They are red, hot, and the plants are loaded with them. Cayenne peppers! Louisiana Hot Sauce!
Remarkable things happen--strange things. For years I have watched hurricanes barrel ashore from my safe dry living room here in Oklahoma. I thought I watched them the way that most Americans do. I thought I felt approximately the same emotions as I saw signs whipping in the wind and debris smashing into walls, panned by camera crews as it bounced down empty rain spattered city streets. When Ike came ashore, I watched it with the same somewhat detached attitude--curious, concerned, but distant. That is, until I checked the radar in the evening just before it made landfall.
The map clearly showed the outlines of Texas and Louisiana superimposed on the radar screen. I saw the storm track where the storm was even at that moment smashing into the shores. I saw Beaumont--and something snapped. Something so long forgotten I didn't even know it was there! Orange, Cameron . . . Lake Charles! And something very much like a panic attack seized me. I was convinced that Ike would hit Beaumont square on. I was convinced that Lake Charles and my old home town of Westlake would get the brunt of it, too. I imagined the storm surge and rooftop rescues. I don't even know if I know anybody there anymore--it was so long ago--but I felt the way I'd feel if my sisters were there.
I was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1955. We lived in Westlake, across the bridge. And it was there in June of 1957 that my family took refuge in the school when Hurricane Audrey hit earlier than predicted, a level 4 hurricane. Previously a footnote in the history of my life, my two-year-old mind hadn't filed memories where they would be accessed. But in that moment that I saw the track of the storm, the fear, the horror--and even strange details like familiar place names--deeply etched at some level exploded into my consciousness.
The cue that triggered a cascade of emotion was the thought of Lake Charles. Why Rita didn't trip that memory, I haven't got a clue. Maybe because we were so over the top with hurricanes that season. Or maybe it was because Galveston was a favorite holiday destination for my family and Ike was already pushing a heavy storm surge against the levees. Half in denial, my first thought was to check to see what Lake Charles was reporting. The warning had been issued that day at 2:30 pm.
Shaking as though the storm was raging outside my window, I couldn't tear myself away from the computer for the next hour. I had to Google everything and anything I could find about Hurricane Audrey on the net. I looked at old weather maps and storm surge maps, I read news reports issued then and rehashed on the 50th anniversary of the storm, I perused library collections of photo journals and looked for books at Amazon.
I noted things. Facts varied from site to site. Wind speeds in Lake Charles were claimed to have been 110 to 150 mph, more often 150. The storm surge was said to be six to seven feet according to the National Weather Service, but Cameron Parish had recorded twelve. Only one site noted that offshore wave height had been 45-50 feet and the waves had come onshore over and above the storm surge at 21+ feet. The actual death toll was unknown, but more than 500 deaths had been attributed to the storm--again, the numbers were never the same from one site to the next.
I tore myself away from the computer for a rare date with my husband for dinner.
A few days later I came to a stop at a stoplight. As I looked in the rear-view mirror, a key-chain bearing a wood paneled station-wagon I had hung on my mirror danced in the sunlight. The little Ford looked like the old Mercury station-wagon we'd owned when I was very small--the first car I'd ever known. The key-chain had been a gift from my daughter, for memory's sake. It caught my eye and the footnote became a page in my life's story.
Then I knew what had happened to the old Mercury station-wagon. Then I knew the storm hadn't been just a bit of wind and all was well. Then I knew there was a story nobody had ever told me. Then I knew we'd been in real danger, that we'd lost things--that storm surges and high winds weren't just something that happened to somebody else far, far away. That's why we had a brand new Ford Squire wood paneled station-wagon in 1957!
It reminded me of a mystery that has haunted me since the late 70s. I'd consulted a psychic hypnotist to help me quit smoking. He'd asked me if he could read a pendant that I wore that my father had given to me. When he took it, he told me that he saw me as a very small child alone in a storm, alone in the dark, my wet dress clinging to my legs--he repeated "all alone" several times--I was crying for my parents. He asked me if it rang any bells. I couldn't think of any. But somehow, I knew he'd seen something--something I should know.
It isn't a footnote anymore. It is part of my tragic early life. Perhaps it is part of why I struggle with depression, insomnia and tend to think in terms of worst case scenarios.
All I knew about Louisiana was that I didn't like it anymore. A few years ago we went to New Orleans and I had thought to stop by Lake Charles before leaving the state. No sooner had we reached Cajun country and we were cruising down narrow roads braced by full bar ditches on either side than I began to feel repulsed. We stopped at a replicated Acadian Village near Lafayette. As we went from house to house I was struck by the familiarity of it all. The odor--the musty odor that had permeated my childhood and every object I touched until I was five--hung heavy in every room. Common household objects like chairs looked so familiar I would think that even the peeling paint, the very color, was familiar--we'd had a chair like that! The village was very well done--although the styles of the houses and even the objects in them seemed everyday to me, I can assure you--truly Cajun. Go see it, but leave me here!
When we got back into the car, I told my husband I felt oppressed and I wanted to get away from there. I didn't want to go on. When we drove out of the white shelled parkinglot, we headed north for home. We didn't stop for the night until we reached northern Texas.
I have other memories, too. Memories that are too fresh to deal with yet. Fifty-one years old! My daughter and I talked on the phone all day today. I repeated my journey with her through the net, searching out anything to do with Hurricane Audrey, zapping her link after link by email. She encouraged me several times, "It's family history, you know."
Then who? Who was it that realized? My mother died a year and four months after the storm.
No wonder I don't want to go back home again!
