"DRY CREEK, Fla. -- Up a red dirt road in the center of the Florida Panhandle, past fields of ripening cotton, the piney woods looks like pick-up sticks. Some trees are bent like praying mantises, and the few power poles still standing lean at precarious angles, their wires doing loop-the-loops around outstretched limbs.
Until Saturday, when neighbors broke through with chain saws and an excavator, the Lipford home, sitting on 160 acres the family has owned since the Civil War, was cut off from civilization. The only way into the property was on an all-terrain vehicle crossing the waterlogged pastures and over bridges built of wooden pallets.
“We’re back to frontier days,” said Jean Lipford, 50. Since Hurricane Michael struck this town on Wednesday, she has been washing clothes in a bucket and bathing in the creek where her husband made a dam with small stones. Her daughter Whitney, 23, has been wielding a chain saw, returning to the house every two hours to breast-feed her 6-week-old son."
