We will all have times in our lives that are a defining moment. A time that everything else is measured against. You will separate you life into before it happened and after. For me that time was ten years ago.
Ten years ago last night I went to bed with a huge storm in the Gulf of Mexico that forecasters predicted would make landfall in Alabama. I woke up ten years ago this morning to the news saying that it was hoping to be a direct hit on my home of St Bernard Louisiana and we had to get out now.
To beat the traffic jams we ran through the house grabbing what we could think of and stuffing it into the back of our car. To hours after I got out of bed we drove away from our house, and we would never live there again.
We fled to Port Arthur Texas and huddled around a television in the hotel room that had become our evacuation shelter, hoping for any news on what had happened to our home and some indication of when we could go back.
The answer to that question turned our to be just short of a month. Thankfully dear friends, the Elshout and Roberts families opened thier homes to us after the storm once the hotel told everyone they had to leave after three days.
When we finally got some news from home, it wasn't good. In our entire Parish, same as a county for you non louisianians, only a handful of structures were not badly damaged. In my neighborhood, there was more than 10 feet of water and it stayed for weeks.
At the end of September, more than four weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, they reopened access to St Bernard Parish and we were able to go back and see what was left and what could be salvaged. Not much.
Everything was covered in a stinking, slimy layer of mud. Our furniture had sat in water for do long, it had simply crumbled. We were able to salvage dishes and pots and very little else other than the miraculous discovery that two of our cats, that we had to leave due to the two dogs we were bringing with us to the hotel, survived the storm.
It would not be until 15 months after the storm that we would have a home. We lived in an camper in a campground until November while we began the process of scooping every part of our life our of our old home with a shovel. We moved north of Lake Pontchartrain to a plot of land on the back end of nowhere that was miles past the hurricane evaluation area and, more importantly, 200 feet above sea level and began putting things back together.
We live in Tangapoha Parish now, but St Bernard Parish is where my family will always call home.
