Article archive / September 2021
Originally published: . Volume 12, No. 9. Source pages: 2.
Everyone in Louisiana has their hurricane story. Now it's Ida blowing down the coastal parishes. Last year it was Laura cutting a path through the state and all but leveling Lake Charles. Ask a New Orleans resident and they’ll tell you their Katrina story. Ask someone from Alexandria, and you’ll get a Rita story. Ask a Baton Rouge resident and you’ll get a story about Gustav, or Andrew, or even Betsy.
Too late to evacuate and reasonably safe from falling trees, Archimedes and I wound up “riding out“ Hurricane Sally last year at our vacation home in the Florida Panhandle. Thinking that she would go from a category one to a tropical storm, we were caught flat- footed when Sally rebooted to a category two in the middle of the night like an adolescent refusing curfew.
The only real consequence was the week long outage. No lights, no Internet, no television. We conserved battery power for our iPhones and computers, so modern life froze. My addictions failed me. No
access to work information or news or my favorite distractions— Star Trek and Lucifer.
By the third day Archimedes and I found ourselves in the undiscovered country. The noise and dizzy dancing of modern life quieted. Sally dragged in cool weather and we opened the windows. We drank coffee brewed over our campfire (gas stove). At sunset, sharing a bottle of Merlot, we watched the pink and blue sky fade. That's when Archimedes reminded me of his hurricane story.
He was 18 and happily working for “good money," $2.20 per hour, on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, when Camille headed to shore in 1969.
Evacuation activities on the rigs were in turmoil and he substituted in as a welder's helper. With no safety equipment, he suffered flash burn to his eyes. He was blinded, in pain, and exhausted when his crew dropped him off at a coastline hotel to wait for a ride from his friend Vernon Whitfield (his real name), who had been working at the shoreline.
While the hotel owner and all the guests evacuated, Vernon finally arrived, and announced that they had no transportation, his car had given out.
Archimedes, exhausted and in pain, decided to settle in for some rest and to weather Camille at the hotel. But Vernon, typically reserved and unobtrusive, refused to leave without him. After several rounds of arguing, Vernon's dogged determination won out. The two hitchhiked to New Orleans, then caught a bus to Baton Rouge, the entire time Vernon leading Archimedes around by the hand.
Two weeks later, the young men were eager to return to work and retrieve Vernon's car. It took them a full day to reach the coast–– the roads were gone, completely washed out. Barges were wrecked on the beaches. Dead cows were sprawled in the trees. Camille made landfall as a Category 5.
Archimedes looked at me across the twilight of the room, and I knew what he was going to say next. The story never loses its impact for me.
“The hotel I had been planning to stay in was gone," he said. “All that was left was the slab.”
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.