Rebirth, Renewal, Retreat: The Fates of Hurricane Andrew : For four hard-hit families, recovery has run at different speeds. One home is nearly finished. Another’s owner has disappeared.

Bull, tin caps, drip flash, membranes, felt --Doug Cumbie is now fully conversant in the language of roofing.

Wearing shorts, a T-shirt and a visor, he’s standing on top of his storm-damaged house, where he’s been working for weeks.

“As ridiculous as it sounds, I’m enjoying this,” Cumbie says, taking a break from ripping old tar paper off a slope of plywood. “It’s hard work, and I’m in pain every night, but I’ve lost about 20 pounds. And I know I won’t have to do it forever.”

Normally, Cumbie, 46, makes his living with a computer, writing technical manuals. He has never re-roofed a house before. But he, like thousands of others whose homes were destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Andrew, has made a full-time career out of rebuilding.

“Those rain clouds worry me,” says Cumbie, drawing his hammer from a belt and nodding to Tony Von Wald, a young man he has hired to help. “We’d better keep pushing.”

Both temperatures and humidity now have begun to climb well into the discomfort zone in South Florida, and routine, violent thunderstorms rule the afternoons. June 1 will mark the start of the six-month hurricane season.

Still, it is a single day during last year’s hurricane season that continues to haunt the memory of most in South Dade County. About nine months ago, on Aug. 24, Hurricane Andrew blew in with sustained winds of 145 miles per hour and spun off who-knows-how-many tornadoes. At least 17 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of South Floridians were uprooted. Damage estimates approach $30 billion.

In this neighborhood, the Redlands, residents of one short stretch of 274th Street were hit hard. Two hours of terror in the dark eventually gave way to the reality of destruction and drastic change. Since then Cumbie, his wife, Amy, their four school-age children and their neighbors have been preoccupied with recovery.

“Everything looks schlumpig,’ ‘ says Amy Cumbie, who goes to her native German tongue for a word that expresses the messiness she sees around her, both inside and outside. “When the roof is finished, we’ll do the ceilings and walls in here, which all got wet, which means we may have to move out.

“So I won’t be able to do my sewing business. I hate it, but what can you do?”

Next door to the Cumbies, the large house of Otilia and Domingos Gonsalves also shows signs of unfinished repair. The roof is covered with tar paper, but there are no shingles or tile. “I made a bad decision on a contractor, and it’ll probably end up costing me $4,000,” laments Domingos Gonsalves, who runs a concrete paving business.

Across the road, in a stand of tall pine trees that were virtually stripped of their branches, a couple of small trailers are parked on Ron Bishop’s land, next to the slab where his two-story, $180,000 and totally uninsured house once stood. It was toppled as Bishop, 40, ran for his life.

Five months ago, Bishop, angry and fighting to hang on to his equilibrium, planned to file for bankruptcy and escape to Central Florida with his 14-year-old daughter. Apparently he did. His former colleagues in the roofing business here say they haven’t seen Bishop for months.

The block’s biggest smiles are on the faces of Ken and Marsha Pitts. In late February, after six months and some $125,000, the couple moved back into their dream home, now completely made over. Everything is new: interior walls, insulation, ceilings, tile floors, even furniture. There’s a new fireplace.

“We’re just waiting for two area rugs, for the back porch to be screened in, and then I have to organize the tool shed,” said a beaming Ken Pitts, a football coach at South Dade High School. “Oh, and then of course the yard.”

The yard was once the neighborhood’s best-tended. But the same wind that lifted the roof and let rain pour inside also snapped palm trees, ripped live oaks out of the ground and trashed the flower beds. The Pittses have planted some new trees, but they vow to do more.

“Sometimes when I’m sitting here in the evening, I meditate on all this, and it seems like a dream,” said Pitts, 48.

Even now, after months of cleanup, evidence of the havoc caused by Andrew is apparent everywhere. Debris is still scattered along roadways in this agricultural area, and many stores and shopping centers remain rubble. “There is nothing for the kids to do down here,” says Amy Cumbie. “We had one movie theater but it’s gone, and the Cutler Ridge Mall is still closed.”

Shade is scarce. The battered avocado grove on the south side of 274th Street has been cleared, and only about one-third of the trees survive. All are stumpy-looking.

As the hurricane shattered routines, it also altered priorities and rules. Goals are short-term.

Ken Pitts notices that at school, “we don’t have a strong emphasis on discipline since the storm. We’re more sensitive. Like a kid can miss football practice because his mom says he has to be home to meet a contractor. There’s more looseness, and kids are starting to take advantage.”

But most people have mined golden lessons from the wreckage too. “I don’t recommend living through a hurricane as a way to redecorate your house,” says Ken Pitts, who has started to shed some of the 35 pounds he gained after the storm. “There is a lot of anxiety, a lot of decisions to make. But I think this left me with a positive, more patient attitude. I have an appreciation for what’s really important. That’s people.”

Out in the sun all day, Doug Cumbie is thinking about what he wants to do for the rest of his life. Not roofing. He’s thinking of law school. “This hard work sort of clears the brain,” he says.

Gonsalves, 54, who was born in Portugal, slept through the hurricane but admits he often wondered whether he would survive what followed. His parents and one of his three sons moved in after their own homes were lost, and it was months before they were resettled. Especially in the six weeks the electricity was out, tempers grew short.

The stress of looking after his family, his business and his employees took a toll on Gonsalves, who is small and intense. “Things like this affect people mentally. I think I’m still a little confused. But I’m more calm now, and so is my wife.”

Helping to soothe Gonsalves is an upturn in business. He has landed so many contracts, chiefly to repave damaged roads and restore shopping center parking lots, that he has increased his work force from 32 employees before the storm to 56.

“Business is very good,” he says. “I had a few extra bucks and so I just bought a $5,000 TV. It’s got a 52-inch screen.”

Two of Gonsalves’ sons have enjoyed good fortune too. Charles, at 24 the youngest, bought two storm-damaged townhouses, fixed them up and sold them for a profit. And George, 26, who lives at home, saw most of his pet pigeons and chickens--blown away or scared into flight during the hurricane--come back.

Almost everyone on 274th Street seems to be planning a vacation this year. Domingos and Otilia Gonsalves are headed for his brother’s place in San Jose, Calif.

Despite adding $15,000 of their savings to the insurance money in order to pay for the fireplace and tile instead of carpets, the Pittses are planning to travel west too. After teaching half the summer session, they’ll spend August in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

And the Cumbies are bound for the Smoky Mountains. They’ll travel in a new Ford van they bought to replace her beloved Volkswagen van, totaled by a palm tree. Says Amy Cumbie, inching heavy red fabric past the needle of the sewing machine: “It’ll be so good just to get away and forget about all this.”

Coming Back From a Tragedy

Most residents of the neighborhood known as the Redlands express optimism that they will rebuild. But for many, Hurricane Andrew smashed more than just houses and jobs; it destroyed a bit of their identity:

WHERE THEY STAND

Bishop: $180,000 uninsured home collapsed in the storm. Owner has abandoned it and apparently left the area.

Cumble: Owner is re-roofing the house himself. Family may have to move out while interior walls are repaired.

Gonsalves: Bad choice of repair contractors cost about $4,000 and delayed repairs. Roof is still just tar paper.

Pitts: Home has been rebuilt--at a cost of $125,000. But the once-beautiful yard is still bare.