adapted from a 2004 issue of St. Petersburg Times
Saturday evening the tempest passed, but the bay still rose, its shoreline invisible, lost. On Sunday, the waters withdrew. People saw dry land. On Monday, those waters roared back, crashing over balustrades onto the boulevard. Meteorologists warned of winds causing a storm surge, which, during the night, snuck in like a cat and crept toward Cynthia Hogue's house on Ballast Point. Her sandbags, placed against all doors, slept on as the water inched closer, then seeped in through cracks and crevices. Cynthia Hogue, 69, woke to stand knee-deep in water and was not sanguine. Glancing out the window as a boatload of teenagers rowed by sending havoc in their wake, she said, 'I wish they'd get stuck.' Water rippled inside her home.

'I have fought this for years and years,' Cynthia Hogue said. "Don't drain the wetlands," I argued. "Birds need them. We need them. We do not need resorts. We do not need casinos."

Elements lay strewn across her bed. Among the gold, the copper, the seaborgium, the tungsten, were notebooks from Hogue's ongoing fight with officials about coastal marshlands and hurricanes. 'The storms come and no one listens to me. I feel like dancing in them,' she said. 'What else can I do? I've tried everything else depending on truth.'

But as she waded through her home on Ballast Point, Hogue decided not to count on truth anymore.