I remember taking a bath the night before it hit, while we still had power. I remember the adults tying back trees to lessen the harm that they could do. And I remember trying to sleep on a cot with the winds making a tremendous amount of noise.
I don't remember how long the storm lasted, or how long we were without power. I do remember walking around the neighborhood, looking at the damage after it was all over. And I remember having to go to school on Saturday to make us some of the missed time.
I remember Hurricane Camille in 1969. We were at my grandmother's house in North Carolina when it hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Driving back to New Orleans, we saw a lot of the damage that had occurred. And New Orleans had gotten a lot of rain.
Hurricane Andrew was heading for New Orleans in 1992. I was working at a radio station in New Orleans that overlooked Lake Ponchartrain and was on the air the night that it was headed our way. My husband of just a few months came to work with me so that I didn't have to face it alone.
But Andrew did not hit New Orleans head on as predicted - it veered and careened into the Baton Rouge area. I was supposed to have a job interview with a radio station in Baton Rouge that had to be postponed.
Of course, the big one for Louisiana was Katrina in 2005. In the suburbs of Baton Rouge, we lost power for just eight hours. I spent the day reading to my 8-year-old daughter, and we all ate ice cream to keep it from going to waste.
It was a completely different world in the New Orleans area where my mother and in-laws lived. My in-laws evacuated - no easy task! But my mother refused to leave and rode it out. My mother didn't have flood waters to contend with, but her power went out in the heat, and she could not get groceries, go anywhere or do anything. It was horrible. No phone service, so I could not even talk to her.
As soon as we were allowed in the area - there were checkpoints going into the city - we went and got my mother and her old dog. We did not give her a choice about coming to our house, though she would have rather stayed put. She stayed a week or so with us, but wanted to go back home, power or not. Luckily, when we took her back, there were some stores and restaurants that had reopened. And while we were there, the power came back on.
As far as I am concerned, Katrina was the beginning of the end for both my mother and mother-in-law. My mother never recovered mentally. She developed Alzheimer's. Every time it thundered, she knew it was a hurricane.
In 2008, Hurricane Gustav decided that New Orleans had had enough, but the Baton Rouge area could use some destruction. It moved in on Labor Day. We watched the rain and winds kick up - and watched the neighbor's trampoline come rolling over our fence & stop just short of the tree my daughter planted in the backyard. Our power went out and stayed off for six days.
You don't know how dark nights are until your whole area has no power. We didn't have a generator, so when the power went out, we were in pitch dark. I grew to hate the sound of neighbors' generators, reminding me that they had some light, maybe some air conditioning, perhaps some entertainment.
During the day, I was fine. I read all day, every day. My kids whined. They were hot; they had no TV, no computers, no hot meals. We were able to get ice and MRE's from a designated location. I preferred to live off peanut butter and crackers than the MRE's. They were just plain nasty.
We did have some fun - we played card games and hung out in the backyard with the dogs. My husband was able to cook some of our food in the freezer on the barbecue pit, so we did have a couple of hot meals. We tried to make the best of a horrible situation, but you could not have seen happier people than when the power came back on!
We were lucky. Some people we knew had no power for more than two weeks. We had no major damage, and of course, our family was safe. In other words, it could have been a lot worse.
I guess I have a little of Gustav still inside me. Sometimes when the power goes out at night, or if I hear the sound of a generator running, it takes me back to 2008. But perhaps the memories will get hazier, as they did for Betsy.
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