Crossing the Ionian Sea

We left for Greece with a lot on our minds.  We have a little more information from the insurance company and friends.  It is a lot of fast emails that are sent and received when we have connectivity.  We are trying to get to Greece quickly (skipping Sicily all together) so we can be on-track with our plan to winter over in Marmaris (Turkey) since we wont make any headway while Code is back home.  Sailing in the winter here can be treacherous and we don’t want to get caught too far away from our temporary winter ‘home’.

Ivan missed 2 days of work dealing with the aftermath of Irene: cleaning up, dealing with clean-up crews and the insurance estimator.  I feel awful that they are in this position and feel so helpless to do anything.  We can compensate them for their time and their inconvenience, but what we can’t do is undo the fact a tree has disrupted their family’s life.  Nicole is our impromptu home disaster project manager and has been helping us reach our builder and providing on the ground support as she is just three houses away.  My sister and her husband will come to the house from Hershey to make some keeptoss decisions and help us assess damage. 

The clean-up crew shored up the sunroom so that there was no further collapse. They tarped the roof over the house and the sunroom to protect against the elements, and cleaned up the major debris.  One one hand, it sounds like they cleaned up the shed so well that the insurance estimator missed it completely (which makes me paranoid that they cleaned up too well so that he missed other damage).  On the other it sounds like they left glass chards behind, which is not acceptable, especially for a household with 3 small children, including a newly crawling infant.  They also managed to put a tarp over the chimney which Ivan knew to ask them to fix since the chimney is the exhaust source for the furnace (and its carbon monoxide).  The thought of the potential outcome of the latter oversights sickens me and we are grateful (once again) that Ivan and Shelly are so on the ball.

We spoke with the insurance appraiser.  The conversation reassured Code and worried me.  When going on little information and conjecture, Code generally takes a more pessimistic corner-case approach in these situations and I tend to be the optimist, minimize catastrophy, and look for bright side (or, you might call it denial). Maybe it is because when I do go over to his side of reality, I find it too overwhelming.  It is exactly our opposite reactions to the day to day crises. Code can blow off the little stuff  like a broken tool or traffic ticket (maybe he is more used to them), while I let a perceived slight or a lost earring keep me up at night.  Code puts his energies into the appropriate baskets, however in practice, when the big stuff blows up he gets very stressed and I get frustrated.  We suppose that while even being a yin and a yang achieves a balance, it isn’t always in perfect harmony.

The appraiser could not tell us much as his report needs to go through the adjuster and we will be hearing from them by Friday morning.  The information he gave us sounded conflicting, on one hand he said he thought he saw some structural damage, but not so much that it was an obvious tear down and rebuild from scratch.  He said one skylight needed to be replaced, but not all.  He uses software to plug in the quality of the items, their age, the square footage lost, the zip code, and all sorts of variables to produce a magic number.  Given the more detailed information, I am more nervous that our couch will not replaced or that we will not recover the value of that skylight.  For Code, he felt reassured that it may not be a tear-down and re-do, and that the estimator categoried this as a ‘significantly sized claim’.

Our thought processes suddenly have diverged into two parallel paths, one good and the other overwhelming and depressing.  We shift paths so quickly it is dizzying.  I can’t remember whether I am feeling lucky or feeling sorry for myself.  We are crossing the beautiful Ionian Sea, reading about Greece, trying to learn some vocabulary (‘ne’ is ‘yes’, and ‘ohi’ is ‘no’), and stopping occasionally to take a swim into water 9,000 feet deep that is more crystal clear than any swimming pool and must be at the upper limit of clarity.   We have both scuba dived in clear waters all over the world:  the Carribean, the islands off of Thailand, Vancouver, and Monteray (California) but we have never seen anything as clear as this.  Looking down with a dive mask, the clear blue goes down for what is an eternity.  I am sure that we could see hundreds of feet, if there were something to see that far away; I am unnerved at the thought that whatever might be down there can also see us.  The kids dive in and swim unnerved, but the mother instinct in me forces me to keep a far more watchful eye than if they were in water 20’ deep. There are no great white sharks in the Med, no man-eating octopi, or whales that will swallow us whole, but it is so deep.  We are in awe of the clarity, the beauty, and the magnitude.  Then out of the big blue pops reality and we go back to wondering how we will manage this both logistically and financially.  We can’t stray far from thoughts of the house and what is to come. 

Code will probably fly back to Silver Spring in a week or so to survey the situation, talk with builders, and deal with the aftermath.  We are making lists of what he can take back home (like his drill that has no charger, birthday presents for my mom and sisters, and clothing we really don’t need) and what he can bring back (like that hand-vac, some boat hardware we can’t get here, my yoga mat, some new running shoes for me, new toys for the kids, and lots of pancake syrup and kraft dinner).   Maybe having some of the small but intact, tangible comforts from our home that was so damaged, will comfort and reassure us that it will all be OK.