The Gust
By: Ken La Rive
It came with a soft hand...
A tender gust past the oak and willow…
And there, in a whistling rustle of micro-dust particles
I blinked and looked away…
But it drew up before me with coils...
And wrapped its invisible cool body around me, and as it
Playfully mussed up my hair...
It moved on….
But much later, in calm
Amazement I hear tell...
Of its relentless fury and seemingly
Indiscriminate destruction…
With the wonder of a boy I realized
How easily my playmate might just as well have
Dashed me to earth in
Compassionless abandon…
Memories of Flossy... from 1972 diary... 17 years later...
I was dressed in my cotton cowboy pajamas, plaid night coat, and Roy Roger’s slippers, and looked through the screen door with the wide-eyed wonder of a seven-year-old. Water, already a foot deep, swirled in black and silver patterns from under the house.
The wind rushed past in powerful and pounding gusts and pelted our outdoor shed with china balls. It sounded like bee-bees.
There was a flash of blue florescent light that lit the night sky over the houses, and our lights flickered. My mother was dressing up my sister Cindy warmly, and in a hurry. My father was packing clothes, food, a flashlight, and putting them in our suitcase. As he rushed past I asked him what was wrong. He mumbled something about the levee breaking, and something called an evacuation. My sister was crying, and my mother was telling her it was going to be all right. The Army was coming for us, the radio said so. I could hear its crackling voice on the kitchen table. There was a hurricane called Flossy, and we had to get to higher ground.
I looked out again and the water was almost to the second step. Then I remembered. My neighbor’s dog and puppies was in a pen next door. Six spotted puppies! “What about the puppies?” I asked my father, “They are going to drown!” I remember his look, “We have no time for that Kenny. We have to get out of here.”
I looked at my dog, Tide, who was huddled under the coffee table shivering. I heard a strange deep horn that seemed to be coming down the road. I could feel it even in my bones. Then I was up in the air in my father’s arms, and with my three-year-old sister in my mother’s, we waded through the water past the gate and into a large dark green tent on tank wheels that my father called a “Duck”. There were friendly Army men with shiny helmets to help us aboard, and it was full of our neighbors all bundled up and peeking through dark green blankets. Their faces looked so lost and scared.
I knew we were safe there, and as I watched the noisy and powerful machine churn a wake across those water lawns, its tank treads made deep ruts all the way to St. Raphael Church. It was too dark to see the small pen where the dogs were, and I hoped that they were safe.
We lay on folded blankets, spun without design on the gym floor. Most everyone was sleeping. The wind’s scream outside blended with the crackle of radio voices, and a group of men huddled around the portable, silhouetted by the golden glow of a kerosene lantern. I heard and saw their reactions, but didn’t then understand, but as daylight came and the winds died down I was told that the levee had broken on the other side as well. Twenty-six people had drowned, some still missing, and the water was so deep it had covered their roofs...
I heard a woman crying, and a lot of feet running up the stairs, but I fell asleep.
It was the next day before we could get home. The levee had been repaired and the water was being pumped out. There was still a foot of water in our back yard. I saw a large clump of red ants float by and the black boy across the street showed me a snake he had killed. His father waved to me.
Several kids I didn’t know floated on a boat down the street. The tree in front of the house had a piece of roof slate embedded so deeply in the trunk it couldn’t be pulled out. The big oak in the empty lot had fallen over. No part of our tree-house was found. The mother dog lived, but all of the puppies died. Diane, the little girl who they belonged to, was very upset and cried and cried for days.
But as I looked down the street to the levee that ran up People’s Avenue Canal, I thought how lucky we really were. That Flossy wind had killed all those people just a few blocks away, and some of them have never been found.
There was a lot of Flossie’s stuff piled up against our chain link fence, and as I tugged on a large waterlogged teddy bear I jumped back when I thought there was a real baby under the water. It turned out to be just a naked toy doll, a Betsy Wetsy, and one of the dead puppies. Even after all these years I can still see that black and white panda teddy bear, that naked pink doll, and that little drowned puppy, with spots.
Author's note: Memory does not severve a six-year-old, and what we remember is what was told to us. The reality was:
Flossy totally submerged Grand Isle, Louisiana, on September 24. A flood wall was topped in New Orleans, flooding some 2.5 square miles (6.5 km²) of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The hurricane turned northeast in respone to the Westerlies, and hit near Fort Walton Beach, Florida, on the 25th. Flossy became extratropical on the 25th over Georgia and continued northeastward, dropping heavy rain throughout its path and breaking a drought in the northeast. Flossy caused nearly $25 million in damage (1956 dollars) and 15 fatalties.
Katrina, and the axe with red ribbon
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