RODANTHE -- Roger and Celia Meekins' Saturday "Night in Rodanthe" was one to remember - not a romance, but a nail-biting action thriller set between a raging fire and a lashing hurricane.
The retirees from Manteo had returned to this Outer Banks community Thursday to prepare for Hurricane Irene and to keep an eye on "Sentinel-on-Pamlico," their 6,000-square-foot, eight-bedroom home, replete with a lighthouse tower. They usually rent the house, but their vacationers had evacuated.
Sentinel sits across the road from "Serendipity," the house Roger Meekins built in the late 1980s, and where the movie "Nights in Rodanthe," starring Richard Gere, was filmed.
Saturday evening, the back side of the storm was raking water from the Pamlico Sound toward the Atlantic Ocean, past the Meekinses' house.
Somewhere beneath all that wind and rain something went wrong with Roger Meekins' generator, even though, he said, he had turned it off for the night.
The Meekinses were on the third floor, trying to get a few steps above the fray of the storm and "away from the noise," as Celia Meekins put it.
"Then I remember smelling smoke," she said. "I turned around and looked out the kitchen window, and that's when I saw the fire sweeping across."
Roger Meekins, 80, remembers yelling, "Celia, we've got to get out of here!"
The couple grabbed two lanterns from the kitchen, then hurried out the back door, walking straight into chest-deep water.
"We practically swam over to our neighbor's house," said Celia Meekins, 66.
Their neighbors, Jim Meyer, 55, and his girlfriend Heather Fleming, 35, both from Pennsylvania, were watching the rising floodwaters from an upstairs window, shining their flashlights into the darkness.
"All of a sudden, I saw flames," Meyer said.
Thinking that his own house was on fire, Meyer ran downstairs to grab two life jackets. Fleming went to get their dogs: Hatteras, a Chesapeake Bay retriever, Jenny, border collie, and Mutombo, a fox terrier.
Meyer carried the two older dogs under his arms, and Hatteras swam on a leash behind Fleming. She had had hip surgery a month ago but ditched her crutches in the mad dash out the door. "You don't even think about it," she said. "You just go."
Not far into the howling darkness, Meyer and Fleming saw two lights bobbing above the water. It was the Meekinses with their lanterns.
Meyer gave Celia Meekins his lifejacket. Fleming offered Roger Meekins hers, but he wouldn't take it.
"I'm glad now he didn't take it," said Fleming, "because there were several spots where my feet weren't touching the ground."
With the Meekinses' house in full flame, and Irene in full-throttle, Meyer guided three people and three dogs slowly between several lots and up the street.
"It was surreal," said Meyer. "The wind was howling, the fire was raging, and the water was pushing us toward the ocean."
Meyer said it took the group almost an hour to walk just 400 yards. Celia Meekins said she was exhausted and felt like she was going to slip away near the end.
Above all of the chaos, Fleming saw a light. "There was a man waving a white towel from a house up ahead," she said. "He must have seen our flashlights."
All four arrived at Ray Grim's house and relative safety just in time to watch the last of the "Sentinel" burn down.
On Monday morning, the Meekinses hitched a ride on a Cape Hatteras Electric truck to Rodanthe Harbor. Their Chevy was flooded.
It was their first chance to get off the island, on the ferry "Neuse" which had just arrived from Stumpy Point with supplies for the recovery on the Outer Banks
Roger Meekins arrived barefoot and with a briefcase full of his medications. All of his shoes burned in the fire. Celia Meekins escaped with only some jewelry, her raincoat, and an empty billfold.
Heather Fleming struggled out of the car on her crutches to get some relief from the sweltering heat. She showed the 11-inch scar from her recent hip surgery.
"She's the hero," Meyer said.
Later, when Meyer was finally able to call his daughter, he reached her voicemail and said, "It was a horrendous night. Please call Mom and Dad. Call everyone. Tell them we're lucky to be here."
After the call, Meyer was in tears. Fleming consoled him before crying herself.
"I'll think twice about not evacuating next time," Fleming said. "But if we hadn't been here, Roger and Celia might not have made it out."
