When I learned early Friday morning that Cedar Key, Fla., had been flattened overnight by Hurricane Helene, one of the first things that came to my mind was a song lyric by Jimmy Buffett — early Buffet, before he became a walking tourist attraction. One of his better songs is “Incommunicado,” released in 1981. It begins: “Travis McGee’s still in Cedar Key/That’s what old John MacDonald said.”
Buffett didn’t get it quite right. McGee, the tanned, laid-back antihero of John D. MacDonald’s terrific thriller novels, didn’t hang out in Cedar Key. He docked the houseboat he lived in — it was named the Busted Flush, because he’d won it in a card game — on the opposite coast, in Fort Lauderdale.
But Buffett clearly knew MacDonald’s own geography. The novelist, who died in 1986, spent most of his adult life in Sarasota and on nearby Siesta Key, just a few hours south of Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast. When Helene scraped ruinously along the central and northern parts of the Florida’s Gulf Coast on Thursday night, it was taking aim at MacDonald country.
There are many reasons to read MacDonald’s 21 Travis McGee novels, which include “The Deep Blue Good-By” (1964), “Pale Gray for Guilt” (1968) and “The Dreadful Lemon Sky” (1974). They’re sly, satirical, tattered around the edges. Kingsley Amis thought MacDonald was a better writer than Saul Bellow. All of the McGee books have colors in their titles. MacDonald was among the first to use this sort of mnemonic device, as Sue Grafton would in her alphabet series, so readers could remember which ones they’d read.
Another reason to read MacDonald is that he was eerily prescient. How much so? He saw Helene coming, more clearly than most. Here is a paragraph from his novel “Dead Low Tide,” from 1953:
You pray, every night, that the big one doesn’t come this year. A big one stomped and churned around Cedar Key a couple of years back, and took a mild pass at Clearwater and huffed itself out. One year it is going to show up, walking out of the Gulf and up the coast, like a big red top walking across the schoolyard. … It’s going to be like taking a good kick at an anthill, and then the local segment of that peculiar aberration called the human race is going to pick itself up, whistle for the dredges and start it all over again.
In his 1956 novel “Murder in the Wind” (also published as “Hurricane”), he wrote about a storm named Hilda — not Helene, but close enough — that destroys the area around Cedar Key. In an author’s note at the front, he urges anyone doubting the plausibility of such a disaster to remember that just six years earlier, a hurricane had put much of the region underwater.
“Though the chance is statistically remote,” MacDonald writes, “there need only be the unfortunate conjunction of hurricane path and high Gulf tide to create coastal death and damage surpassing the fictional account in this book.”
By Saturday, the death toll from Hurricane Helene had passed 50, after record-breaking storm surges carried away whole houses and inundated roads. The storm is expected to cause $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage, according to one estimate.
It turns out that nothing about this devastation is statistically remote. Helene came just weeks after Tropical Storm Debby and less than a year after Hurricane Idalia, both of which flooded Cedar Key. The city narrowly escaped catastrophe two years ago, when Hurricane Ian slammed into southwestern Florida and killed 150 people across the state. The big one, for Cedar Key, came this year.
In the Travis McGee novels, the protagonist, a “salvage consultant” moonlighting as a private eye, is primarily interested in a) attractive women and b) slacking. But McGee is also a rarity: an intense environmentalist with a sense of humor. (He pronounces himself “wary of all earnestness.”) He is an especially sharp critic of greedhead developers who leave shoddy buildings in their wake. He loathes condominiums. His Florida is a paradise being lost daily.
Long before scientists got on their bullhorns about population booms and breakneck development making hurricane damage disastrously worse, MacDonald was railing against shabby construction and corner-cutting in Florida’s real estate market. The admonitions in his novels carried over into his other writing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he wrote for a small magazine in Sarasota. In one of his columns, he lamented the felling of Florida’s tall pines, if only because their shade “kept many a stalled tourist from frying like a mullet in his own grease and suntan lotion.” In another column he wrote, “Every zoning-buster, anti-planner and bay filler is degrading us for the sake of his own pocketbook.”
MacDonald’s novels spoke to me, in part, because I spent much of my childhood in Naples, a town in Southwest Florida a few hours south of Sarasota. Hurricane alerts, in summer and early fall, were common.
This was before the internet. We’d follow the storms by using the free paper tracking maps, the size of Dairy Queen place mats, that grocery stores handed out. We’d tape these to the refrigerator and then listen to the local AM radio station, WNOG (Wonderful Naples on the Gulf), for the latest coordinates. We’d mark the hurricane’s longitude and latitude in pencil, in a snaking series of encroaching Xs.
Sometimes one would get close enough that my parents would pull out plywood and nails to protect our windows. Then we’d all walk down to the beach and watch the churning waves that reached in and rearranged the sandbars.
“Incommunicado” turned me on to MacDonald. I was 16. (Buffett often mentioned writers in his songs, and palled around with Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane.) I never visited Cedar Key, though I spent time in the area, and my grandparents lived for a while in Sarasota. I was too young to know that MacDonald lived nearby, but in recent years I have liked reading about one of his traditions there.
MacDonald and some writer friends, including Larry L. King, would hang large “drinking flags” outside their houses on certain afternoons. These meant, essentially, “Come on in.”
It’s a happy tradition, one that I feel like reviving today. I’d pour one out for MacDonald. I’d pour out two for Cedar Key, everyone struggling, once again, to rebuild there.
The post The Novelist Who Foresaw the ‘Big One’ for Florida’s Gulf Coast appeared first on New York Times.