McCLELLANVILLE — They say that Spanish moss breathes and feeds and lives on air, and McClellanville is the rare place that makes you believe it.

It’s what this fishing village is famous for — oak trees soaked with moss, the thick, salty air — and Hurricane Hugo.

Or, alternatively, the village is famous for shrimp — and Hugo.

Or, just Hugo.

This is the town Hugo destroyed, 15 years ago today, with its 135 mph winds and its 20-foot surge of water. The big storm with the big, fat name drowned the town, its boats, its houses.

This is the town where at least 400 of the 450 residents have a Hugo story. Some even have a favorite line.

The night of the storm, Thomas Allston said, it was like two trains running through Manhattan. “With bad exhaust systems.”

Laura McClellan likes to say that the only good thing Hugo got rid of was her Yankee ex-husband. He didn’t want to rebuild, so he left. “I told that to the man from National Geographic, and he printed it. Can you believe that?”

Her brother, Larry McClellan, takes a broad view of the disaster. “It was a damn mess, to put it mildly.”

In McClellanville, everyone has a Hugo story. Here are some of them:

‘A DEVASTATING THING’

Skipper Munn has never forgiven a certain weather forecaster, not to be named here, but he knows who he is. The last one broadcasting before the power went out all along the Charleston coast, the one who predicted the storm would strike between Georgetown and Myrtle Beach, 30 miles or more up the coast from McClellanville.

“His was the last voice I heard before I left the house,” Munn said. “I grabbed a couple of guns, a couple of pictures, and I left.”

Two days later, he fought his way back to his family’s home in nearby Awendaw, climbing over oaks, trekking knee-deep through dead fish and insulation and other people’s family photos.

“The only thing I had left was a set of steps and a concrete slab.”

No dock. No refrigerators for his catch. No boat, so no job as a fisherman. No house. No nothing.

The day Hugo struck, Sept. 21, 1989, was his son Joel’s 19th birthday. The cake was destroyed; ditto the presents.

“It’s a devastating thing, to lose everything,” said Joel Munn, who turns 35 today.

‘IT’S A BIG LANDMARK’

Before Hugo, Mary Duke was a stay-at-home mom.

Before Hugo, her husband was a fisherman.

“It’s almost like antediluvian times and postdiluvian,” Duke said. “It’s a big landmark in everybody’s life.”

In McClellanville, they talk in terms of before Hugo and after, even about things that have no relation at all. (“Was your son married before Hugo or after?”)

After Hugo, Tommy Duke tried to restart his business, but like so many other fishermen, he had little or no insurance.

So he went back to school and became an accountant, commuting to Charleston each day.

Mary Duke went to work for the town, as clerk and treasurer, in the new town hall, two stories off the ground.

So far this season, she’s boxed up all the records twice to move them to safety — from Gaston and from Charley. Among the heirlooms lost in Hugo were all the town records.

And much of its confidence.

Mary Duke, now 54, said she rebuilt her life once and once only.

“I just don’t know if I could start from scratch again.”

‘I LEARNED PATIENCE’

The storms this season have brought back memories.

For Patty McClellan, those memories wake her up in the night, prey on her while she watches The Weather Channel.

“I hear the helicopters, because they circled this house for days,” Patty McClellan said.

“It was like Vietnam,” said her husband, Larry, making a chopping sound. “Bup, bup, bup, bup, bup.”

The McClellans live in their family home, site of one of Hugo’s most inescapable images — the plantation home on the creek, slammed by 10 shrimping boats. The hulls fell against the house like knocked-out teeth, like headstones end-to-end.

Larry McClellan left fishing for a year, having lost his equipment among most of his other possessions. He took on a full-time job of repairing the house and the land, thick with mud.

The family found the bright side, sometimes literally, outside their window. They had no kitchen so they turned the porch into a place to cook. They had no hot water, so they crawled out of the house onto a boat with a shower, power and lights.

They took in strays: not dogs, but people, friends of their son’s who had no place to live but needed to finish their senior year at Archibald Rutledge Academy, the private school up the road.

“I learned patience,” Patty McClellan said.

FLOATING TO SURVIVE

Thomas Allston is itching to tell his Hugo story. Just ask.

“You are looking at a man who floated through Hugo on a gas bottle,” Allston said.

He floated out of his house, alongside his 17 year-old son, clinging to a propane tank, like the tall, thin ones you see behind someone’s house.

It was no accident, either. Allston knew the water was rising fast. He’d already taken an elderly neighbor a mile up to the shelter at Lincoln High School.

So just in case, Allston parked his car, a 1971 “Deuce and a Quarter” Buick outside the kitchen window, between the house and the propane tank.

Sure enough, when the water rose, he and his son climbed out their window, crawled across the car and grabbed the tank.

“My son said, ‘Dad, we’re going to have to swim.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how to swim, but I know how to survive. ’”

They clung to the tank and floated to their neighbor’s house, riding out the storm on their second story. “The key to when you go through a disaster is instead of panicking, you think of survival.”

AT LINCOLN HIGH

Around the corner from the Allstons, at Lincoln High School, the stage tells the story.

The silent stage, where hundreds of people huddled, to escape the rising surge that leaked in the doors and windows. Where men tried to beat through the windows with flashlights and knives, not knowing the water outside was even higher.

The high school was the shelter for the town’s elderly, the young, those with nowhere else to go and no way to get there. They all survived, some of the babies because they were hoisted into air-conditioning ducts.

The students at Lincoln High are too young to remember; many were not yet even born.

But principal Juanita Middleton remembers. She grew up nearby and was then the principal at Santee Elementary School, across the highway. That school’s shelter did not open until a few days after Hugo, but people were so eager to escape Lincoln, they literally broke the door down.

Like her neighbors’, Middleton’s life was in pieces — school was out for a month, because the students had no homes, no roads to travel. Middleton’s home was under water, her first new car, a 3-week-old Toyota, tossed onto the patio. Totaled.

The “lesser” losses were worse — her wedding pictures, college yearbooks, the piano her children played.

Middleton is now a principal-specialist at Lincoln, her alma mater (class of 1959). She wants to bolster enrollment, at 131, down 300 students since Hugo hit. A handful of families left, but most of the children have gone off to magnet schools in Charleston or West Ashley.

She sees her school as the heart of the area, and wants to keep it that way.

“In neighborhoods like this, you need a high school. You need a football team. You need a place.”

‘FADING SLOWLY’

Rutlege Leland was mayor then, and he’s mayor now. He sighs when Hugo comes up, but hey, it does almost every day.

The good? The attention meant his people got the help they needed, financial, emotional, even physical labor. The bad? Well, it’s not so bad to be known, he said, if it makes other towns, other people aware of the need to be prepared. And, to get out of the way.

He runs Carolina Seafoods, the marina at the center of the local economy, taking in shrimp from 30 boats a day during the season.

Inside the marina, he slows to point out the high-water mark from Hugo, a faint dirt line 12 feet off the ground.

“It’s fading slowly. But we never have washed it off.”

Reach Bauerlein at (803) 771-8485 or vbauerlein@thestate.com.