[Original post: September 27, 2005]
Hurricane Rita has passed and our power and water have returned, along with the infernal heat and another surge of never-say-die love bugs.
We didn't realize how bad the weather would get here in Marksville, possibly because I've never been on the eastern (stronger) side of a hurricane before. On Saturday morning, when the power and water
disappeared, it seemed like we'd all spend the day sitting around, watching the rain, reading and napping. There were various breaks in the rain, too, during which Claude the dog ran around outside, and I sloshed across the garden in Rodney's rain boots to re-fill the birdhouse and collect various blown objects from the sodden grass.
Throughout the morning we had sporadic bursts of wind and driving rain. Sometimes the sky looked bright: birds flew between strands of trees, and pick-ups hissed along the wet Bluetown Road. But then the rain would return with a blast; at times it was almost horizontal. The pond filled to its grassy brim. Rain drumming down on the tin roof was loud enough to drown out conversation. This is an old house, and gusts of wind made it flinch and shiver.
Just after two, Claude - who had been scampering outside - turned up at the laundry door, begging for re-admittance. And then the house really started shaking, the wind a piercing whistle, an onslaught of rain drenching the floor of the screened porch and blowing dirt and insect debris into the house. Wind bent the trees, and rain leaked into the house under windows and doors. The house felt like it was rocking on its foundations, drilled by the wind. Flashing on the front porch, shaken loose, banged incessantly. ("I don't like this at all," I wrote in my notebook.) We were all a little scared.
When the worst of it passed, the garden looked flattened and bedraggled. The bird house I had filled earlier was now six feet higher in the tree (and completely empty). Claude's house was upside down. The swing seat on the front porch, unhooked earlier, had sailed away into the yard.
Through old-fashioned methods of communication (i.e. an old phone that doesn't require electricity), Paige called from storm-free Alabama to tell us a nasty band of weather had just passed over us, with winds up to 75 mph. After a lull of about forty minutes, another band arrived (driving rain, mean wind), and then another more than an hour later. These weren't as bad, although the second brought down the trellis, thick with vines, on the porch.
That night, driving into Marksville to have a shower at Rudy's house and watch the local TV news (he had water and intermittent electricity but no cable), we saw how lucky we were: many people had big trees down. The streets were a mess, with branches everywhere and flooded gullies. Avoyelles Parish had a tornado warning until 9 pm, and funnel clouds were responsible for some of the damage, I think. Water came back late on Saturday night, but it was 48 hours before the power was re-connected. Sunday was hot and unbearable; we slept on the floor and sofa at John Ed's house that night.
The news after Rita seemed to focus on how major urban centers dodged the bullet (and other clichés), but this hurricane devastated southwestern Louisiana. Many small communities - homes and livelihoods - were destroyed. I read an AP report yesterday in The Advocate that the six Louisiana parishes and Texas counties most affected by the hurricane have higher poverty rates than the national average of 9.2%, and none has median family incomes above the national median (of $50,000).
A sadder statistic: however non-affluent they are, they're better off than the 24% of families living below the poverty line in New Orleans, where the median income is only $32,000.
We were nowhere near the center of this hurricane: this was more of a tropical storm here, I guess. But it was frightening at times, and uncomfortable. (Reading by candlelight may sound romantic, but those damn things flicker, and not having a flushable toilet is a rustic delight I can live without - so much for my dreams of triumph on Survivor.) I said on another post that this is as close as I ever want to get to a hurricane. Nature is mean and indiscriminate. If someone tells you that a hurricane is coming and you have to evacuate, GO.
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