Adam Rayhart is a flair bartender at a cocktail spot in downtown Fort Myers, Florida, a city that sits along a river just inland from the Gulf of Mexico. He moved there last year from Lehigh Acres, sixteen miles farther inland. The move was mainly to be closer to work, but having views of the water, he said, “were a plus.” The tattooed and bearded thirty-two-year-old has lived in Florida since he was four and has experienced a lot of hurricanes. “I can’t even remember most of their names,” he told me. When Rayhart saw predictions that Hurricane Ian was headed for the Gulf Coast, early last week, he did what he always does in anticipation of losing power for a few days: he charged his electronics, bought a couple cases of water and nonperishable food, and stocked up on batteries for his flashlights and lanterns. “I can live off Mountain Dew,” he told me, noting that he hadn’t even picked up the maximum number of cases of water allowed at his local grocery store. “I just need the water for my dogs.”
Rayhart has been living at Riverwalk, a fifty-unit apartment complex right on the Caloosahatchee River, just outside of downtown Fort Myers. He and a roommate, Eric Stebbins, Jr., who also works at the cocktail bar, share a second-story unit facing the Caloosahatchee, which is protected by a small sea wall. The steps leading up to their apartment are about fifteen feet from river’s edge. Their second-story patio overlooks the complex’s pool, a few palm trees, and a gazebo where they often hung out, talking about their day or sitting in silence and enjoying the sunsets.
They weren’t really worried about their apartment. Storm surge had never been a serious problem in the area, as far as Rayhart knew. But he helped a downstairs neighbor named Stefanie prepare her own apartment with sandbags, and he told her that she could shelter upstairs with him and Stebbins if necessary. Stefanie took him up on the offer, and the three of them hunkered down Thursday afternoon, in Riverwalk apartment #50.
“You could hear the wind out the door and through the windows,” Rayhart told me, describing Ian’s arrival. “It seemed like a typical hurricane. Waters were getting wavy and stuff, which was to be expected.” On his final walk outside to relieve his dogs, he tripped and broke a toe, but that problem was soon forgotten. He noticed that the barnacles on one of the river’s piers, visible the day before, had disappeared below the waterline. “I was, like, ‘O.K., water is rising up a bit,’ ” he told me. Then it began to pour over the little wall and onto the apartment’s pool area.
“It still didn’t look so bad from the river side,” Rayhart recalled. “But Stefanie is, like, ‘Holy crap, the parking lot is flooded.’ I go out back and I look, and there’s just a river in the parking lot.”
At this point, there was a knock on their door. The apartment opens onto a breezeway that is roofed and railed but otherwise open to the elements. “I’m, like, ‘Who the hell is trying to hang out?’ ” Rayhart said. It was another downstairs neighbor, who had a young family. Rayhart thought that they had evacuated. (Rayhart and Stebbins estimate that roughly half of the apartment complex’s residents evacuated the island prior to the hurricane’s arrival.) Rayhart told me that the man said, “Do you mind?” He added, chuckling, “I told him to get inside.” The water outside was now about waist high, and rising inside the first-floor apartments. The man ran back down to get his family while Rayhart tried to keep the door cracked open in the heavy wind.
“It was taking him too long,” Rayhart said.
As it turned out, Stefanie had been a professional lifeguard for years. She told Rayhart to grab a rope. He ran to his closet and found his dog’s twenty-five-foot training leash. “Me and her ran outside,” he went on, “and I tied the leash around the railing of the staircase. She grabs the rope, jumps into the water while holding it, and goes over to the downstairs window because they can’t even open their door.” She handed the leash through the window to the man, who handed her back a toddler. Holding the leash and the crying child, Stefanie waded back upstairs. (Rayhart told me that the man and his family, whose names he declined to share, did not want to talk to the media about their ordeal.)
Rayhart could see his lanai’s roof paneling coming undone, and a few tree branches were falling. He was wearing jeans, in the pouring rain, trying to figure out if he should wade to his first-floor neighbor’s window. As he was thinking, Stebbins leaped into the water, made it to the window, and brought back suitcases in one hand while holding the leash with the other. Stefanie followed him: this time the man handed her a baby through the window. Then he climbed through the window with a case of water, and his wife followed behind with their small dog.
Once everyone was inside apartment #50, Rayhart deadbolted and barricaded the door. He offered his neighbors towels and trail mix. A little while later, looking out a back window, toward the unit’s parking lot, Rayhart noticed the rising water level in relation to a nearby staircase. It seemed like a good way to measure the progress of the surge. “We were losing about one step per half hour,” he told me. “Meanwhile,” he went on, “I’m texting my parents in Tennessee, like, ‘When’s this storm supposed to end?’ My dad goes, ‘Midnight.’ I’m, like, ‘Oh, great.’ But I wasn’t telling them what was really going on, so they wouldn’t freak out.”
Rayhart tried to project calm, he said, to the new residents of his apartment. But, he told me, “every so often I would go in my room and sit in my recliner, take deep breaths, sip on some water, get my composure together, and then get up and put on a strong face.”
As dusk was falling, Rayhart heard Stefanie scream, “There’s a boat!” An unmoored yacht, visible in the wind and rain, was coming toward their apartment. It shifted slightly as it drew near, instead passing over the apartment’s pool, and ended up wedged between two buildings. “A close call,” Rayhart recalled. Then another yacht appeared. “Like, a million-dollar freaking-big yacht,” Rayhart said. “This time it’s coming directly for my living room.” He told everyone except Stebbins and the man from downstairs to get in his bedroom, farthest away from where the yacht seemed poised to strike the building. “I’m standing there, and I’m looking at them,” Rayhart said, “like, ‘Are you guys ready, because it’s about to get real.’ ”
They began dumping items from plastic storage bins, which they thought they might be able to use as life rafts. “The plan was to just try to either jump on the yacht if it crashed through the living room,” Rayhart said, “and try to survive on that, or try to get away.”
Stebbins told me that the plan to get themselves onto the yacht “was laughable, until the second one came barrelling toward our front door at about forty-five miles per hour.” He added, “I did have faith in our concrete patio to stop the boat before it actually came into the living room.” He mentioned a kayak that they had moved from their porch to their living room. “I was ready to load dogs and kids on the kayak and take them somewhere safer,” he said.
The yacht crashed into a palm tree a few feet from the building, temporarily pinned between the tree and the gazebo. “It’s sitting there just going up and down at the waves, sawing away at the palm tree,” Rayhart told me. “And then the palm falls on my patio roof, and that gave the boat enough space to shift to the right. So I was, like, ‘The boat is moving, run!’ ” The boat soon slammed into the apartment’s concrete wall—which held—and then got lodged between a powerline and another apartment unit.
Nightfall was nearing. Rayhart checked the waterline at his neighbor’s staircase, visible from the back of his apartment. It was now about halfway up the stairs: six feet high and rising. “We might have to climb out my bedroom window and swim over to this yacht,” Rayhart recalled thinking, referring to the second vessel. “Like, it’s still afloat, and, if anything, it’ll take us more inland where there’s no water.” Time passed—it was impossible to tell how much. He went back to the window to look at the nearby stairs in the dwindling light. This time, one more step was visible, he said. “And I’m, like, ‘Oh, my God, the surge is over.’ ”
At this point in his story, Rayhart mentioned that he hosts a comedy podcast, “The Rayhart Rundown,” and has some funny film projects he’s trying to get off the ground. As the danger receded, his impulse was to make a joke: “So the first thing out of my mouth when I said the storm surge is over was, ‘You know, this might be a bad time, but the name of this place,” Riverwalk, “ ‘really fits it now.’ It got a few laughs.” He insisted that his downstairs neighbors stay the night, and offered them his bedroom. They accepted. Before trying to get some sleep, Rayhart donned his motorcycle helmet and went outside to survey the damage below. “Their door had been crushed so hard by water that it broke off the doorframe and threw the door into their apartment,” he told me. “It was destroyed.” The man told Rayhart that if he hadn’t let them inside, their plan was to barricade themselves in their bathroom, where they would have almost certainly died. “So now we’re friends,” Rayhart said. When they all woke up, he helped them look for their keys in the rubble.
While the residents of Riverwalk apartment #50 survived and retained power throughout—Rayhart figures this has something to do with being connected to the same grid as the local jail—the water in the complex was out, and wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon. “The hurricane ripped out all the pipes on the first floor,” Rayhart said. He was considering his living options. Leaving Florida was a distinct possibility, once he finished up a few film projects. “My apartment is probably gonna be condemned,” he said. “I don’t have anywhere to go.” He pointed out that his story was a common one, perhaps he’d even been lucky: hundreds of others lost their homes on Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, Captiva. At least seventy-two people have reportedly died across the state as a result of the hurricane, including thirty-five in Lee County, where Fort Myers is situated. “They’re gonna be looking for new places to live,” Rayhart went on, referring to the survivors. “Apartments won’t be available. I don’t know what to do.” He was sure of one thing. “I no longer want waterfront views,” he said. “I have seen enough of it. I’m O.K.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misdescribed the size and location of Fort Myers, Florida.
