In Mexico Beach, unimaginable loss and uncertain futures collide after Hurricane Michael

Nov. 18--MEXICO BEACH -- A tiny ceramic planter. A glass coffee canister. A saucepot. A lockbox.

A nondescript, mud-covered purse, held in the evidence cage at the makeshift Mexico Beach Police Department, surrounded by dozens of waterlogged firearms and bins secured with tamper proof tape. Inside, items wholly unremarkable except that they represent some of the last personal items of Agnes Vicari, a woman whose life was washed away by Hurricane Michael over a month ago.

A pink wallet. A pink comb. Lipstick. Prescription sunglasses. A sock purse with a handful of bicentennial silver dollars. A Big Lots coupon.

Keys to a front door that doesn't exist, and to a Kia Sportage likely at the bottom of the canal.

"Where did they find it?" Gina Vicari asks Mexico Beach Police Chief Anthony Kelly as she signs the form releasing her mother's purse into her possession. "Was it with her, or washed somewhere else?"

"I think it was in the debris pile," Kelly answers.

The remains of her mother's house are just two blocks away from the department's trailer at Porter Park, but Vicari nearly gets lost navigating there; the familiar landmarks all either gone or entirely unrecognizable to the woman who lives in Port St. Joe and has worked in restaurants in Mexico Beach for decades. The Fish House, Toucan's, the El Governor motel -- Vicari has worked at them all. Now, they're almost unrecognizable too.

Standing on the concrete slab where her mother's modest, single-story but brightly colored home for over 20 years once stood, it's hard to imagine a house was ever there at all. Vicari herself has trouble pinpointing exactly which room she's in, or on really, relying on items -- a fan, her granddaughter Lily's mattress, a microwave, a shower head -- to get her bearings.

The only part of the lot still clearly definable is the garden, once "whimsical" Vicari says, with an iron horse statue and brightly spray painted tires holding plants now corroded by the salt of the storm surge. All that's left are the green stalks of dozens of lilies that never bloomed.

"I think," she starts, pointing to the right front corner of the slab. "That's her fan. I think she would have been there ... or in the hallway. That would have been the only safe place in the house."

"I really didn't want to know, not right now anyways," Vicari said. "I just didn't want to really know everything. It's so much to absorb."

***

With the Category 4 monster Hurricane Michael just offshore and Mexico Beach in the crosshairs, a police officer came to 79-year-old Agnes Vicari's door and begged her to come with him. Later, he would be the one to find her purse.

He wasn't the first, but he would be the last to try and save Agnes' life before conditions deteriorated to the point where, even if she had tried to leave, she likely couldn't have saved herself. Vicari had tried to talk her mom into leaving too. Holed up with her family in a friend's brick home in Honeyville, near Wewahitchka -- where Anges had refused to come with them -- and with that house crashing down around them too, Vicari at first thought her mother had evacuated with the neighbors. She later found out her daughter was on the phone with her grandmother almost up until the very end.

"Lily talked to her at the end, and I didn't know until later, but she realized it was too late that she stayed," Vicari said. "And that was it."

But why, when everyone else around her was retreating, when police officers were begging, did she decide to stay in her little three-bedroom cement home?

The question prompts a long sigh from Vicari.

"Why did she stay?"

Because they always stayed, Vicari lands on. For 23 years, they stayed. They stayed for Ivan. They stayed for Katrina. The last storm Agnes left for was Opal, and the experience was so miserable, leaving was never an option again.

"They made her leave for Opal, and she drove, I think, 11 hours into the storm, because they went that way," Vicari said. "Getting back was miserable and then they got here and there was like, a puddle."

Agnes' home was bookended by a multi-story condo up on stilts on the beach side and a row of multi-story cement condos on the other. Hers was one of three such homes, relics of a time before Mexico Beach was "overbuilt" Vicari said. At one point, Agnes owned the lots next door, but she "undersold them," Vicari explained, adding, "I wish she would have listened to me." The buyer then flipped the lots for a substantial profit, and those buyers put up the condos, made of solid cement, with a wall and a pool. Ultimately, Vicari believes those condos were the undoing, with the storm surge able to pass through the stilts of the condos closer to the beach and swamp the three houses before hitting the cement wall and ricocheting back into Agnes' house, causing it to collapse onto her mother. She doesn't have any proof, but she has a "feeling" that's what happened.

"I made a joke, it's a pretty good size property but it's a little cement house. Meanwhile everyone has these gorgeous, huge houses," Vicari said. "I thought she was crazy at first, but she made it her own."

None of the three houses survived the record-setting storm surge -- over 15 feet according to the latest data from the U.S. Geological Survey, and over 20 feet accounting for wave action. In fact, none of the houses that weren't on stilts as close as, or closer to, the beach as Agnes' house survived, the area now a sad sea of empty concrete pads where homes once stood. The two neighboring houses have both been cleaned up, and picking through the remnants of her mother's home, Vicari finds the neighbors' things have been pushed onto her mother's lot by the cleanup crews.

"They're putting the crap on my side!" she said with a laugh. "Well, her side."

Technically, though, it's Vicari's side now, though the official documents --the title to the car, the money for the funeral, the diamonds -- are in a lock box that has yet to surface. The missing documents are a big holdup for the insurance company, she said, who don't seem to understand the house has not only been destroyed, but has been swept away. The lockbox, Vicari believes, has to be in the rubble somewhere. Or, she turns and points, in the neighbor's pool.

For a second, her gaze turns to the wider world around her, where houses were picked up and deposited in the street blocks away, where personal belongings have been moved into other lots or pushed into the woods, where cars end up in the canal five blocks away, where her mother's furniture has never been found. In that world, something as small as a lockbox could be anywhere. But that thought is too much. She refocuses -- it has to be in the house. Or the pool.

"We have to hire somebody, I guess, to go through all of this," Vicari said.

Had she survived, Vicari doesn't think her mother would have been able to take what has become of her world, where her beloved Mexico Beach resembles more of a landfill than a quaint little beach town, where the house she'd worked her whole life to build, "brick by brick," was so easily erased off the map.

"I can just see her now," Vicariously said. "Weeping and weeping and weeping."

Now, Agnes' daughter and granddaughter have to come to terms with a future that doesn't include Sunday spaghetti dinners together. Doesn't include sleepovers, or Easter egg decorations. Doesn't include Thanksgiving or Christmas together.

Now, Agnes' daughter and granddaughter have to come to terms with a future that, once they sell the land, likely doesn't include Mexico Beach at all.

"We have to leave now, because this was our whole life," Vicari said. "And grandma's not here. We always felt like grandma's house was our anchor. We always had grandma's house. We always felt like this is where we would come back to."

"We may come back to sell or something, but I can't see us ever coming back here."

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