"How high did the water get?" asked Steve. Our waitress silently walked to the door of 'Steamers' cafe and pointed to a green line drawn on the wall above chest height. "The previous high water level was all the way down here" she added, bending all the way down to a wave pattern drawn with Sharpie about a foot off the ground. "Then Idalia was here" she said, referencing the 2023 Hurricane, and pointing to a black mark around two feet off the ground, not far from the lower mark. "We prepared for it to be somewhere in between" she said. In the midst of the bustling cafe at lunchtime, we all took a moment to look at the marks on the wall in silence. The distance between the water level that the town of Cedar Keys had prepared for, and how high the water rose during Hurricane Helene, was almost unbelievable.

Later, driving through Suwaneee, another Gulf-side town north of Cedar Keys, we saw tree branches hoisted into upper tree branches, boats that appeared to have been lifted and dropped in driveways, broken windows, boarded-up holes, and debris still clinging to the upper branches of palms, cedars and other bushes. The newer houses were built on stilts 16 feet high or more - the new 'code' for building, we had learned from the waitress.