COLLIER CITIZEN

The View From Planet Kerth: Caution: Snowbird alert. Viewer discretion advised

T.R. Kerth
Contributor

Irma has passed, and though the damage to Collier County was blessedly less than it had been predicted to be, there is still quite a mess to clean up and a lot of infrastructure that has yet to come back online.

T.R. Kerth

But if there is a silver lining to those category 4 clouds, it is this: The news is filled with “neighbor helping neighbor” stories as adversity once again brings out the best in us.

Well… yeah… sort of….

I do not use social media, but my friend Jay does, and I was surprised to hear him tell me: “We have some year-round residents here who have been posting comments on Facebook and other social media outlets about how mad they are at snowbirds who have been calling them from up north to ask them to check on their homes, while all of us down here are absolutely miserable without power, water, internet….”

Oh.

Well….

For the record, my wife and I are snowbirds. We spend a full six months in our Naples home, but for the rest of the year we are in Illinois, which is where we were when Irma struck Naples. We were glad to hear that most of Naples — including our home — had fared pretty well.

But then I got that message from my friend Jay about the deep-seated animosity of some residents who are “so mad” at snowbirds and curse them online for everything from traffic jams to crowded restaurants — and now, on top of it all, the intolerable inconvenience of asking a neighbor for a quick peek over the fence.

But I’m a snowbird. Are my full-time neighbors “so mad” at me for wanting to know how my digs made it through the storm?

Pat, my new permanent-resident neighbor next door who moved in less than a year ago, decided to hunker down through the storm. I called him before the power went out to give him my garage door code so he could get the housekey I had stashed inside. If things got bad, I told him, he was welcome to use anything he needed from my house — food, water, gas, tools, ladders, even shelter if it came to that. He called to keep me posted as the eye was overhead, long before I even thought to call him, and he didn’t seem “so mad” about doing it.

My permanent-resident neighbors across the street park their cars free of charge in my driveway for six months because they have three cars and only a narrow single driveway. They evacuated, and they didn’t seem “so mad” when I called to give them Pat’s report about how our properties had fared.

Our young permanent-resident friends a few blocks away evacuated their three young kids to Tennessee. They hadn’t returned yet when I texted them to say that my house had fared pretty well, and they were welcome to move into it if they found theirs was uninhabitable on their return. They didn’t seem “so mad” to hear their snowbird neighbor tell them that.

My wife and I like all our neighbors, and (unless they are really good at faking it), they seem to like us. Even the full-timers. We’re nice to each other.

So I had to wonder what kind of jerk would go online and fire up the Twittersphere with gale-force waves of hatred for the inconvenience of being called by a neighbor asking if they could glance across the fence and see how the house held up.

Certainly not the permanent residents who live on my block. But then, they’re good neighbors — not online trolls so socially impaired that their only relationships are with “virtual” neighbors online. If the trolls could ever pull their noses and thumbs away from their devices, go outside and meet the guy next door, they might find that he’s a pretty nice guy, too, even though he’s not there all summer.

But that’s not as much fun as online hatred and anger, is it? Hatred and anger is the coin of the realm on social media.

And snowbirds (the social media trolls snarl) are the worst.

There was a joke my fellow teachers and I often told whenever a student got on our nerves: “You know,” we would say, “teaching would be great, if it weren’t for all the kids.” And then we would laugh, because we were intelligent enough to understand the joke’s irony. Every kid had the right to say to us, “Yeah, I can be a pain, but you have me to thank for your jobs. You’re welcome.”

And when I hear Naples full-timers say, “You know, this place would be paradise without all the snowbirds,” I can’t help but remember that joke. Except that many of these jokers don’t have wits enough to realize that Naples exists because of snowbirds, in exactly the same way that schools exist because of kids.

“But still,” the haters tweet, “those damn snowbirds….”

Huh.

My wife and I are retired, so we could choose to live in Naples full-time, just like you. We own a house in Naples, just like you. We’re not there all summer, but our snowbird full-year tax dollars are there, just like yours, ready to be used for recovery.

You’re welcome.

Would you like us better if we chose to live in our Naples home all year long — just like you — and if we had been there in early September, grabbing that last case of bottled water before you could get to it? But we weren’t there, and you got that water, because we’re snowbirds.

You’re welcome.

Or how about if we were the car in front of you, sucking up the last few drops of gas before the station put out the yellow tape to say they’re closed? But we weren’t there, and you got that gas, because we’re snowbirds.

You’re welcome.

Or if that long drive up Interstate 75 took you a few hours longer as you tried to evacuate because we were on the road, too? But we weren’t on the roads, and your drive wasn’t quite that long, because we’re snowbirds who made that drive way back in May.

You’re welcome.

We’ll be back in a couple months, and when we return, the restaurants and the sport fishing charters and the nail salons and a hundred other businesses can go back to full employment, so all you full-timers can put food on your tables.

Because we’re snowbirds, the “neighbor helping neighbor” story that the social-media trolls are too dim to understand.

You’re welcome.

- - -

The author splits his time between Southwest Florida and Chicago. Not every day, though. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Why wait a whole week for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Get T.R.'s book, 'Revenge of the Sardines,' available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine online book distributors. His column appears every Saturday.