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Driving across Florida in the middle of the night after a hurricane, that's one way to make peace with your God. Or start to try.

My husband and I look up from our evacuation hotel in West Palm Beach after the storm and know, in a deep, bone-and-soul kind of way, that we can't stay one minute longer. We have to cut a line through this state and get home to whatever chaos Hurricanes Helene and Milton have double-teamed along Florida's west coast. We pack our cruddy room faster than Tony and Carmela Soprano pull weapons and cash out of a ceiling.

Florida, man. What does anyone know about this state? The outsiders, I mean, the ones with the quips. Why do you live there? Why choose Florida when you know hurricanes happen? You all must be off. Well, sure. Nice to meet you, world. We are a little off. But we're not so off that we should perpetually be regarded as some kind of petting zoo goats. The national media does not have to zoom in obsessively on the few leathery oldsters who refuse to leave their boats, the drunk dudes goofing in rising waters, the big city reporters getting clobbered with flying debris. None of it helps our case here.

You see, now the kooks have started saying Florida is being targeted by the government, a government that is... creating weather disasters? To wipe out voting blocs and progressive urban planning, I guess? Honestly. Imagine the ignorance it takes to reduce a state of suffering human beings to a political point in a conspiracy with all the brains of a Hot Pocket. Do these people come within 10 yards of understanding how offensive that is? Oh, but that's not the most sinister piece. Then, our own governor gets up and makes a thin attempt at denouncing the kooks before proceeding to inelegantly "both sides" his way through a false equivalency likening the conspiracy to recorded, peer-reviewed science that states warming waters make extreme weather worse.

Anyway. Whatever you want to do, I guess. The people are the cost. Emotionally. Physically. Existentially.

Sorry, sorry, we are making peace. We make peace from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico with very few streetlights guiding the way. We drive down State Road 60, past the corny but fun Westgate River Ranch where we once rode ponies, through the forests of tired slash pines, around the patch of mud where the kitschy Desert Inn used to sit at Yeehaw Junction, past Manny's Original Chophouse, which has those yeasty rolls with sweet butter, where we always stop on the way back from Mets Spring Training in St. Lucie. The water rises along the sides of the highway in glassy mirrors the farther west we get.

We can forgive them, the quippers, in our quest for peace. No, really, we can. Forgiveness matters in a time of crisis, and forgiveness heals. Also, it's good to be fair, and the outsiders offer a fair line of questioning.

Both Helene and Milton taught a masterclass in survival Whac-A-Mole. Helene, the eye of which stayed 100 miles off the coast of Tampa Bay, unleashed storm surge levels our community hadn't seen in a century, flooding people out of homes, life after life lost to rising waters inside family living rooms. Then it demolished, of all places, western North Carolina.

And not two weeks later, another radar blob intensified into something named Milton, pointing an arrow toward Sarasota and Tampa Bay. Having just seen Helene's destruction, many of us took heed and fled. But what did Milton do? It dropped record rainfall here, flooding parts of Tampa Bay no one said to evacuate, places such as inland Clearwater and Plant City and North Tampa and Largo. Wind ripped the tops off a stadium and a concert venue and plunged a crane into the place I work. And speaking of St. Lucie, Milton spurred monster tornados through the South.

How does this fit in your conspiracy theory, you absolute heartless goons? Did everyone who died have the right political affiliation? By all means, go on the internet and laugh at the guy on the boat again.

Peace. Peace. Peace.

Where is safe? It's a good, fair question. And I don't know. I can sit here outlining the reasons why Florida is still a good place, still a beautiful place full of natural wonders and wildlife, jammed with a fun, rummy spirit that propels those boat guys to party on. I can remind you that we're full of helpers who are, as we speak, dragging limbs out of yards and mopping floors and sending food to those with nothing. But painting us as some angelic, Mister Rogers monolith isn't right, either.

We're a place, OK? A catchall for people from other places, from the Midwest, from Canada, from every international community, interlopers who stay despite the risks and give birth to Florida natives. We're stubborn, and we're enterprising, and sometimes we're foolish. We're bursting with beauty, good intentions and problems.

Out the window on State Road 60, I see an anti-abortion sign over a recycling center. I see gun and pawn shops, taquerias, Little Caesars. I see a host of street and town names stolen from the various Indigenous people who were here first, who I don't really believe are protecting their colonizers from storms in spirit form, sorry. I see a phosphate mining plant near a worn-out set of railroad tracks. I see traffic lights and power lines down in Valrico. I see downtown Tampa sparkling like a water globe, the only place with power yet on this black, still night.

And because weather is so fascinatingly cruel and magical, just before we reach our home at the north end of Pinellas County, I think I see a touch of those northern lights everyone is posting about. My husband doesn't think so, but that's OK. Here in Florida, we don't always agree. I've always been a bit of an optimist, anyway; it's the only place I can find peace.

There's one thing I'm certain I see here at 2 a.m., amid this particular stage of anxiety hangover when everything still feels confusing and muddy and awful and strange. I see stars, so many of them, clearer than ever.

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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on X or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

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