Tuesday, May 31, 2016

remembering RITA ~ 10Years


~ Lovely Rita - Hurricane ~
10yrs. Remembering

The question still remains as to whether the city turned off the electricity as a precautionary measure, or the 50 to 70 mile per hour winds took it out. Either way, we lost power just after 9:00 pm, September 25th 2005.
The TV, air conditioner and living room lamps hesitated once and then, in that tiny identifying second, everything went black and silent; Rita was about to swallow up Lake Charles.
“Okay then, here we go,” I said, feeling like we had just been locked into an untested roller-coaster ride.
“I’ve got the matches,” Carl said, “I’ll light the candles.”
Debbie giggled with nervous anxiety as she flipped on her flashlight and moved to light the lantern. “Well, God, I hope you’re on our side tonight,” she said while adjusting the height of the wick..
Carl is from here and I met Debbie, also native Lake Charles, during the caring of Katrina evacuees harbored in the mass shelter at the civic center only 6 weeks before. Being an island girl, and first-timer to all this Gulf storm stuff, and surely a force of this magnitude, I chose to give the fight-or-flight judgment away to the experts. The two veteran Cajuns had made the decision to get out of town the day before. However, witnessing the horrendous and dire traffic troubles that had been created along I10 from Houston to Baton Rouge by the mandatory evacuation orders when Hurricane Rita decided to spin into the gulf and veer to the east, made the home-grown pair think twice about traveling.
A Bergeron, and a Bourgeois, would be the experienced voices of reason; Cajuns to the core, they would decide whether to turn tail or stay put. Being a transplanted Hawaiian neophyte I actually like being out in the rain. But, when the news began its coverage about 10 mile drives taking four hours, overheating vehicles, people running out of gas and water...
We three opted to stay.
Debbie prepared our Friday afternoon meal like a death-row chef. Carl put up every spare scrap of wood he could find over the windows, including parts of an old dismantled pool table. Carl's mom had been out of town visiting grand kids in Alabama; I told him how cute he looked, working diligently to save his mom’s house.
“I’m not just saving the house,” Carl replied dryly, “I’m saving our [rear ends].
By early evening, the hurricane began her approach, rolling in as accurately as the news had predicted. When the wind gusts reached 50 and and the rain started falling sideways, she blew out the electricity, like a candle on a cupcake. Rita had arrived.
As we three musketeers, or suicidal idiots, huddled in the candlelit living room. Debbie and I felt a resigned optimism about surviving the coming fury. Parked in our easy-chairs we discussed karma points. Debbie and I had become fast friends in the civic center make shift computer lab working for the Red Cross during the Katrina episode connecting people that were looking for their families, or, that were lost and needed to be found by family. So, that had to count for something.
Except for the wind howling outside, the house was strangely quiet for a Friday night. No TV, no stereo, no AC, no fan or refrigerator or hum of neon kitchen lighting, nothing, Only the lingering aroma of Debbie’s earlier cooked dinner seemed normal.
To think, just over 30 hours before we had been sleeping peacefully when Carl’s friend Terry called the house.
“No golf today bud,” said Terry.
“What, you gotta work today?” Carl said.
“Nope,” he said. “Mandatory evacuation, everything south of I-210.”
Originally Corpus Christi’s hurricane, Rita veered to Galveston, and now, preparing to lay panic to a geographical swath from Houston to Baton Rouge. The Eye would eventually hit just west of Orange, Texas. Lake Charles would receive the wrath of the east wall sometime after 2 a.m.
“Welcome to Louisiana, D’Ellen,” Debbie would say. “How do you like it so far?”
Carl and I had pulled up our Midwest stakes only five weeks prior, moving from Chicago back to his hometown. We’d arrived just in time for not one, but two of the most devastating hurricanes, the worst to hit the Gulf Coast in recorded memory.
For Carl, the move back home was supposed to be an inexpensive, relaxing break that we would share, lay low, do some camping, that sort of thing; decide what and where to go next.
However, within thirteen days of our big move, over 8,000 residents from New Orleans and its flooded surrounding area arrived in Lake Charles; separated from family, pets, homes. Their new, temporary dwelling was a basic cot on the main floor at one of the two mass shelters in town and Burton Coliseum out by the airport. Against the backdrop of one of the most devastating natural disasters America had seen, the friendship Debbie and I found was kismet.
“First Katrina, now it’s our turn.” Debbie had said as she and I assisted the red cross and the last of the New Orleans evacuees onto the buses, earlier that day, heading north to Shreveport, La. “It’s just too sad; they lost everything they own, twice now!”
She wept for them yet again.
It’s hard to explain while waiting for merciless weather to come in and move on, how a few well placed candles could be enough light to read by, much less remain calm.
“Look at him,” Debbie said in awe, pointing out Carl’s placid posture, adorning his favorite chair. “He knows that we are going to live through this! He’s sitting there calmly running his lines!”
Only a few weeks before, Carl and snagged the part of Willie Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman’, and fully intended to deliver his stellar performance in November at the Lake Charles Theatre.
Ugly Rita’s evil eye churned nearer. Intensifying, by midnight the assortment of wild wind had arrived. Blasts, bursts, gusts, gales, twirls and whips of salted air and gnarly weather seemed to be at the edge of town slamming the darkness between 70 to 90mph.
Sitting alone,
each in our own
comfortable living chairs,
our quiet panic
and waves of wind
rolled in and over the house.
With the hardest gust, we could feel the ominous pressure puff in our ears.
“That was weird,” I’d say. When in actuality, a thousand times I was ready to say, “HIT - THE - INTERIOR!”
But nothing would happen. Well, not nothing. Windows didn’t crash out, the second floor didn’t blow off, a tree didn’t crash in and divide the house. We remained, at least on the exterior, calm. Debbie and I talked, existentially of course, and Carl gave us updates from his Walkman radio in between readings from various literary works.
“…When Radar O’Reilly graduated from high school he was offered several jobs,” Carl recited. “Some of them legitimate . . .”
Carl’s trivia performance was interrupted by a series of calls. I thought it astounding that our cell phones performed perfectly throughout the storm. Everybody who knew us, and cared, called in.
My friend Nikki’s call came in from Atlanta at about 1:30a.m. Those words will be, forever, indelibly imprinted in memory.
“The eye is just west of you,” she said. “You’re going to get the east wall around 2:30. Winds will be sustained at 100mph for 45 minutes and then it will be over – well, past you.”
“Is that all?” I said.
We chuckled. She had been watching the hurricane by Doppler on her computer, and like most of our friends scattered across the states, her calls got less the later it got, despite the approaching east wall. Being the middle of the night in most places they were all succumbing to sleep, but my family in Hawaii kept the lines open.
I continued to be amazed at the resistance of our structure. Blast after blast I anticipated the second floor to blow off like the hatch off a ship. Yet it remained attached.
Restless by simply listening to the storm, Debbie got up out of her ez chair. The front door opened to the north side of the house, tucked in a corner avoiding the full force wind; it created a kind of sheltered alcove. With the guarded nerve of a curious, yet bored child Debbie cautiously turned the knob.
“Oh my God, D’Ellen…” she gasped.
I hopped from my recliner, excited with the change of pace. We looked out into the blackest black I’d ever seen. Black as ink, the fierce storm sounded like mad tigers fighting to the death, and, you could smell the ocean on the air as if you were standing on Holly beach. A beach with no stars or waves or distant shore. And surely out of the deep, dark black the tigers would leap into our faces. In a moment of clear, saturated humility, we shut the door.
5 a.m. came with gray light. The wind puffed with resolve, as if on a mission, like mother nature briskly combing the last of summer out of her hair. I slept on the floor by the front door that had been opened since 3:30, in the quiet calm that we had survived something numbingly large.
A week or so after the storm, Carl was asked by his friend Mike if he was scared.
“I might have been,” he said. “If the wind hadn’t created such a ‘white noise’ that we could have heard the trees snapping and falling around us, yeah sure.”
Eleven days without electricity in a sticky, steamy Louisiana setting can make any dwelling pretty ripe. Added to that, with only candles for light at night, if you were going to find anything misplaced, it was better done before dark.
Debbie had plans to work the Texas Renaissance Festival long before we met or any visiting hurricanes came around. And, since there wasn't a job to be had in L.C. unless you owned a chainsaw, I took off with her to work the Renaissance; Carl stayed behind to hold down the fort. I would come home during mid week to visit, bring necessities, see if power had come back and hear his raw tales of living in Lake Charles on limited amenities.
It had been almost two weeks; Carl had been essentially primitive camping in a house.
It was my 2nd mid-week visit, hot and irritated, one Wednesday afternoon, we had been looking for something in different rooms before it was too dark to find when 'the surge' came. Two people can have two different experiences of a miracle moment. I thought, foolishly, my stepping on a cable made the bedroom light blink. Without power, how does that happen? Anyway, meanwhile, in a bedroom down the hall, Carl heard a slight grown of an air-conditioner.
We both said “Whoa!” and jumped into the hall.
“Did you see that?” I said.
“Did you hear that?” he said.
At that gleeful moment, another power surge heaved and breathed life into everything electric. Lights. Fan, fridge, AC all came up in a glorious DC-juiced noise! We ran into the street. Dancing the ‘happy electricity dance’! Neighbors who were in their houses oblivious with the grind of generator motors plowing in the back yards came out to see why we were acting so nuts.
“Turn off the damn generators! We have POWER!” Carl bellowed and sang and leaped.
With the return of the electricity back to Lake Charles so, slowly would come back the people. No more tending to friends and family freezers and fridges.
But, that’s yet another story.
Remembered by: D'Ellen Myers

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Old Poem IV

I thought I saw something


I thought I saw familiar
I thought I heard the wings of a great bird take flight
I thought I could smell sweetness
the way things smell when they are fresh and growing
I thought I may have even felt a new emotion.

A child lives with a woman’s eyes but,
the eyes are childlike in vision
something different is something new
growth cannot be forgotten, it is part of a change in time.

To relax and float is not as easy as it looks
even scary, like shapes and sounds in the night
we sometimes attack nothing really
as the familiar stands all too close for comfort.

Don't look back my friend, you might see something
something that I thought I saw.

Old Poetry III

Empathy is as strong as it is real
no less fragile was the feeling that moved with it.
 So, with two no-longer in balance, another change takes place.
emotion runs not as deep,
remembering and learning from the pains of the past.
Less nourishment is required
a smaller space is occupied.
I fight the allowance of complete happiness now,
for a past when it was good with you.

I am a product of my environment
and can adapt in most situations.
You touched me
we walked where I hadn't before.
we created new markers for my emotional standards
Now, I teeter with uncertainty locked in conflict.
A new balance must be within reach soon or
I may truly go mad.

Some days, as if it is any help
I hide in my notebook and for get the day
close my eyes to dream.

As though by design,
I feel empathic with you
and for the moment
without reservation
memories return and may are no weaker for their time spent sleeping
but, energized by beliefs that are true and sure
for as long as they last.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Don't be afraid 

Let me tell you what I'm afraid of:
I'm afraid you're the best thing in my life
I'm afraid I sometimes take for granted our friendship and closeness
I'm afraid that our love might change
I'm afraid if you wanted to
you could cut my soul,


afraid of the pain I would feel
another loss I would know.


I'm afraid of your dreams
I'm afraid that I even think about that.


I only tell you this
to tell myself
and recognize the vulnerabilities of the human heart


All joy cannot be put in only one place.
without you
my world lacks joy
and I don't know what to do about that.


There's a sadness that vials me
a certain sorrow that sits behind my eyes


You say, love you today if that's what makes me happy
Well today it hurts and that's what
I'm most afraid of.

 

 

Old Poetry II

     A girl leads a goat down to the river.
Fog patches ease into the tiny valleys.
Fear chases love away.

     But does it flee for its life or find close cover
and spy from a safer distance?
Will you come back if I open my hand?
     The music is saucy and good. 
I still enjoy watching you move.
Light another candle please.

     Kitty cat comes to rest on the step.
Don't feed her or she will surely stay.
I see you behind that rock. It's brighter than all the rest.
I'll be down by the river in you choose
watching the water shift the stones.

Old Poetry I - The Inspiration of Love

Doing crazy things
not doing anything at all

Getting lost out in the world
Discovering universes within the human heart

Having the strength to move mountains
being open enough to surrender

Getting nose to nose in opposition
being the only one I can really talk to

All the colors of the rainbow painted on a silken summer scarf
wind or rain it beams of joy
and all other emotions that brush against 
The Inspiration of Love


 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Morning comes again and the phone has not rung
I pick it up just to be sure
 reality bites
 for a moment, I am silent and sad, the day begins.
  my heart, has no one to speak with,
nothing to share, you're no-longer there.
3am
The moon came by and said 'Hi'.
Sleep was soft beneath the covers
Hopes chance falls onto the pillow
till the dim hours of dawn steel away the time that you might call in the night.

Purity has worn out its welcome.
Memories gather in the shadows of another time
between the dark and the light
it remains a simple thing to find,
to fight,
with all that wants to continue being in love with you.

You pulled away
I fell away
that was the plan
the woman knew, the child
may never understand
we stood about, both capture and prisoner
reluctant to ask any questions
thinking about it would not be safe traveling 
what answer could I possibly reach for if I fell?

So, I say 'Hello" to the moon once more
and call on certainty
that a voice in the night 
someday 
I will no-longer wait for.

Monday, March 21, 2011

A Pleasant Disruption

Mahalo kiddo, for making this serendipitous venture to Lake Charles, Louisiana another cool event.
Remember when I said, "...that I sit in this particular spot on the planet, and all the cool people and happenings come here"... and... as usual, I past up a great opportunity at that moment to thank and flatter the one that brought me to this 'SyFy' dance.
This project landed in little ol' LC without any help from me. Another-one of 'great moments' we now get to add to the Great Moments Book: "Our little Life in Lake Charles". To cross paths with you guys ... WoW. I'm calling it . . . The syfy EXPERIENCE! ...you and your confident, with efficiency and humor, problem-solving nature, oddly teaming up with a 'to say the least''

an 'Eclectic' crew of humans the lead of 'life in motion'.

Anyway, what I was originally getting to was, . . . thank you, miss Marny, (Virgo) of course, for the Pleasant Disruption.
My diet went out the window, I' didn't drink enough water or get enough sleep. My Cats quickly fell back into their predatory instincts. I forget the front porch light is on...all day...but since we come home late, or at different hours, 'it's been nice actually. It was a delightful weekend, and I'm really glad "Jack' whom I've never met, couldn't take the pressure of 'enjoying the ride'.
. . . And, my dear, since you are the 'master communicator, - that goes a long way in my book- if you feel so moved, please pass on this link to the crew.
It was a Pleasant Disruption.
~Dln/Care
CDProductions

. . . calling on Fat Tuesday . . .
what's up with that?

Monday, February 7, 2011