I found myself involved with all manner of problems and I threw myself into them for the next few days protected from some of the worst of the storm by the whole house natural gas generator that supplied my house, noisily, with power.
And then one day, out of the blue, the call came. I don't remember for sure who it was, but the phones were suddenly back on. The next day I was in a car driving back into the post hurricane hell that was the Mississippi coast.
"What was the storm like," Tommy asked?
The stranger stopped and looked at Tommy for a long moment. "Interruptions, interruptions" he said as if trying to get an understanding of what the word meant, almost as if he was wondering what the very simple question meant, but substituting his own word for it.
A hurricane is not as interesting as you might think when it is happening. I know you've all seen movies, there is the classic with Humphrey Bogart where the actors brave a storm in the Keys. You can be caught like that. I suppose there is always some who in places where fear is felt. For this storm it was probably best summarized by a video on youtube where someone decided to ride out the storm in the Beau Rivage Casino parking garage. At the beginning of the video, the film maker is jovial, talking about how wise he is, how safe his selected point of reference. As the storm knocks out the power, the ramp leading up to the upper floors, and covers the tops of the 20 foot tall oak trees he gets steadily more quiet, eventually the film continues with no words in little fits and starts of video as the battery runs out and then it ends. Of course, others end up swimming for their lives and many of those do not make it. This storm was like that for many. In New Orleans, people died in their homes, as I will tell you in more detail given time," this last saying with pointed sarcasm.
"Others were evacuated to the super dome to live in human excrement without power or plumbing or adequate food or facilities of any type, although they were dry and lived. They tried to cross the bridge to Jefferson Parish where things were better and were turned back at a roadblock manned by the sheriff as if they were zombies trying to invade a walled city in a science fiction movie instead of human beings with different skin color and smaller bank balances which was what they were.
But that level of excitement is reserved for the most directly impacted. When you live through one normally, it is wind, and the house shakes. It gradually builds to a crescendo and then dies down again. There are strange cloud formations, but often time the curve of the initial oncoming storm, is all that is seen.
Messages pass back and forth. Those closer to the water disappear from the social grid first, usually giving stories of greater destruction the closer they are to the coast. While there is power, and my whole house generator assured me of power through the entire night, you can watch newsmen who go in harms way to tell you what is happening. Eventually, it gets so dark that you are compelled to be in mostly, although you can, even in the worst of it, go out into the wind and feel it pull on your clothes, watch branches and sometimes entire trees topple, feel the bite of rain blown at a hundred miles an hour. For me, the lights went out for a few moments followed by a snap, then a roar as the generator came to life. The roof leaked a bit. Eventually you tire of the news, the noise of the generator begins to be a bigger burden than the discomfort of the mugginess that accompanies a loss of power in the summer, but you dare not turn it off for fear it might not come on again. And then you sleep.
In the morning, it is usually clear, surprisingly so. The storm takes its bad weather with it far inland. Sometimes there is residual rain, but it is mostly sunny around the pockets of rain. In this case, the destruction of the island, which caused me to lose not only my house but the very lot it had been built on were victims of the weather and there was a lengthy disruption of services, although nothing like what happened along the Mississippi coast and into New Orleans.
Walking the streets early the next day, they were far too blocked to drive through, you had to be careful to step around the fallen power lines and climb over trees that were down, sometimes the two being a combined hazard since the lines could be wrapped around a large limb, one causing the other to fall in some cases.
I had owned two houses in the neighborhood where I lived and the one I did not live in was destroyed by a fallen tree that would remain on it for weeks to follow while the triage of repairs were done and the droning of the generators became unbearable.
Is that what you wanted to hear?
The girl? She remains in the past and in the future except to the extent that her presence was a brain tapeworm and remains so to this night.
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