(This is a story written by a fellow I met at the
Mockingbird Caffe, a local town restaurant in Waveland )
THE END OF A TIME
Paul Estronza La Violette
(laviolette@datasync.com or www.annabellepublishing.com)
Stella has left her key ring on the table where I'm working. She's outside hanging cloths on a makeshift clothesline; I'm making notes on the chores I had to do for the day.
It's a long list. I had to call and get an internet service connected to the old farmhouse so I could access e-mail with my laptop, find out where I could another cell phone for Stella to replace the one we had left at the house, cancel our old phone service, see about cable service for the borrowed TV ...
The list is too long. I pick up Stella's keys. Any divergence is be welcome.
Unlike my own keys, which are on two separate rings, truck keys on one, car keys on another, Stella's keys are all on one ring. In total, they made quite a handful, a bulge in her purse that I had kidded her about.
She had lost her keys once. That had been an experience. We had to replace remotes and ignition keys for both of the vehicles, the post office box key and the house key. It had been both time consuming and because of the remotes, rather expensive. But today, as I looked at the keys on the ring she had left on the table, I realized that if she lost them now, the expense would be small.
I began pulling off keys from her ring that were no longer useable.
The first was my truck key and its remote opener. There was no longer a white Ford Ranger for me to drive around. The Ranger had been a wonderfully pleasant truck that I enjoyed driving. I had owned it for less than a year, actually just eight months, but it had been a very pleasant experience. My too often told jokes about it being white and thus invisible among the other white pickup trucks on the road was no longer germane.
It was no longer invisible; it was gone.
The next key on Stella's ring was the post office box key. For various reasons, we don't keep a mailbox in front of the house. I usually dive once a day to Coleman Avenue and collect my mail from the Waveland post office. I suppose it's possible that the small building may be still standing. I doubt it. The building stood at a comparatively low elevation and, despite being brick, had probably been washed away in the 35' foot storm surge that all of Waveland experienced.
In any case, it would be awhile before the post office would be operating again. I took the key off and put it aside, sort of something that will come back in use in the indistinct future. In doing so, I began to think about Terry, the Postmistress and a close friend. Had she left in time? This started a bad line of thinking that I quickly squashed. There were too many unknowns, too many friends that we hadn't heard from.
I looked at the keys remaining on Stella's key ring. The last key that I was looking at would be the hardest to remove. It was our house key.
Stella and I had lived in that house for thirty years. We had designed and built much of its sprawling redwood structure ourselves. Each year we had expanded it with the help of a close friend. Working in the heat, arguing about what we were doing, modifying, extending the structure until in the end, it had fitted Stella and I like a glove.
In the last week, I had been working aboard a 36' trawler owned by Ned, a friend who lived in Pass Christian. He, I and three other close friends had spent the week sailing the eastern end of the Mississippi Sound mapping the debris field of an 1812 naval battle. I had written a book on the battle and we were looking for small relics of the nearly 200 year old naval action.
At noon on Friday, the last day of the survey Ned received a call on his cell phone. He listened for a moment and then announced, "Katrina's coming right at us. It's up to a category three and will be here late Sunday, early Monday." We quickly broke off mapping and headed the trawler back to Bay St Louis and the Casino Magic Marina. We worked securing the boat from the storm. Then, calling the various wives to come and get us, we all went to my house where Stella was waiting with a farewell supper.
It was a glorious, wonderful evening that fitted well the ambience of the old house. We sat in the dinning room told stories, laughed, spoke about next year until late in the evening and then broke up and said our goodbyes.
Stella and I spent Saturday cleaning up, lowering storm shutters and clearing things about the grounds. It was work, but it was a drill we were used to doing. The coming hurricane, while promising to be bad, didn't worry us overly much.
The house had been built extra strong (one inch plywood, 2by6 studs at 2by4 spacing), the roll down shutters were heavy plastic reinforced with steel strips, and the house elevation at seventeen feet, was fairly high for our area.
We felt secure in that we could take 130-knot winds and the ten to fifteen foot storm surge that usually accompanies a category 3 storm. We had done so in Hurricane Elaina, a rather bad category 3 storm.
That night, Stella and I went to bed tired, debating wearily whether in the morning we should stay in the house or leave and seek shelter. We realized that no matter what we finally decided, the next week would be extremely uncomfortable, but we were not overly worried.
We went to sleep.
The next morning, I got up at 6:30 and turned on the cable TV weather station. Katrina was now a category 4 and would increase to a category 5 by noon. Waveland would get gale winds by noon, hurricane winds by 6 PM and the eye or just east of the eye, would hit our area dead on sometime Monday morning.
Eye or no eye, we were in the worst possible quadrant of the storm, the northeast. The winds would be terrible, but the tremendous surge both n height and force would be catastrophic. I woke Stella and told her we had just a few hours to leave before the roads became clogged with evacuees. We gathered our important papers together, downloading the two computers to a laptop, packed a few clothes, put Holly in his carrier and, driving Stella's car, left by 10:30.
My white truck stayed in the garage. Maybe... Monday, we sat in a hotel room in Tallahassee, Florida and watched the radar show the storm's eye make the hurricane's third landfall, this time directly on the Mississippi coast. All indications pointed to the coast experiencing a terrible calamity. We slept that night knowing that the chances of our escaping a personal tragedy were very small.
Aerial pictures over the next few days showed that the tragedy was much more than personal. They indicated that the coastal Mississippi coast towns, especially Waveland, Bay St Louis and Pass Christian, had been washed over by a storm surge 35 to 40 feet high that had gone a mile inland. Not only was our house gone, but our town was gone as well.
We are in Pennsylvania now staying in an old farmhouse, sleeping in the same room that Stella had been born many years ago.
Things in Waveland and the Bay are different now. They had been significantly changing the last two years and now, Katrina's drastic changes overshadow all of these. I believe much of the wonderful easy way of small town coastal life that I have so carefully tried to document in my writings and books is gone.
So, as to the keys, it hurt, but I began removing the house key from the ring.