Dear friends and family,
Well, we’re back in Houston in our current home. We drove back yesterday, starting fairly early, and made the trip in five hours, so it was smooth sailing. Evidently those coming back from Dallas, Austin and other points west had a harder time, and today the traffic is bumper to bumper from every direction. With the temperatures still making records, I’m so glad we got back smoothly.
Our drive back to Houston took us through some of the areas hit hard by Rita. We drove along I10, which is a little in from the coast, so we didn’t go through the worst-affected sections of Cameron Parish. But it was bad all through Lake Charles and Beaumont, with thousands of trees down or snapped, all the road signs and massive advertisements torn up and chucked around, and house after house after house badly damaged. Some hotels were completely destroyed. They’d just opened the Lake Charles bridge, which had been hit by a barge, so we didn’t have to make the detour people made a day earlier. From about 50 kilometres before Lake Charles almost to Houston no-one was allowed to exit without a special reason or permit, and all the exits were patrolled by National Guardsmen. We knew this was happening, so we made sure we filled up with petrol in Lafayette.
We arrived home to a city that was barely dented by Rita. I still think our decision to evacuate was the right one, but this illustrates just one of the reasons why evacuating is so problematic. If you evacuate early to avoid traffic mayhem, you could spend the whole of hurricane season evacuating ahead of storms which peter out or end up going somewhere completely different. And you’re likely to lose your job or at least severely irritate your employer in the process. If you wait long enough to see whether the storm is really going to be a danger, you either end up in nightmarish traffic or, worse, you don’t get out in time. People along the Gulf Coast have been playing this probabilities game for decades
Today back in Houston was about as normal a day as we’ve had since Katrina hit. (Or as my colleague and friend Margaret Maggio says in her thick southern accent, “We need to appear normal even though we no normal.”) Lillie went to the office and I stayed home and worked. Well, worked a bit. It’s very hard to focus on it, and there are still so many phone calls to make and bits and pieces to attend to, work gets done in the interstices.
I’ve been hoping for a full week where we can establish some sort of routine, but I don’t think we’ll get that for some time. We learned tonight that Mayor Nagin is allowing access to all parts of the city except the lower Ninth Ward from 5th October. That means we’ll be allowed in from dawn to dusk to check on our house and try to get a few things out. We’re hopeful we can salvage some stuff from our second floor, provided the stairway is safe. So we’re now in full swing trying to organise this. We’ve booked plane tickets to New Orleans (a couple of airlines are now flying there) for the end of next week; we’re trying to enlist the aid of the contractor who did such a wonderful job on our late lamented front porch to rustle up some trucks and some hired hands; we’re lining up tetanus shots and face masks and coveralls, gloves and boots; we’re chasing up temporary beds in Laplace, not far from New Orleans; and we're making a prioritised list of the things we hope to retrieve.
We’re both really keen to return and deeply dreading it.
Lillie’s sister, Laurie, whose single-storey house not far from us in Lakeview was completely inundated, managed to get in there today, forcing open the door. She didn’t really have any hope of recovering anything, which was lucky because there wasn’t anything to salvage. Except…when they got into the house they found, still alive, her kitten Loupgarou. After a whole month, in a house which has been underwater for at least three weeks.
It broke my heart to think of the poor little thing surviving alone in those conditions for all that time. Laurie’s other cat, old Evangeline (named after a Louisiana parish) died. It’s mind boggling to think how Loupgarou managed. (The name, by the way, is Cajun for werewolf and is pronounced loo-ga-roo). She must have managed to stay afloat, maybe on floating furniture. Laurie left a lot of dry cat food there, too, so some of that must have floated up, too.
We’re so happy for Laurie, who has lost so much and is besotted with Loupgarou.
Love,
Rose
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