Categories: uncategorized
Date: 02 September 2008 20:40:26
You always meet interesting people in a hurricane evacuation.
We're sheltering in the gymnasium of a Baptist church in Mississippi. The few classrooms around the edges of the open area are "home" to some families -- I smile when I see how that worked out, because it helps to corral some of the restless younger set away from me!
The rest of us are divvied up into (basically) family groups. My own bunch is one extended family; others are similar groupings. There's usually an elderly family member, or an infant, or someone in a wheelchair or with a cane. Young healthy families and single men don't evacuate as readily as will a family that starts to plan how they will take care of a newborn or Grandpa in the face of a hurricane.
Come to think of it, nephew and grandkids are my tender young family members, and they all left sooner than I did and went different ways. All of us left are pretty much healthy and able... I guess what drove us out was the knowledge that Hurricane Gustav would almost certainly come to ground right there in our back yard. We aren't all that far north of Terrebonne Bay; we're in Bayou Cane, a community overgrown by the big town of Houma many years ago.
So we packed the vital things and the dogs and we rolled our caravan of two cars and two trucks North.