primping for thirteen people. We realize that our warning is being taken too seriously when Stephanie cuts her shower time down to ninety seconds.
After dinner, we start to pack up our things and contemplate having a group sleepover in one of our apartments. We think again, considering the tiring twenty-four-hour drive ahead. A few of us hang out in a bedroom, playing catch with toiletries and making ninja headdresses out of T-shirts. A select group, I discover the next morning, will stay up talking until 2 a.m. They will take pictures of themselves in various stages of sleep deprivation for amusement on the long ride home.
Saturday, March 11
At 8:30 Saturday morning, we are packed to go. This, we note, is the second time we've managed to do something on schedule; the first time was sitting down to last night's dinner. There is some regret that we failed to bring our projects to completion, but there is also a warm and well-earned feeling of accomplishment for what we did do.
We drove 1,400 miles and worked five days to put our personal dent in the $13 billion in damage wrought by Hurricane Ivan. We understand that the storm destroyed 150,000 homes, and we know that we helped to repair only two of them, but we also understand that two houses are two homes, in this case the homes of Terry and Pamela and of Carolyn.
We also learned so much — like how to live with twelve strangers for a week, how to use power tools, how to build things up and take them down. We learned that a game like Produce Master, which really just involves saying the names of vegetables, can get very risqué and be very much fun.
We wave good-bye to our home for the past week. We snag a souvenir palm frond to remind us of where we went and what we did. And we climb in the van.
