‘Doomscrolling’ and searching for a ‘timeline cleanse’
On the Saturday before Milton, this editor was at Dollar Tree in Englewood, at the Winn-Dixie shopping center. For those who do not know it, Dollar Tree almost always has UHT (ultra-high temperature) milk in those juice box containers. For reference, and for the next storm, they are on the bottom shelf in the back. Over the years, the offerings have changed.
For a time, there was a Utah maker, which I’m guessing had its origin in the Mormon practice of preparing for disasters.
This time, the milk was from Marcel’s Modern Pantry, made by Diversified Foods out of Louisiana. When disasters come, shelf-stable milk is just one of those things that makes the worry diminish. For if the power goes out for a couple of days, at least there is milk for the coffee.
Perhaps Louisiana, with lots of storms and café au lait, has some storm priorities down.
Everyone has their personal ways of getting through these things.
That newly opened Dollar Tree, which was lost during Hurricane Ian, is giant and well-appointed. But on Saturday before Milton, the roof was leaking in at least two places; the shopping center was not quite buttoned up.
The clerk, cheerful and energetic, said that if she had to go through “another one of these” with Milton, she was outta here, she said – back to Ohio.
That’s what Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders wrote and sang back in 1984, in her hit “My City Was Gone.”
The song starts: “I went back to Ohio. But my city was gone.” Hynde’s city and favorites had not been pulled down by a storm but by 1970s America. For that clerk from Ohio, who lived in a mobile home, there may be family to go back to, but even more landmarks might be gone there.
Just before Milton, the tour around Englewood, like the tour anywhere in southwest Florida, had an element of gloom about it, especially as it came so soon after Hurricane Helene. Some were already reminiscing fondly about the cool, clear days after Hurricane Ian, which we have experienced this week after Milton. The destruction was bad after Ian, but the days following – if you could look to the sky – were glorious. The pre-Milton rains and tornadoes also gave the area a bit of the feeling of something frightening coming.
The current expression for searching for the truth amid all the social media platforms is “doomscrolling.” There are groups of people searching for the latest bit of doom to repost and gain readers. The challenge for everyone is that you sort of have to “doomscroll” to find out the truth of what is happening. After a certain amount of “engagement” in this social media, one can post something happy. This is referred to as a “timeline cleanse.”
There was and will be a lot of doomscrolling. And now we all doomscroll in real life, hoping for happy endings, searching for our own timeline cleanses.
Perhaps all of us have crutches to get through storms, as we go from disaster to disaster, testing our “resilience” against whatever comes our way. Having UHT milk in the cupboard is a crutch. The challenge for resilience in coastal Florida is that the traditional ideas of security at home, and preparing for disasters, are suddenly required to be mobile, too.
After Milton, we headed to Englewood. The Dollar Tree was closed. The south part of the shopping center had about an inch of water. We were there not to get UHT milk, but to get internet service from T-Mobile, as Xfinity was out on the island and in parts of Cape Haze.
The store was flooded, but James and Jagger, the two store clerks, were out front with a card table. They hadn’t had any customers, but each had fared well through the storm. The only place to eat that day was Denny’s.
Englewood does not yet have a Waffle House storm indicator. Maybe soon?
They went back into that mildewy store to get a T-Mobile hotspot to help get the Beacon – and this editor – back online. This whole island has been restored thanks to folks like James and Jagger (pictured here) and the many hundreds of utility, construction and cleanup workers who came here immediately to help the island recover, sometimes by boat, or even on foot, dragging a Rubbermaid mop bucket across the Causeway.
They are part of this island story, and after the full recovery from the storm, deserve some thanks for what they have done, and have earned a home on this island too. They do not own even an inch of the island. But they do in spirit.
Garland Pollard is editor of the Beacon. Email letters and comments to editor@bocabeacon.com.
