Here's what it was like as Milton's eye came ashore

Sarasota: Crickets chirped. Frogs croaked. Mosquitoes feasted on people who ventured outside to marvel at the clear sky and eerie calm.

In Sarasota, Florida, the roaring 120 mph winds of Hurricane Milton abruptly subsided about 8 pm, as the storm's center began to make landfall nearby. It was a jarring difference from the hours before and after, when the sounds we heard were like bowling pins crashing or a jet engine accelerating for takeoff.

Inside my hotel, windows moaned and shrieked in the wind. Ceiling vents rattled and vibrated.

The hotel was packed mostly with people who had been ordered out of evacuation zones. They gathered in the lobby late into the night -- it was the only spot with lights powered by a generator -- and watched warily as water crept under sandbagged doors.

Sharing stories of hurricanes past, and gathering to peer out the windows into the darkness, were the only things keeping them occupied and distracted from worrying about the homes they had left behind.

I grew up in New England and have covered blizzards and nor'easters for decades, as well as the recent epic flooding in Vermont. But I had never experienced a hurricane in Florida.

One thing was the same: the persistent uncertainty, down to the last hours, about how bad it would be and where the worst impact would be felt. Nothing had prepared me, though, for the raw intensity of the experience -- the long, anxious hours of listening in the dark to a raging wall of weather.

The minutes I spent outside as the hurricane's massive eye passed over were as unforgettable as the total eclipse I witnessed in northern Maine in April -- an interval of sheer wonder at the mystery and power of the natural world, in which everything else, fear included, briefly falls away.

By daybreak Thursday, the howling winds had subsided, and people began to venture outside to see what the storm had left behind. The wind uprooted trees, stripped sections of metal-sided buildings and tossed yachts onto the edge of Bayfront Drive along the waterfront.

By 8 am, residents were emerging to breezy conditions and clearing skies to walk dogs and begin clearing limbs and branches.