Displaced by Hurricane Ian, campers find community in a Fort Myers Walmart parking lot
They're building a community in a Walmart parking lot.
Across Fort Myers, unusual communities are popping up in unexpected places as displaced residents join visiting volunteers and workers finding places to camp while the work begins to recover from Hurricane Ian's destruction.
Some, like Sharon and Joseph Pastore, 65 and 66, brought their whole homes with them. The couple rode out the storm in a 1974 Airstream trailer they bought in 1984 in Apache Junction, Arizona.
They survived with their dogs, Brody and Paisley, but their beloved catamaran, the Bolero, docked at Salty Sam's Marina on Fort Myers Beach, did not.
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"We were out there near the dock until the rain got spooky," Sharon Pastore said. "I know everyone said they prayed, but I was calling up every dead relative I could think of that night. I was visualizing them in a ring, pressing down on the Airstream to keep it from floating away."
Even after moving further inland to a Publix grocery store lot, Pastore said the storm surge sent whitecap waves up above the bottom of the trailer's door. She and her husband planned how they'd break out of the trailer's back window if they needed to escape the waters rushing in.
She's working on letting go of the boat, emotionally, she said.
"We'll be fine. We'll go to Clearwater for the season and then we'll be on our way. We'll be OK," she said.
'No wants and no needs'
Others, like Kurt Bartholomew, had to leave everything behind in the forced evacuation of Fort Myers Beach after riding out the storm on the island.
Bartholomew welcomes his new neighbors to the patch of land where he's been staying, a shady parking spot out on the edge of the San Carlos Boulevard Walmart, just down the row from the Pastores' new place.
He has an air mattress, some extra clothes and snacks and a fresh copy of "Where the Crawdads Sing" to keep him company.
Normally, he said he goes to the library six days a week, but all of his books are strewn along the beach, if they're anywhere. He's looking forward to the mystery, he said.
"I've got no wants and no needs," he said. "And quite frankly, I'd rather be out here than in a motel."
He turned his face up to the sun as he spoke, spreading his arms wide to catch a cool breeze moving through the palm trees.
'We were here'
A few rows over, the Cajun Navy Ground Crew volunteer food and supply distribution center is up and running. Beyond them is a sea of RV campers and tents, largely inhabited by visiting workers and volunteers.
An outlier in the lot is Roberto Marquez.
A construction-worker-turned-muralist, Marquez has found a late-in-life calling to channel his activism into art.
Since 2018, he's handed over the reins of his construction company to his sons back home in Dallas. These days, he travels the world to try to paint murals that capture the emotion of the moment after tragedy or disaster.
He's traveled with migrant communities, created works in Uvalde, Texas, and in Ukraine hoping to help document the moments. He prefers to donate his installations to the community when they're finished.
"Pictorially, I think it's important to leave something behind so that someone down the road would remember what happened," he said. "It's another way of saying, you know, 'We were here.'"
He builds his own canvases, some topping 8 feet, often using donated or salvaged wood pieces to make the stretchers. His art could be categorized as cubist or futurist, full of swirling colors and stylized, fractured images that become recognizable for a moment before fading back into the piece.
"One of them in Ukraine, they called 'Mexican Guernica,'" he shared with a smile at the reference to Pablo Picasso's famous painting.
Marquez wears a black leather bandolier across his chest, filled not with bullets but paintbrushes and his reading glasses. He joked about the unsubtle metaphor, and said he really just found it practical to have his tools on hand while working on the large pieces.
The towering mural in the Fort Myers Walmart has yet to be named. Marquez hopes the community will help him find the right one.
Reach reporter Mariah Timms at mtimms@gannett.com or 615-259-8344 and on Twitter @MariahTimms.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: After Hurricane Ian, residents are camping at a Fort Myers Walmart lot
