Optimism reigns in wake of damage

Irony dealt its heaviest hand when, on our way to North Carolina, I called the newsroom trying to ask for locations of Red Cross centers and dispatched emergency crews on the northeastern coast. While on the phone with my editor, the signal cut out as I tried to maneuver my car in the dark with Zach, our photographer, passed out in the passenger seat.\nThen the first raindrops of our trip started to fall.\nAnd the sign on my right:\n"Hurricane: 14."\nIt was only Hurricane, W.Va., hundreds of miles from the eye of the actual storm. But while the residents of that town have grown accustomed to living in Hurricane, millions farther east were preparing to live through one.\nDriving along the hundreds of miles of highway in heavy rains with massive gusts of wind while trying to dodge fallen trees, we would grimace and contemplate how we'd feel if Mother Nature decided to throw a couple upper cuts at our lives. We both agreed our thoughts would be hostile and maybe even unforgiving, but our hypothetical reactions were the extreme opposites of what we discovered among the residents at the heart of destruction.\nAn elderly man in Edenton, N.C., sat smiling from ear to ear on his front porch and asked if we knew where he could get some cigarettes. When we said we hadn't seen an open business for hundreds of miles, he continued smiling, leaned back in his chair, and in a hospitable southern drawl told us to be safe. \nFurther up the mainland, a line of houses in Elizabeth City, N.C., could be found with families sitting on porch swings and lawn chairs watching cars try to swim through the intersection across the way. A giant tree in one family's backyard lay where, the day before, it came literally inches from destroying their home and perhaps killing them. Instead of worrying, they joked with us while their kids rode their bikes and waded in the floods.\n"As long as you've got God in your life, you can get through anything," a woman called out.\nWhile watching residents and business owners clean up the remnants of what undoubtedly took years to build but minutes for Isabel to destroy, we didn't see angry faces or ones of astonishment at what they had lost. We didn't hear people cry out in vain or agony that all they had worked for was only a memory.\nWe saw the torn roofs, the downed power lines, the deserted towns. We saw the fallen trees. \nWe walked through the floods.\nBut what was more surprising than any realization we came to of the awe-striking power of Hurricane Isabel was the resiliency and optimism of those she affected most.\n"This wasn't nearly as bad as the last one, was it?" a local business owner chuckled while standing outside his destroyed building. "Nah, the last one was nothing compared to this."\nHe stood looking over the heaps of torn boards and glass with the glistening Pasquotank River behind him. \n"We were prepared," he said, as the last of Isabel's humid morning breath coughed on our faces. He looked back at me with his hand raised to shield his smiling eyes from the sun. \n"We've just got to move on"