When Hurricane Ian hit, Lonnie Winn turned to Donald Trump for help.
That's how he likes to tell it, anyway.
Lonnie can't swim and he and his partner Patsea Smith decided he should get into a Donald Trump-styled floatie as the water rushed into their home near Fort Myers Beach on Florida's west coast.
"Oh let me get that, I gotta do a plug for him," Patsea says as she picks her way through the utter destruction in her living room to show us the floatie.
"There he is!"
Patsea and Lonnie are using humour a lot to get through these days.
The waters came quickly, higher and faster than they ever anticipated.
Levels on the canal behind their home surged several metres within minutes.
Boats were suddenly floating by at window height.
Lonnie and Patsea were standing by the back door as the waters rose higher and higher.
They were in it chest-deep.
Lonnie started to think about whether, with the help of Donald Trump, he could cling onto the post holding up the car awning if he had to float outside his home.
"Everything's messed up, everything," he says.
Just about every possession they have is muddy and soaked. Nothing is where it should be.
Days after the storm hit, Patsea is still gingerly picking her way through the carnage, in shock at all that has been lost.
"Oh my God, oh Lord, oh my — all my mother's pictures and all that," she says, as she sinks down with an old and now very soggy album.
The fridge lies on its back in the middle of what was the kitchen. Even if they could right it there'd be no power to plug it in.
It's hard to see when basic services will ever return to the over-55s community of Bayside Estates.
Lonnie's actually only 54. Patsea, his partner of several years, 73.
"I'm not too old to hop," she says.
Patsea ran a landscaping business, but she thought that was behind her.
"I've worked all my life and I'm finally retired, and then just what have I worked for now?" she asks, gazing around the battered home.
"It's just material things, I assume."
Patsea wants to get a ute to take away all the material things the storm has destroyed.
"I can't sit here and watch them — take it away," she says.
"Just memories. What life's all about now, it's memories."
The trouble is she doesn't have a car or a working phone to organise any of this.
Her phone was in a zip lock bag but, even with our car charger, it doesn't come back to life. Lonnie's is gone too.
They don't have money either — or not much. There's a few thousand in the bank, but the ATMs are down.
"I got $41 in my pocket," Lonnie says.
He's a maintenance worker at a mobile home park. He's still wearing his work T-shirt. "Orange Harbor", it says on the front, "STAFF" on the back.
Without his car, currently trapped under the wreckage of their home, Lonnie can't get to work.
There's probably no work anyway.
Lonnie thinks Orange Harbor will also have been badly affected by the hurricane, but he's not certain, because with no working internet, phone or radio, he only knows what he's hearing from other people.
'We lost everything'
We meet Lonnie and Patsea at a gas station. It's not selling gas.
Looters have smashed the door of the shop and a small group gathers as a man from a neighbouring business helps board it up.
Lonnie and Patsea wander over when they see us there.
They've been out walking, hoping to see any signs of help on the way or get information on when it's coming.
Patsea's eyes light up when she sees a packet of Oreos in our car.
"Can I have a cookie?" she asks with childlike intensity.
They're hungry.
They are trying to ration the little food they have.
Later, we come across an impromptu community barbecue, being run by the staff of a local gym.
There's toilet paper on offer too, toothpaste and deodorant.
"It's girls' but it smells good," one of the volunteers tells Lonnie.
He responds with a hearty laugh.
Back home, a carload of friends turns up to check if Patsea and Lonnie survived and to share their horror stories.
"We lost everything!" Patsea says.
"So did I," her friend Brenda says as the two women fall into each other's arms.
Brenda survived by holding onto a ceiling fan.
She thought she would die.
"I know, that's how Lonnie and I was," Patsea says.
"Just breathe, it's OK."
Volunteers lend a hand
Patsea has lived at Bayside Estates for about 16 years, but she says she's done now.
She owns the plot and she wants to sell up and get out.
Communities here are particularly vulnerable to climate change. More frequent and intense hurricanes threaten the area and the southern tip of the state could be under water by the end of the century.
People keep on coming regardless. Hurricane Ian is unlikely to change that.
The warmer weather and lower cost of living lure them, and they take their chances that next time the storm might hit somewhere else.
Ian was predicted to make landfall further up the coast, nearer Tampa. The forecast changed in the day or so before it hit.
Meteorologist Professor David Nolan from the University of Miami says there's no real mystery in that.
"There have been cases in recent years where the forecasts were nearly perfect four days or three days in advance," he says.
"But even the one-day forecast can be a little bit off.
"In this case, the reality of it was that it just kept shifting to the south … unfortunately, it did give people less time than they expected."
In the days after the hurricane, an army of volunteers descends on the Florida coastline.
They operate with less red tape and in smaller groups and can be more agile than the authorities. Some of these volunteers are ex-military, some are affiliated with churches, all want to feel they are helping in some way.
By the time we check in on Patsea and Lonnie later in the day, some people have popped by with two air mattresses, which were inflated for them and laid down outside so they didn't have to sleep another night in the damp house, which is beginning to smell.
As we arrive, a young couple from Pennsylvania is stringing a tarp up over the beds.
Life is suddenly looking a little brighter.
Lonnie is talking a lot about how people come together in times like this and how lucky they are to be alive.
It's still odd for them to be in this vulnerable situation.
"I feel like we should be helping too," Patsea says.
Accepting help "is kind of hard to grasp", Lonnie says.
When another group arrives with the offer of a bed in a shelter, Patsea and Lonnie don't hesitate.
Within minutes, they've gathered up their few dry belongings and are boarding a bus, buoyed by the prospect of a dry and safe night — ahead of an uncertain future.
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