Tropical Storm Irene Brings Unexpected Blessing To Jamaica Man

(Host) Many of the stories coming out of Tropical Storm Irene have been heart-wrenching - tales of trauma, loss, or at the very best, courage in the face of adversity.

But for one Jamaica man, who lost his home and everything he owned on August 28th, the storm brought unexpected blessings.

VPR's Susan Keese has the story.

(Keese) Things looked pretty bad for Dave Kaneshiro when a CBS News team interviewed him near the site of his vanished house and land.

(Reporter) "To give you an idea of the scale of work involved just in Jamaica Vermont, I'm standing where a row of housing used to be. So the creek moved over and took out your house?"

(Kaneshiro) "Took out everything, the front porch and the front house."

(Keese) Kaneshiro is 72 and a retired mechanical engineer. He'd raised three children in the house he lost that day.

But in the 1950s and early ‘60s, long before he landed in Vermont, Kaneshiro was a surfer in Southern California. His group of friends fell out of touch, until Kaneshiro turned up in a national newscast.

(Kaneshiro) "We were a very close-knit group. There was only a few of us at that time that went out and rode the waves. The bigger the better."

(Keese) Kaneshiro also had a girlfriend - a sincere friendly girl who shared his passion for surfing.

(Kaneshiro) "Her name was Kathleen.  I called her Kathy. I would pick her up and then we'd go and meet some of that group.  And we traveled from beach to beach all the way down to Mexico."

(Keese) Kaneshiro gave her an amethyst ring. The couple agreed that after Kathleen finished college, they'd get engaged.

But then Kaneshiro disappeared. And Kathleen never knew why. An old surfing buddy had sent her a video of Kaneshiro's TV interview.

Kathleen Phillips-Helmann is a retired ad agency owner and stained glass artist, living in New Mexico.  She says Kaneshiro was hard to track down, since he'd lost his phone lines along with his land.

She finally did make contact on Facebook with Kaneshiro's son, Troy.

(Phillips-Helmann) "And Troy e-mailed back, ‘My dad really needs friends right now, here's his cell phone.'"

(Keese) Helmann-Phillips says she talked to him for a while before she realized he didn't recognize her.

(Helmann-Phillips) "He said, ‘No ma'm I don't. I've been trying to figure it out.' I said, ‘If I told you it was Kathy would you know who it was?' And he said nothing. And finally he said, ‘Kathy, is it really you?'"

(Keese) Kaneshiro says he'd been in limbo after the disaster. He's renting now in Weston and won't know until spring whether his Jamaica property will be accepted for a FEMA program that would give him money to start over.

But after Kathy called, things started looking up. He learned that her husband died a few years back. He lost his wife a dozen years ago.

So when she asked him to come visit her, he said, yes. She met him at the airport.

(Kaneshiro) "I was amazed that I could feel the same feelings, and I could tell that she was still the same after all these years. I could tell that it was the same Kathy that I knew, way back in the days of the sunshine and the beaches."

(Keese) Last week, during Kathy's visit to Vermont, the two got engaged. During that time, Kaneshiro confessed, at Kathleen's insistence, that it was her parents who had forced him, with threats, to leave their daughter alone.

The couple's old surfing friends, who seem to be showing up now, are calling their romance a fairy tale.

Kaneshiro, who's heading for New Mexico for Christmas, is still puzzling over how a disaster can become a blessing.

For VPR News, I'm Susan Keese in Manchester.