Rita and Me
December 27, 2005 (rev January 29, 2006)
On September 24,2005, hurricane Rita came ashore just to the west of my parent's home in Lake Charles, LA, causing significant damage to the community and to their house. I was pressed into service to help them move and the following is a diary of my experience.
(click on thumbnails for larger versions of the photos)
Background: 1962 - 2005
My parents got married in St. Louis in 1962 and I came along around a year later. After living in Dallas and Wichita for a time, we moved to Lake Charles, LA in 1970 when my father took a position as an electrical engineering professor at McNeese State University. Following some time in a rental home on 422 West Lagrange St., my parents built a house in the Peyton Place subdivision just to the Southeast of the city limit off Highway 14. It was a nice 1,800 sq. ft. three-bedroom house on a full acre of land with a swimming pool and a concrete tennis / basketball court.
1962 |
1965 |
1966 |
1973 - a rare Louisiana snowstorm |
1977 |
1973 |
1977 |
1979 |
1983 |
1988 |
December, 2001 |
November, 2003 |
Thanksgiving, 2003 |
April, 2005 |
The subdivision was named after the owner of the farmland upon which it was built and I'm not certain they were completely aware of the association with a similarly named series of books and movies dealing with the social and sexual dysfunction of postwar suburban America. Unfortunately for me, we were the first people in this young neighborhood to have a swimming pool and in the intense heat of that first summer I gained alot of neighborhood "friends" who were interested in my friendship primarily for my natatorial possession. Having interests that were more cerebral than athletic or gustatory, the abundant opportunities for and interest in outdoor activities were lost on me. Isolated from the city by a busy two-lane highway with no shoulder, there was no way to venture outside the neighborhood until I became old enough to drive. Also, as a multi-racial half-Asian child growing up in schools that were technically integrated but still intensely polarized on black / white lines, I did not quite fit in with either group and have a "people" to call my own. These factors, along with a hereditary disposition toward stubbornness, led me to the early development of a distrust of people and a penchant for self-sufficiency that has been a mixed-blessing throughout my adult life. I never entertained the notion of settling in Louisiana and upon graduation from high school in 1981, I left for school in Texas and only returned to Lake Charles for sporadic holiday visits thereafter.
Nevertheless, it was a generally safe and friendly neighborhood to grow up in. While most people in the neighborhood (then and now) left their lots largely bare to make lawn care easier, my father ringed the lot with young pine saplings and planted numerous hardwood and fruit trees - a choice that would come back to haunt my parents later.
As the years passed, my father became increasingly involved in electrical contracting in addition to his duties as an Associate Professor of Engineering. The extensive amount of attention needed to maintain the house received decreasing priority as his workdays became longer and longer.
This cycle culminated in 1994 with my father's catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke, probably caused by untreated high blood pressure and a family history of stroke. My father was initially not expected to live and ended up staying in the hospital for six months. He had handled all the physical maintenance of the house as well as all the financial affairs and the chaos of his life was reflected in the disorganization of all associated paperwork. This left my mother quite unprepared to deal with the maintenance of the home as well as overseeing his care at the hospital. Shirking my familial responsibilities, I continued my faltering acting career in New York City as my mother undertook the leviathan task of caring at home for a stroke victim. Surprisingly, mom managed to hold it together for 11 years, although the decline of the house and the disorder of it's contents steadily progressed throughout that time.
In 1975, my parents bought 70 acres of land in Salem, MO from my grandparents as a way of honorably supporting them in their old age. In the summer of 1976, my father and I built a small one-room cabin on that land, next-door to the crumbling remains of the two-room shack where my mother had grown up. Their one-room cabin became a vacation home when my parents would visit once or twice a year. In 2003, she contracted with a nephew to add an additional bedroom on the back. This investment turned out to be surprisingly prescient.
1976 |
1976 |
1976 |
2005 |
September 21, 2005 - September 24, 2005: The Evacuation
On September 14, my parents went to their vacation home outside Salem, Missouri, a tiny hamlet in a very isolated part of the northern Ozarks. Lacking detailed news about the hurricane brewing in the Gulf of Mexico, they set off for home on Wednesday, September 21. They spent the night in Sheridan, AR and decided to continue on home despite hearing about the hurricane on the news. Although I'm not entirely certain why my mother chose to return to Lake Charles, the stated reason was that she needed to get her vital documents and needed to get my father's prescriptions so they could be refilled.
As they made their way through Louisiana they encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic leaving in what turned out to be a mandatory evacuation order by the Mayor and Governor. However, they decided to press on and got in around 6PM on Thursday, the 22nd. They picked up their papers and immediately left - there would be no prescription refills at the closed Wal-Mart.
Unfortunately, the major artery through Southwest Louisiana is the east-west Interstate 10. The north-south roads are all two-lane, making a northward migration by a quarter million people very difficult. My mother remarked later that she had never seen anything like it in her life, with overheating cars, ambulances and roads becoming parking lots.
Alexandria, LA is normally a three-hour drive north, but on this evening it took them around ten hours. The traffic started to abate somewhat at this point and although my mother wanted to pull over and rest for awhile, my father would not allow her to sleep. Showing his diminished mental state, he even said that he would rather go back home and die there rather than evacuate. However, mom finished the drive to stay with friends in Homer, LA.
Because I was starting my first year teaching at a middle school in the South Bronx, my days were extremely long and I did not keep my cell phone on. My mother left a message right before they left Louisiana, but since she had lost her cellphone charger and did not keep her cell phone on anyway, I was not able to contact them as they made their way North. I finally heard from them Friday afternoon, when they had safely arrived in Homer and had rested a bit.
September 24, 2005 - October 1, 2005: The Storm
The hurricane came ashore early on the morning of Saturday, September 24, 2005, with the eye centered just to the west of Lake Charles. The hurricane cut a wide swath of destruction, effectively wiping a number of coastal towns off the map and causing extensive damage throughout Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas.
09/23/2005 |
09/24/2005 |
Numerous hurricanes had struck Southwest Louisiana over the half-century before Rita, but none had been overwhelmingly destructive or deadly since Audrey hit in 1957 with a 13-foot storm surge and winds gusting to 180 mph, killing 390. However, the death toll from that storm was largely due to the poor forecasting of the time (an era before satellites of any kind). The widely covered destructiveness of Katrina on the other side of the state gave Louisiana residents newfound respect for hurricanes. If anything good can be said of Katrina, it was responsible for the high evacuation rates for Rita less than a month later.
The bulk of the damage from Rita was related to wind. While low lying areas did experience flooding, Lake Charles is well above sea level and not subject to the levee breaches that proved so deadly in New Orleans. However, the wind destroyed large parts of the electrical grid and toppled thousands of large trees that seemed so invulnerable just days before. While the number of buildings that suffered structural damage from the wind was minimal, the wind caused widespread roof damage, subsequently resulting in interior water and mold damage.
11:13 10/04/2005 Sign-age was another common victim of the wind |
11:13 10/04/2005 Downed power lines on Highway 14 |
11:23 10/04/2005 Seamed-steel roofs are normally considered more durable than shingles...but I guess you need some wood under it. |
11:47 10/04/2005 The Hibernia bank building downtown is one of a handful of tall buildings in the city. Because of its proximity to the TV station, damage to it was featured prominently in news coverage of the area. But it was certainly not the most important or serious damage in the area. |
11:50 10/04/2005 Numerous hotels were knocked off-line right at the time they were needed most. Piles of wet carpet and hotel furniture were a common sight. |
11:51 10/04/2005 Recreational watercraft piled up against a damaged railroad trestle like so much cord wood |
11:55 10/04/2005 Damaged pier on the east side of the lake, just north of the Civic Center |
11:55 10/04/2005 Lake Charles is home to a number of floating casinos. The Harrah's was very severely damaged, prompting speculation of divine judgment. |
11:59 10/04/2005 The Civic Center, on the East side of the Lake, was used to house Katrina victims. After Rita, it's voluminous parking lots were used as staging areas for emergency vehicles and office trailers. |
12:00 10/04/2005 Lakeshore Drive littered with downed trees |
12:07 10/04/2005 My mom's former dentist |
12:11 10/04/2005 McNeese State, my dad's former employer. Many buildings had extensive water damage but were spared structural destruction. |
12:12 10/04/2005 The hurricane stopped at the McDonald's playland and got a bit rough. |
12:15 10/04/2005 Downed trees in a drainage ditch off McNeese Street. |
12:16 10/04/2005 Used to be a convenience store. |
12:19 10/04/2005 The Burton Coliseum. A totally redundant venue originally built for rodeos and later acquired by the university. Used to house Katrina victims and as a staging area for emergency equipment. |
12:25 10/04/2005 My parents' post office. No mail today. |
12:36 10/04/2005 Off Highway 14. One of the few houses that I saw that was blown apart by the hurricane. |
17:28 11/28/2005 Prien Lake Road. McDonald's tall signs were especially vulnerable to the wind. |
17:29 11/28/2005 Prien Lake Road. The canopies at filling stations seemed especially inclined to flying away. |
17:30 11/28/2005 Prien Lake Road. It needed to be torn down anyway. |
16:41 11/15/2005 12th Street |
Meanwhile, my distraught parents were watching news coverage of the storm. Because most of the members of the press had evacuated as well, news from the area was slow in arriving. Because of the wide area affected, what little news came out was not specific enough to allow individuals to know the state of their own homes based on a few camera shots from outside the television studio. However, it was obvious that significant damage had occurred in the area and that few people would be going home anytime soon. A state of emergency and curfew was declared, limiting access to the area in order to prevent both injury and lawlessness.
September 27, 2005 - October 1, 2005: Refugees
Faced with this situation, made more difficult my my father's lack of mobility, my mother decided to retrace their trip from the north and return to their vacation home in Missouri. I was able to gain access to some information on the Internet via blogs that allowed the few people who were still in the area to share their observations. The area newspaper (The Lake Charles American Press) and the television station (KPLC-7) also had some information on their websites, although their ability to report was limited by the state of emergency and the impassibility of streets littered with tree limbs, shattered glass and downed power lines.
The storm downed a significant portion of the area's electrical infrastructure including lines in residential neighborhoods, lines to substations and generating plants. While initial fears were of outages lasting months, electrical crews from around the country converged on the area and managed to get a significant percentage of Calcasieu Parish back up within two weeks. However, faced with a sudden disappearance of revenue, staggering costs for repair, and the limited amount of available cash associated with newly "streamlined" and deregulated utility companies, Entergy declared bankruptcy on 9/23.
Most of us are only vaguely conscious of how dependent our modern lifestyles are upon a reliable source of electrical power. Aside from the need for electrical appliances for food preparation and storage, in my parent's case, power was also necessary to power the water well. Air conditioning has also become basically essential to combat the oppressive sub-tropical South Louisiana heat. Without electricity, my parent's home would have been uninhabitable, especially considering my father's condition.
Since it was obvious that my mother would not be able to drag my disabled father around a disaster area, I volunteered to take a reconnaissance trip the following weekend.
October 2, 2005 - October 5, 2005: The Reconnaissance Trip
As conditions in the city improved, parish law enforcement entered a "Look and Leave" phase with a dusk-to-dawn curfew. This was to prevent looting and supposedly anyone caught outside after dark would be hauled off to jail. There were also tales of helicopters with infrared detectors patrolling selected neighborhoods at night...maybe the rich folks on the other side of town. People that stayed in the neighborhood said they never saw any cops patrolling, although no one I spoke with in the neighborhood had any looting problem. Regardless, in the absence of electricity, grocery stores, gas stations and other essentials of contemporary life, the community was not capable of supporting thousands of returning evacuees.
I flew out of New York into St. Louis on October 2, rented a car, drove down to Salem to spend the night and then left for the 16-hour drive to Louisiana. Because of the curfew, it would not be possible to do the drive in one day and get in before dark. Because of the displacement of people, it would not be possible to get a hotel anywhere close to Lake Charles. So I decided I would simply pull over when I got tired and sleep in the car.
Paradoxically, the road trip was not entirely unpleasant, as I was accompanied by a new Sirius Satellite Radio receiver and had no rigid time constraints. I pulled off briefly to visit a couple of attractive Missouri springs and the Bill Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock - which is adjacent to a fascinating, old, abandoned early 20th-century railroad bridge. I spent the night in the parking lot of a hospital in Winnfield, LA.
06:35 10/02/2005 Dawn on the Upper West Side |
11:20 10/02/2005 Manhattan |
18:05 10/02/2005 The first of many Burger Kings |
19:38 10/02/2005 A valley in Northern Dent County, MO |
10:30 10/03/2005 The Cabin |
11:23 10/03/2005 Round Spring, MO |
11:32 10/03/2005 Feed into the Current River |
13:29 10/03/2005 Mammoth Spring, AR |
17:15 10/03/2005 Abandoned railroad bridge near the Clinton Library |
17:25 10/03/2005 Paying homage to my hero |
06:03 10/04/2005 Overnight in Winnfield, LA |
08:38 10/04/2005 Utility trucks |
When I woke up early the next morning, I filled up with gas in Alexandria, LA, anticipating difficulty in getting fuel in Lake Charles. The attendant said he had only recently began receiving fuel shipments again, since his normal distributor was based in Lake Charles.
I got to Lake Charles early on Tuesday, October 4. Although I saw extensive damage and downed power lines on my way out to the house (about 5 minutes off the Interstate), I was surprised to see little observable external damage to the house. There were two large trees down in the front yard, but they fell away from the house, sparing would would have been catastrophic damage. The primary observable damage were patches of shingles that had been blown off the roof.
09:08 10/04/2005 Kinder, LA |
09:43 10/04/2005 Lake Charles' Greenwich Village. Nothing like its namesakes in London or NYC...even before the storm. |
09:44 10/04/2005 Dramatic power line damage on Highway 14. |
09:48 10/04/2005 One of the nicest houses in the neighborhood. The wind caused a chimney collapse and extensive associated damage. |
09:48 10/04/2005 My first view of the house |
09:50 10/04/2005 The rear of the house |
09:51 10/04/2005 Roof damage on the NE side |
09:51 10/04/2005 No tennis today |
09:51 10/04/2005 Old microwave TV antenna. They company went bankrupt years ago, so no one ever came to get the antenna. |
12:50 10/04/2005 NE side roof damage |
12:51 10/04/2005 SE side roof damage |
12:51 10/04/2005 E side roof damage |
12:51 10/04/2005 Downed trees in the front yard |
12:52 10/04/2005 NW side roof damage |
10:50 10/04/2005 Downed trees in the front yard |
10:51 10/04/2005 Downed trees in the front yard |
10:52 10/04/2005 S side roof damage |
10:54 10/04/2005 Downed trees in the front yard |
19:38 10/04/2005 Remarkably, the persimmons hung on through the wind. The squirrels came by later and got them. |
19:39 10/04/2005 Shingles litter the West side of the house |
19:40 10/04/2005 The wind blew down the last vestige of a wooden fence that used to surround the pool in back of the house. |
19:41 10/04/2005 Downed trees in the front yard |
19:41 10/04/2005 Downed trees in the front yard |
19:41 10/04/2005 Downed trees in the front yard |
As I entered the house, it became obvious that that the seemingly minimal external damage had resulted in a major internal problem. Water that had entered the house during the storm and rainfall on subsequent days had entered the ceilings and walls under the affected roof areas. This resulted in large and colorful patches of mold in my parent's bedroom, the living room and a bedroom used as a storage room. The "Den" and my old bedroom in the back of the house were unaffected, although the smell of the mold was very strong throughout the house. The mold in the master bedroom was especially attractive, with orange patches that observers said were completely novel to them. While there is a notorious black mold that emits deadly toxins, this did not appear to be that variety, since I was able to spend a considerable amount of time in the house over the next two months with no observable respiratory distress.
10:48 10/04/2005 Master bedroom |
10:48 10/04/2005 Master bedroom |
08:13 10/05/2005 Master bedroom |
08:14 10/05/2005 Master bedroom |
10:48 10/04/2005 Master bedroom |
08:12 10/05/2005 Master bedroom |
08:12 10/05/2005 Master bedroom |
10:48 10/04/2005 Orange mold - folks said they'd never seen anything like it. |
08:13 10/05/2005 Master bedroom closet |
10:49 10/04/2005 Master bathroom |
08:14 10/05/2005 Master bathroom |
08:14 10/05/2005 Sewing room |
10:48 10/04/2005 Sewing room ceiling |
08:14 10/05/2005 Sewing room |
08:15 10/05/2005 Foyer |
10:49 10/04/2005 Foyer ceiling |
10:49 10/04/2005 Living room ceiling |
10:49 10/04/2005 Living room walls |
08:11 10/05/2005 Living room |
08:15 10/05/2005 Living room |
08:15 10/05/2005 Living room |
08:16 10/05/2005 Living room |
08:16 10/05/2005 Living room |
08:16 10/05/2005 Living room |
08:17 10/05/2005 Living room |
10:49 10/04/2005 Back hallway / laundry room |
08:18 10/05/2005 Laundry room |
08:17 10/05/2005 Hallway / laundry room |
08:12 10/05/2005 Unaffected den |
08:12 10/05/2005 Unaffected den |
My two primary tasks then became putting a tarp on the roof to prevent further damage, and emptying the freezer to prevent a serious biohazard. I also spoke with my mother by phone and got instructions on what clothing, papers and photos she wanted brought back to Missouri.
FEMA and a number of other organizations were supplying reinforced blue plastic tarpaulins along with wooden slats and roofing nails for providing temporary roof repairs. These "Blue Roofs" began springing up all over town as people began slowly returning to the area to assess damage. I took a drive downtown to survey the damage to my parents' church (First Baptist Church) and was surprised to find the building was largely undamaged and serving as a distribution point for blue tarps which were the same type as the FEMA tarps but branded with the name of a Christian organization. My rental car was not large enough for the wooden slats, but I was able to get a couple of rolls of tarp and some roofing tacks and head for home. (For FBC, the initial relief turned to sadness as they ended up being diagnosed with a mold problem a few weeks later).
11:27 10/04/2005 |
11:30 10/04/2005 |
11:30 10/04/2005 |
11:38 10/04/2005 |
11:39 10/04/2005 |
11:45 10/04/2005 |
The freezer and refrigerator proved to be one of the more unpleasant jobs in a season that was filled with unpleasant jobs. The refrigerator hadn't been cleaned in perhaps 15 years and would have been a nightmare even in normal circumstances. Having sat for a week and a half with no power, the contents were quite aromatic. I got some heavy garbage bags from the garage and a pair of rubber gloves from the sink and started pitching. Nine fetid bags and two hours later, the job was done.
15:07 10/04/2005 |
15:07 10/04/2005 |
15:07 10/04/2005 |
15:07 10/04/2005 |
15:07 10/04/2005 |
15:21 10/04/2005 That used to be a head of lettuce |
16:33 10/04/2005 If you have any question why we discarded the freezer from the garage... |
12:56 10/04/2005 I was surrounded staring bovines during the entirety of my travels. Maybe those Hindus are on to something. |
With the invaluable assistance of a next-door neighbor, Charlie LeBlanc, I was able to get the Blue Roof on later that afternoon. Without the wooden slats and in the hands of two amateurs, the job was not as attractive or secure as might be desired, but it ended up holding for most of the next two months.
19:37 10/04/2005 |
19:39 10/04/2005 |
19:49 10/04/2005 |
I elected to sleep in the undamaged back bedroom that night. Much like much of the rest of the house, in recent years it had become more storeroom than bedroom. Lacking electricity or water and in 85 degree temperatures, it was a fitful night. Because the screens were not completely secure and allowed mosquitoes in, I was unable to open the windows. But I wasn't there to sleep and the evening and the morning were the first day.
08:18 10/05/2005 |
08:18 10/05/2005 |
The next morning, I took some additional photos of the interior and some shots of the damage to the neighborhood. Charlie pulled his trailer up and we joined our bags of refrigerator detritus for a trip to a household garbage pickup point. On the way back, we stopped at a mobile claims unit set up by State Farm to check on the status of his adjuster.
07:49 10/05/2005 |
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11:12 10/05/2005 |
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12:10 10/05/2005 |
12:20 10/05/2005 |
12:20 10/05/2005 |
11:11 10/05/2005 I fell out of this tree and broke my arm when I was 12. Still standing tall. |
12:09 10/05/2005 Pretty, isn't it? |
12:13 10/05/2005 Nothing quite like a cooling mud bath |
Having done all I could reasonably do, I left for the return trip to Missouri around 1PM. As I was leaving, the electrical service trucks began repairing downed lines in the neighborhood. Interestingly, a satellite was simultaneously snapping a photograph of our neighborhood. If I'd been a day later, I would have had power.
12:38 10/04/2005 |
10:55 10/05/2005 |
12:13 10/05/2005 |
10/5/2005 Satellite view of our blue-roofed neighborhood |
On my way out of town, I took some additional shots of the chaos.
12:29 10/05/2005 My high school football stadium. No night games this season. |
12:31 10/05/2005 The bell won't be ringing any time soon |
12:36 10/05/2005 Note sign for a roofing company using a number deceptively close to the FEMA Blu-Roof program number |
12:40 10/05/2005 Folks lined up for free food from a church. It's hard to eat at home with no power or refrigeration. |
12:41 10/05/2005 People lined up at the main post office trying to get their mail. |
12:42 10/05/2005 The other side of the post office. |
12:43 10/05/2005 Somehow I don't think she will have to worry about that overdue library book. |
12:44 10/05/2005 A downtown office...intact except for missing windows. |
October 6, 2005 - October 23, 2005: Waiting
Having always hated the predominantly two-lane drive northward through Louisiana, I elected to return to Missouri via I-10 to Baton Rouge and I-55 north through Memphis. This does make the trip a bit longer but it requires less stress than constantly having to pass logging trucks in timber country. Following a night at Knights Inn somewhere in Mississippi, I pulled in to Salem on the afternoon of October 6.
13:00 10/05/2005 Those ubiquitous utility trucks |
08:39 10/06/2005 Knight's Inn |
15:03 10/06/2005 Americans do have a trouble with apostrophes |
15:55 10/06/2005 Take me home, country roads... |
08:13 10/07/2005 More staring bovines. |
10:14 10/07/2005 Breakfast |
My mother was somewhat relieved that the house had not been completely destroyed, although I'm not sure she completely grasped the extent of the mold damage and the fact that solving the problem would require, essentially, gutting and completely renovating the house. Although her comments seemed to indicate a desire to return to her home, the trauma of the evacuation (as well as memories of a less chaotic evacuation for Lily in 2003) seemed to have loosened her previously stubborn refusal to move into a less maintenance-intensive living situation. She compared her situation to Abraham and suggested that perhaps, "This was a sign. That it was time for a change." We agreed that the best course of action would be for them to stay in Missouri until it was safe to return to Lake Charles and make arrangements for a temporary or permanent relocation.
11:04 10/07/2005 Dent County Courthouse, Salem, MO |
15:04 10/07/2005 Lambert Field |
16:35 10/07/2005 Lambert Field |
19:39 10/07/2005 Charlotte, NC |
23:05 10/07/2005 LaGuardia |
00:25 10/08/2005 Manhattan |
I returned to New York and gave two-weeks notice to my school, putting a premature end to a long seven-week career as a middle-school math teacher in the New York City Public Schools. It was a mixed blessing since my teaching experience had been quite difficult. While first-year teaching is always unspeakably hard, I was team teaching an inclusion class of mixed special-ed and regular-ed students. The driver behind inclusion is that the observation that special-ed students perform better when placed in a situation that provides additional special-ed support but is more like a regular class than the stigmatized special-ed-only classes. In practice, since most special-ed disabilities manifest themselves in discipline issues, inclusion ends up being a dumping ground for the school's behavioral problems. Dealing with that kind of student requires a very special kind of personality that is oriented around people and is comfortable dealing with constant conflict... something I don't have.
Thankfully my co-teacher was a seasoned veteran capable of handling the discipline issues in those multitudinous situations where I was over matched by a room of screaming urban 12/13/14-year-olds. But my life was miserable and it was obvious from the assessments that I was not teaching them anything. Success in this situation would have required me making a considerable change in my way of thinking...something I was not prepared to do. While it was a violation of the trust placed in me by my principal, my students and my colleagues, I had a legitimate excuse for jumping ship and I took it. However, this did entail jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire...and Karma be swift.
On October 17, I got a call from one of my parent's neighbors saying she had heard that FEMA was providing trailers to people who weren't able to get back into their homes. I called the number she gave me, but was told that I would have to apply in person.
Also around this time I was contacted by Mary Kate, a FEMA contracted adjuster who wanted to get into our house to verify the damage. Aside from keys, she needed my mother to sign some kind of release form, a difficult prospect since they were nestled deep in the Ozarks and access to a Fax machine would be difficult. Since my parents and I were far from Lake Charles and no one in the neighborhood had the keys to our home, I told her there was no way to let her in until we got back to town. Mary said she was on a tight deadline but would see what she could do. I never heard from her again.
October 23 - 26, 2005: Back To Louisiana
My new life as a novice aid worker started off with a bang. I have hated flying for years and have used Amtrak whenever possible. But since I was going one-way to an extremely remote area, the logistics of ground travel became somewhat complex. The plan was to take Amtrak overnight to Chicago, take a nine-hour Greyhound bus from Chicago to Rolla, MO, and finish off the trip with a one-hour cab ride to my parents' farm in Salem. When my uncle heard about this plan, he insisted on picking me up at the bus station in Rolla, which would save a rather chunky cab fare, but introduced some potential problems since he did not have a phone and my parents' farm is out of cellphone range.
The problems started when the train to Chicago was delayed four hours due to freight congestion caused by damaged track that was caused by a derailment. This caused me to miss the bus connection to Rolla. I left a message on my mother's voice mail, hoping she would be able to contact my uncle so he wouldn't be waiting at the bus station in vain. Since I figured it was best to keep moving, I took the Texas Eagle train to St. Louis. But since it would not arrive until 8PM, the next bus I could catch to Rolla didn't leave until 3AM with a nasty 5:30AM arrival time. But...keep moving.
15:25 10/23/2005 Penn Station, NYC |
16:21 10/23/2005 The Mighty Hudson |
16:23 10/23/2005 More Hudson |
07:54 10/24/2005 Nighttime on the Lakeshore Limited |
09:02 10/24/2005 Rural Indiana |
10:49 10/24/2005 Trailers!!! Perhaps for us? |
14:15 10/24/2005 Union Station, Chicago |
15:49 10/24/2005 Union Station, Chicago |
15:50 10/24/2005 Union Station, Chicago |
The train to St. Louis was uneventful, although the Viewliner cars (unlike Superliner cars used on East-coast routes) do not have electrical outlets, making it impossible for me to do any work on my laptop. A lady on the train from St. Louis was not entirely certain where the bus station was, however I wondered whether it could be accessed via the Metro light rail that is a block away from the train station and she said that might work. On arrival in St. Louis I began walking to the Metro station and was followed by a pesky homeless guy who, thankfully, ended up being harmless.
Although there was a Metro employee at the station and a number of people waiting for the train, no one seemed to know where the bus station was. One gentleman suggested the convention center stop on the train, and finally, a nice lady said her bus passed right by it and she would show me the way. The weather was starting to get cold and the bus took about half an hour to arrive, but... keep moving.
Taking Greyhound is a unique cross-cultural experience for those of us who try to remain cloistered in middle-class existence. All the folks that can't afford cheap air fairs take buses, as well as people from all those remote rural towns that aren't serviced by air travel. The bus station was a converted 1927 Cass Bank building that turned out to be nowhere near a Metro stop. The initial impact of the relatively well-preserved rococo bank interior, inhabited by the huddled masses (including a family of Amish) and lit by garish modern (sodium) lamps (i.e. street lamps) was somewhat overwhelming, considering that I was at diminished mental capacity from 30 hours of travel. I bought a ticket and tried to get some sleep (on seats designed to keep people from sleeping on them). Finally, around midnight, I decided to give into biology, take a cab to a hotel room, and... stop moving.
The Econo Lodge was a dirty but good choice, I got up at 7AM and took a cab back to the bus station and got on the 9AM bus...which was 30-minutes late. My 55-pound bag was 5 pounds over the weight limit and I pulled out some books to save myself $25 (clandestinely replacing those books before boarding the bus). However, I was not entirely certain what I would do when I got to Rolla. I had left a message on my mother's voice mail about my approximate arrival time and in transit to Rolla she got the message and left a message for me that she would come pick me up...if she could find the bus station.
08:26 10/25/2005 Econo Lodge, St. Louis |
08:49 10/25/2005 Jones Dome, St. Louis |
08:51 10/25/2005 Eads Bridge?, St. Louis |
09:17 10/25/2005 Bus Station - 1927 Cass Bank Building, St. Louis |
09:18 10/25/2005 Bus Station |
09:22 10/25/2005 Bus Station |
Turns out, the bus station was a parking lot in back of a McDonald's just off the interstate. There are very few people that take the bus to Rolla and, accordingly, no one knows where the bus station is...because there is no bus station. So, my mom is driving around Rolla, asking folks in stores where the bus station is and getting contradictory answers. I asked a cashier at the McDonald's, got the name of the street in front of the restaurant and called mom. However, I misunderstood the street name I was given and when she didn't show up in 15 minutes, asked again and got the correct name. Finally...48-hours later we had contact, and drove back to Salem, packed up the car and, via the Hilcrest in in Sheridan, AR, headed back to Louisiana.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
We got to Lake Charles in the late afternoon and as my mother surveyed the damage, my father settled into his recliner and began watching TV as if nothing had happened. Our next door neighbor had contacted me a few weeks before about clearing the two trees in the front yard and he had made good on his word, although the stumps were still there and waiting to be grounded down.
18:19 10/25/2005 Mammoth Spring, Arkansas |
17:42 10/26/2005 Yet another Burger King |
19:39 10/26/2005 Home...kinda |
19:40 10/26/2005 Yes, it's spreading |
19:43 10/26/2005 Stumps... |
19:43 10/26/2005 Stumps... |
19:43 10/26/2005 Stumps... |
19:44 10/26/2005 Stumps... |
In preparation for the trip I had searched on line for available hotel rooms but the closest I could find was a Super 8 in Natchitoches, about two hours north. My initial plan was to drive to Natchidoches on Wednesday and then be able to have pretty much a full day in Lake Charles on Thursday. However, my mother wanted to get to Lake Charles as quickly as possible so we got into town on Wednesday but were only able to spend a couple of hours looking around before having to leave again for the drive back up north.
My father doesn't handle driving after dark very well and becomes quite agitated in the back seat, constantly asking, "How far???" and responding to any explanation, no matter how reasonable, "Too far!!!" The drive is made even more unpleasant by his insistence on cranking the heat up, regardless of the outside temperature. When he insisted on going to the Super 8 in Lake Charles, we drove by. The large pile of storm-damaged carpet and furniture in the parking lot should have satisfied my father, but in his diminished mental state, he did not seem capable of completely understanding the situation.
We stumbled in to Natchitoches around 10PM. Since my father insists on having three meals a day, regardless of the schedule, my mother and I had to go to a grocery store and pick up some nasty sandwiches. Upon returning to the hotel, I declined the evening meal and went to bed.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
As we drove back down to Lake Charles, we jotted down the names of some promising looking hotels along the way that were closer to home. The extensive commute left us with very little time, but as my mother ran some errands around town, I tried calling a number of hotels in the Lake Charles area. Around half of them were closed due to storm damage and the others were booked solid for weeks with evacuees. Thankfully, the Stagecoach Inn in De Ridder (about an hour north of town) had available rooms and I booked a few nights.
11:26 10/27/2005 |
One of my mother's nephews had agreed to consider coming down from Missouri to do the repair work on the house. He drove in on Thursday to scout the house and went back to DeRidder with us that evening.
Friday, October 28, 2005
When we got up, my cousin came over to discuss the work on the house. His gave us a very reasonable rough estimate with a prediction of two months of work...once he was able to get materials and get started.
I tried calling the hotels again and, to my surprise the Microtel had a vacancy for a week. In perhaps my stupidest and most inexplicable move of this whole experience, I only took three days of that vacancy and I would rue that conservative choice with every futile exploratory call over the next month.
With my mother taking my father to a doctor's appointment, I rolled the refrigerator and freezer out into the front hard for a chlorine shower. The odor was less from decomposed food than from some kind of aromatic spice or spicy fluid that had been revived by the heat. The garden hose spray and chlorine solution got rid of alot of the smell, but neither unit was ever quite right. The chest freezer in the garage had a terrifying brown liquid in the bottom when I visited earlier and I did not even attempt to clean it.
Throughout our six weeks in Lake Charles, one of the major problems was finding something to eat. Most of the restaurants and grocery stores received some level of damage and were having problems finding staff (for reasons discussed later). Mom loves Wal-Mart because you can get everything in one place, and it's comparatively cheap. Although I avoid them because of their predatory business practices, meager payment of associates and virulent anti-unionism, it's hard to argue with her logic. However, centralizing retailing in a few large buildings has the unintended consequence of removing the redundancy needed for disaster tolerance. Damage to the Highway 14 Wal-Mart (my mother's fave) instantly removed alot of critical retailing capacity from the city. The Nelson Road Wal-Mart, which was relatively intact, became Mecca for desperate area shoppers and that resulted in a continuous traffic nightmare reminiscent of the week before Christmas. Thankfully, other grocery stores came back on line within a couple of weeks and I was able to retain some level of progressive dignity while satisfying my shopping needs.
Restaurants were a different story. With lots of folks living in hotels and trailers, eating out became a regular way of life. But like the grocery stores, many restaurants were also damaged and having problems finding staffing. Adding to the problem was my father's finicky eating habits, which led us to eat a tremendous amount of Arby's gelatinous ersatz "roast beef." I will not be willfully eating at an Arby's again any time soon and I can be thankful that they are hard to find in Manhattan. We also were frequent patrons of Fire Mountain (a bulimia buffet), Hunan Buffet (Hunan is Chinese for eating disorder) and Piccadilly Cafeteria (loved by geriatrics all over the south). While I was quite content to grab a sandwich and get back to packing, the folks cherished their "good meals" and the added complexity of transporting and feeding my father could suck a good two hours away from the day's work.
Friday was our first and only visit to the local FEMA assistance center, located in the gym of an abandoned Baptist church just south of downtown. With their core constituency moving further away from the city center into bright new suburban homes, Trinity Baptist made a strategic choice to abandon their traditional downtown building and construct a new church further South. They had just built a new "Family Life Center" (i.e. gym) in the late '70s and in the mind of someone who left town about that time, it was still a new building. But it was now outdated and abandoned and it was odd to walk in and take the time trip.
We had heard about the potential availability of temporary trailers for evacuees and this was confirmed. However, the representatives were not able to give us any time frame or a firm commitment when or if we would ever get a trailer. Oddly, the fact that my father was handicapped and a veteran (albeit of the South Korean Army) was supposedly criteria that would push us up on the list. The fact that we had land that could be used to house the trailer was also a plus. Trailers set up in "FEMAville" trailer parks would take another four to six months to get set up and another FEMA rep who was passing by suggested that these would not be desirable places to live due to crime - perhaps coded language.
15:43 10/28/2005 |
17:38 10/28/2005 |
We also found out how FEMA assistance would work:
- The first tier of assistance was the expedited $2,000 in emergency aid that I had applied for on line. Supposedly that money was deposited directly into my parents' account and was supposed to help with the expenses of evacuation.
- Second, whatever personal insurance would cover, FEMA would not cover
- Third, everyone needed to apply for a low interest loan, which would be administered by the Small Business Administration regardless of whether the applicant was a business or not. If qualified, the loan would cover expenses not covered by personal insurance. But as a loan, it would have to be paid back.
- Finally, if declined for a loan, supposedly, FEMA would then actually start paying cash in the form of grants.
Since my parents were well insured and anticipating an equitable settlement, the loan was unnecessary and, therefore, we could expect no help from FEMA except for, possibly, a temporary trailer. The loan application was, in fact, a loan application with the customary intrusive questions. Although over the next few weeks my mother often considered going through the loan process, ultimately we deemed it unnecessary.
Staying in a hotel room with my father is not a restful experience. He wakes my mom up once a night needing assistance to go to the bathroom. And regardless of when he or my mother gets to bed, at 6:00 AM each morning he insists on getting out of bed to watch TV. While this is an unpleasant but tolerable problem when the TV is in another room, it is very difficult to sleep with the sound of chirpy morning anchors and the flash of the idiot-box glow.
With that in mind, I chose to brave staying in the back bedroom while the folks went to the Microtel. Again, it was a bit warm and the odor wasn't pleasant, but my first solid night's sleep in a week proved to be quite refreshing.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Saturday was notable for a visit from the Allstate house adjuster. For some reason, this event required corresponding with five different insurance adjusters: A house adjuster, a mold adjuster, a home contents adjuster, and an extra living expenses adjuster.
The housing adjuster was a very gregarious older gentleman from Arkansas who was contracted by Allstate. The legend going around the neighborhood was that you would get a better deal from contractors (who were paid on commission) rather than Allstate employees (who were incentivized to keep claims as low as possible). The adjuster took copious notes as he examined the house carefully. His most notable comment was as he was reviewing our policy: "Aw, man... You need to up your insurance!"
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14:29 10/30/2005 |
The mold adjuster contacted us a few days later from Florida and given the extent of the damage documented by the house adjuster and in my photographs, gave us the maximum $10K.
The living expenses adjuster contacted us some time later and ended up giving us a modest lump sum. We were not required to send him receipts.
The contents adjuster was the final person to contact us. Despite the amount of water damage to the house, most of the meaningful contents of the house were spared. My mother related the conversation she had with the man, who seemed quite relieved to be speaking to someone pleasant and seemingly honest. People were throwing out perfectly good stuff and claiming losses. Adjusters were being threatened by irate claimants and that one had even been kidnapped and had his car burned. Apparently, the criminal element that had been uprooted from New Orleans and dissipated around the country was taking root in it's new surroundings. He echoed a refrain that can be heard from many people around the world: "What you see on the news is not what's going on."
Over the 34 years that my parents lived in that house, they accumulated a tremendous amount of material, much of which they had forgotten they had and had no use for keeping. However, both parents were "collectors" that, when given the choice to keep or throw away, would almost always keep. It was a hereditary tendency since my grandmother packed her house full before having to be forcibly taken to a nursing home in her late 80's. Clean out of the house was something I had been dreading since my father's stroke and, in some ways, it felt good to finally be getting it over with.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Sunday was the cleanout day for the attic and the first of two outdoor storage sheds. Both were hot, noxious jobs. Unfortunately, I neglected to take "before" shots of either area, but I can say that raccoon droppings look very similar to dog crap.
The shed cleaning allowed me to revisit a couple of old motorcycles that my father had bought in the mid '70s. He had some kind of arrangement with one of his engineering students that bartered for an old Honda C110 series 50cc street bike for me and a Suzuki 250 two-cylinder, two-cycle bike for him. The Honda 50 was fun for a 12-year old, but was no match for the 70cc dirt bikes that my neighbors owned. While they were happily risking their necks driving across the rice field, I was stuck on the streets deathly in fear of being accosted by the State Troopers that would sporadically patrol our neighborhood. Dad's Suzuki 250 never worked quite right despite considerable work by him and the guy who gave it to him. Over the years I had hoped to give these bikes away to someone who had an interest in classic machines. But it turned out that the gas tank on the Suzuki had corroded and given the wretched state of the Honda, they now became not treasured machines but toxic garbage that I had no idea how to get rid of.
My first payback for not taking the week at the Microtel was having to drive my parents to Alexandria, the closest I could find a hotel. Because my mother has very poor vision at night, I had to do the driving and the subsequent commute chewed up alot of time.
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Monday, October 31, 2005
On the way to our confirmed reservations in Alexandria, I noticed a number of vacancy signs in Kinder, LA - a boomtown that has sprung up around the Coushatta Indian Casino half an hour Northeast of Lake Charles. On the way back, I was able to get the folks a couple of nights in the Kinder Inn, an establishment that had just recovered from minor storm damage.
The tennis court had been the bane of my existence for three decades. My father used to force me to play tennis with him, which I hated at the time and which contributes to my distaste for the game to this day. I had a colleague in High School who derided me as being "rich" for having a tennis court - thus demonstrating the strange values system I endured during my youth and also demonstrating a lack of knowledge about the comparatively small cost of laying a recreational concrete slab. As the house declined in the late '80s, my father inexplicably used the court for storing bricks, sand and gravel. Weeds and fire ant nests began to grow through the cracks and by the early '90s it had been largely recovered by nature. In 2003 when I hauled a number of the bricks off to build a pathway behind the house, I unwittingly exposed myself to poison ivy, resulting in a very unpleasant rash on my arms for the next two weeks. There's not much you can do about poison ivy except allow the affected skin to peel off. Zanfel seemed to help some, although I developed a secondary allergic reaction to that cleaner after using it for a few days.
With all this in mind, I had revenge in mind as I hoped to clear off the court on Monday. However, the task was much too large to do by hand as just hauling off the sand and gravel would have taken a day to do with a wheelbarrow. I did clear off some of the weeds and old wood, but upon encountering a young copperhead preparing for winter, I reluctantly retreated from my effort. My next door neighbor brought his tractor and box blade over to demonstrate what could be done if we paid him, but another neighbor ultimately volunteered to do the cleanup along with a much needed cleanup of the rest of the yard in gratitude for all that my father had done for him in the years before.
My defeat led me to realize that part of my distaste for Lake Charles was the presence of so much flora and fauna that was trying to hurt me, all exacerbated by the oppressive heat and humidity that blankets the area for most of the year. All stuff we don't have in the more temperate urban areas I have come to love:
- Poison ivy, oak and sumac
- Poisonous Snakes
- Fire ants
- Mosquitoes
- Wasps
- Biting flies
The retreat from the tennis court did give me time to start cleaning out the cabinets in the garage that had been used for storing paint, automotive fluids and other toxins. As with the rest of the house, there was stuff in there that had been forgotten since the '60s...including my father's diplomas!? Although I could have taken the low road and bagged the stuff up for FEMA to haul off, I started a collection on the driveway in hopes of finding some more ecologically sensitive destination in the future. I never found such a place and our contractor ultimately had to volunteer to deal with it at some point in the reconstruction.
|
1979 |
2005 What a difference 25 years makes. |
16:09 10/31/2005 |
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16:10 10/31/2005 |
16:11 10/31/2005 Scavengers |
22:38 10/31/2005 Succotash dinner |
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
Up there with the cleanout of the fridge, the cleanout of the main shed was pretty damned unpleasant. This had been my father's work shed when I was growing up. Upstairs was a small attic play area where I spent numerous nights of fantasy of places far beyond Lake Charles.
As my father's activities kept him away from home more and more, this shed degenerated into a storage area and home for small furry animals. The garage also became a storage area for large piles of equipment for his contracting work, making it almost impassible for walking, much less parking a car. When he had his stroke, I boxed up and transferred much of this garage material into the shed - discovering the bones of a mother possum and four babies along the way. Somehow, leaves also began settling in this area building up a carpet of humus over the concrete to go with the animal droppings.
Into this scrum I descended armed with shovels and dust masks. Although I had hoped to be able to sort the hardware for potential sale later, the poor condition and intermingling with garbage made the task much too difficult and, ultimately, futile. I dragged and scooped the material into a wheelbarrow loads and hauled most of it to the curb.
Fall, 1972 |
Fall, 2005 |
10:35 11/01/2005 |
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22:10 11/01/2005 Voila! |
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22:11 11/01/2005 The upstairs playroom |
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With my folks somewhat closer in Kinder, I was able to stay at the house and experience a few peaceful moments of rest and Elysium.
Wednesday, November 2, 2005
When the world was young, the clouds of mosquitoes drifting over from the drainage ditches and rice fields made it very difficult to enjoy the comparatively mild evenings outdoors in the Spring and Fall. Our neighbors built a recreational screened in patio behind their home and used it to great effect. My mother always wanted one and my father started a somewhat more elaborate one with multiple sliding glass doors and ceiling fans. However, he only partially completed it before his stroke and, as with pretty much every other space in their house, it became primarily a storage area for plants and gardening tools.
Wednesday was the day for cleaning up the patio, although disputes arose with my mother on my desire to basically put everything on the curb rather than have to pack and haul a lot of dirty stuff around to a new home. Ultimately, I was able to get most of it disposed of, although she insisted on moving a number of heavy, dirty and fragile clay pots.
17:29 11/02/2005 |
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17:28 11/02/2005 |
Wednesday was also the day for a visit from a Realtor regarding sale of the house. Joan Johnson was an agent from Flavin Realty recommended by a neighbor. She looked over the house and made numerous observations and positive recommendations for the reconstruction:
- It was a seller's market before hurricane and although no one was certain what would happen after the hurricane, the speculation was that with numerous people both from the area and from Cameron (which was almost completely wiped off the map) will be looking for new houses.
- When she researched the neighborhood, she found it to be extremely stable. Only one house had been sold in the last three years.
- As with many people who saw the house, she really liked the brick
- She suspected that the mold we were seeing on the walls was not the toxic black mold that can cause death and sends lawyers into a tizzy. But without further confirmation, it was better to be misled than dead.
- Paneling and wallpaper are no longer fashionable. They also covered the walls of a large portion of the house. Although many of the walls now needed to be gutted to remove the mold, mom really liked the paneling and thought, perhaps, a potential buyer might have similar tastes to hers and would not be concerned with trends in interior design. I disagreed, but it's her house.
- We had become so used to the rice field next door that we never really thought much about it. However, it does introduce some unknowns both as an area for future (undesirable) development and for the absence of protection from strong storm winds that could come sweeping down the plain unabated by other buildings.
- Lowered kitchen ceilings were a strange period feature of early '70s houses. Mom loved hers and they do give the kitchen a more intimate feeling. But some might call it claustrophobic, and she consented to having our contractor raise the ceiling during reconstruction.
- Ultimately, the mantra in selling an old home is "Don't do more than you need - you may not get money back." It's a nasty balancing act because if you don't do enough you might have a harder time selling and/or be unable to get the price you want.
- Beige or taupe paint is preferred over white for walls.
- Laminate floors are cool, but expensive.
- The marketable square footage only includes the heated area, not the garage or patio.
Interestingly, she pointed out that the biggest drawback to the area was the quality of the schools (Fairview / F.K. White / Lagrange), since the more attractive growth areas are on the Southwest side of town. In the polarized climate of suburbia, this may also have been code for race as our side of town was and is much more integrated than the more affluent areas.
Ms. Johnson later passed on to me the name of an Environmental Inspector (who is a member of Industrial Hygiene Association and has a CRMI Certification) who could come into our house during renovation and give us some indication of the level of remaining mold in the house. He would come in after the demolition and chlorine treatment but before reconstruction to take two indoor samples, one outdoor sample, maybe one surface sample. After the results were processed in a lab, the resulting 30-page report would, basically, indicate whether mold was in one of three level categories: background, above background, or way above background. While he could not guarantee the absence of mold (which is impossible since there is mold everywhere), his job was to provide quality assurance...and give the new buyer some indication that the cleanup was done right.
Right around the time the Realtor arrived, I got a call from the Allstate adjuster. The initial assessment of our damage was quite generous and above the initial estimated cost of the repairs. Financially, at least, the folks might actually end up a bit ahead of where they were before the storm.
For a number of years, my mother had mentioned Ruston as a place she might like to relocate. Although I had always hoped she would move back to Missouri to be closer to her remaining family, she insisted that the limitations of my father's state health plan necessitated staying in Louisiana. On their frequent trips to Missouri, they always passed trough Ruston and she always though it looked like a nice place to live. Now was the chance to explore that possibility.
Supposedly, FEMA would be hauling away damaged materials if placed on the curb. The stuff was starting to create a truly fearsome pile and I was growing concerned about what would happen if FEMA never showed up.
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Thursday, November 3, 2005
Much to my father's consternation, we drove to Ruston after dark on Wednesday night. I had explored Realtors on the Internet earlier in the week and set up an appointment with a Realtor in West Monroe for Thursday and in Ruston for Friday.
Prior to meeting with the Realtor, we drove around West Monroe to get a feel for the place. Although my mother had been told by neighbors that West Monroe was a nice place to live, what we saw was thoroughly unimpressive, at least in our price range. My father has become deeply negrophobic in his dotage and I also discovered he is deeply repulsed by houses with drainage ditches in the front yards - something quite common even in nice suburban Louisiana neighborhoods. I also discovered that my mother was insistent on having a garage, something surprisingly rare in homes under $200K.
The Realtor was surprisingly unfriendly and gave us some listings in our price range that we could view for ourselves. West Monroe has experienced significant growth over the past few years and the response has been feeble attempts at gentrification with modest new homes being build in older, less desirable neighborhoods. Compounding this issue is the presence of a very odoriferous paper mill just south of town.
The one nice thing to come out of the meeting with the Realtor was introduction to a very nice lady who discussed financing options with us. It is possible to get a "Bridge Loan" to finance a new house until your old house is sold. However, given my parents' excellent credit, options like just getting a regular mortgage and paying it off early might be cheaper. Later, we found out that one of my aunts was having problems with her bridge loan because she was unable to sell her old house, so this scared my mother away from serious consideration of this option.
Despite my mother's distaste for apartments (which I think would be perfect for them in their situation) I was able to get her to view one unit in a relatively nice complex I read about on apartments.com. This led to the significant discovery that most apartment buildings and homes have 23" doorways to the bathrooms. Because my father's wheelchair is 25" wide from rim to rim, this has presented a major obstacle in finding a new place for them to live.
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Friday, November 4, 2005
Friday was a much more promising day as we met with Anita Gray, a very gregarious and helpful agent at Barnes Realty in Ruston. She sat with us and discussed the neighborhoods in the city (again, drawn on racial lines) and took us to see a number of new and existing homes, most beyond our initial $125K limit. We also came to the realization that trying to buy a new home in two weeks was technically possible, it was probably not the most sagacious course of action. Although we were unable to close a deal and solve the gaping question of our ultimate destination, we felt we had found a friend.
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19:30 11/04/2005 Oil change |
Saturday, November 5, 2005
On our way back to Lake Charles, we scouted some additional apartments in North Monroe and in Alexandria. With our late start, driving back took most of the day and the folks ended up at the Stagecoach Inn in De Rodder for the night.
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Sunday, November 6, 2005
Sunday was a day for sorting through the stuff I had dragged down from the attic. There were numerous boxes of old toys, books and papers from my childhood in the '70s. I also found a few boxes of my mother's moments from the '50s, including a photo of an old boyfriend. Some of these materials I re boxed for continued storage, while some of the toys I boxed with the potential for selling them on Ebay at some point.
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12:47 11/06/2005 A lizard. |
12:48 11/06/2005 Not only are they harmless and friendly... |
12:50 11/06/2005 but it's great fun to watch them eat insects. |
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19:24 11/06/2005 My parents dreamed I would grow up to go to an Ivy League college. This garbage can was as close as I came. Ironically juxtaposed with my first toy guitar. |
For some reason, my father had kept perhaps a dozen ceiling fans that he had taken out of people's housed while doing contracting work. I assumed they were useless (or too difficult to try to sell) and hauled them out the the curb for disposal. Oddly, of the things he remembered, he would constantly ask about those fans, to which I could only reply that they had been taken care of.
Mom was finally able to get started on cleaning out her sewing room. This was a bedroom adjacent to their master bedroom and had served as my bedroom from 1972 until I moved to the back bedroom in 1977. With the persistent refrain, "Oh, just put it in the sewing room" the piles of old clothes and magazines grew over the years until it became largely impassable by the time of my father's stroke. With my mother's time and attention consumed by my father's care, the sewing room became ossified in the '80s, until Rita came calling and ruined much of the contents of that room.
15:01 11/06/2005 |
15:01 11/06/2005 |
On my daily trip to Lowe's for boxes and Arby's for indeterminate protein, I passed the last vestige of a tent city that had sprung up on the lawn of a former drive-in movie theatre that has lately become a driving range. With it's overwhelming mosquito population and oppressive heat, Louisiana was a pretty awful place to put a drive-in. I specifically remember an all-night showing of all five Planet of the Apes movies. I think the mosquitoes sucked me dry before we got to the second.
There were also still people living in campers of the parking lot of the damaged Wal-Mart. They slowly began to drift away during our time there
16:08 11/06/2005 |
16:08 11/06/2005 |
16:44 11/06/2005 Folks camping out in the parking lot of the closed Wal-Mart. |
16:52 11/06/2005 FEMA trailers at the air base. So close and yet so far. |
After I had cleaned out the shed in the previous week, I noticed that large clumps of wasps would gather in the crevices between the ceiling and wall after dark. Having bitter memories of wasp stings from my youth (including getting stung on the lip the day before the start of 5th grade), I purchased a Raid fumigator and released it just after dusk.
20:23 11/06/2005 The wasps |
The folks were back in De Ridder and I was in the back room for the night.
Monday, November 7, 2005
With the major outdoor areas cleared, we began tackling the master bedroom. Unfortunately, my father's adjustable bed mattress had some mold on it. But the mattress covers on my mother's mattress saved it from a similar fate. Both her closet and my father's closet has mold, but, in my father's case, stuff had been growing on his clothes since the '70s.
15:17 11/07/2005 |
15:17 11/07/2005 |
15:22 11/07/2005 |
Much to my delight, contractors for the long-rumored FEMA pickup arrived and began hauling off the huge pile of garbage that had accumulated on the curb. Also to my surprise, most of it compressed very nicely and fit in a single trailer. The only things they refused to haul off were old tires and toxic chemicals.
15:54 11/07/2005 |
19:00 11/07/2005 |
19:01 11/07/2005 |
19:16 11/07/2005 |
19:16 11/07/2005 |
19:21 11/07/2005 |
19:24 11/07/2005 |
19:33 11/07/2005 |
They could not come more than 10' into a yard and because the piles extended somewhat further than that, our next-door neighbor volunteered to bring his tractor and box blade over to scrape the remains over for a later load.
09:15 11/08/2005 |
09:15 11/08/2005 |
09:15 11/08/2005 |
09:20 11/08/2005 |
09:28 11/08/2005 |
09:29 11/08/2005 |
09:29 11/08/2005 |
After the folks left for the evening, I began tackling a pile of old equipment in my former bedroom. At some point in the '80s, my father acquired an old computer table from the early '70s. Remember that computers at that time were massive beasts that took up entire rooms. This table could have held an elephant and weighed almost as much as one. In high school I had collected vacuum tube electronic equipment and made some feeble attempts at becoming an amateur radio operator (KA5AKX) - complicated by my use of dilapidated vacuum equipment at a time when it had just been outmoded by transistor equipment. Sometime in the '90s, I began piling that old, useless equipment on top of dad's computer table with the intention of hauling it all off someday. That day was November 7, 2005.
November, 2003 |
17:15 11/07/2005 My first homemade drum machine. |
17:15 11/07/2005 Homemade mixer. Sounded like crap. |
17:15 11/07/2005 Dad's old turntable |
18:23 11/07/2005 A tube amp I built from a kit. Sounded great 'til it blew a capacitor. |
18:23 11/07/2005 If they'd gotten me a woman, maybe I would've been less scared of them. |
20:29 11/06/2005 Why I never succeeded as a ham radio operator |
14:15 11/10/2005 Circa 1943. Possible Ebay material. |
Tuesday, November 8, 2005
As mom continued work on her sewing room, I began tackling the huge pile of boxes in the back bedroom that were left over from my father's office.
After my father's stroke, he remained on the faculty of McNeese State by using up the YEAR of sick days he had accumulated over the 23 years he was on the faculty there. However, as it became obvious that he would not be returning to teaching, it was left to me to clean out his office. I got a bunch of boxes from the supermarket and from U-Haul and began packing everything - including journals from the '50s and piles of unopened boxes of samples from textbook publishers. Amazingly, everything fit into the back of my father's pickup and I transferred everything to the corner of my old bedroom. Over the decade, my mother would occasionally pop open a box of student papers and shred them, paranoid that some legal issue would arise if she simply threw them in the garbage. But basically, they stayed in one place for ten years until November 8, 2005.
Although both my father and me encouraged my mother to allow me to simply haul them to the curb, she insisted on moving them, perhaps hanging on to them as a symbol of the considerable intellect that was lost forever with my father's stroke. I did go through most of the materials removing a few meaningful items, such as my father's PhD dissertation. However, most of the boxes were resealed and placed in the garage for transport and, ultimately, a trip to a recycler at some point in the future.
20:35 11/08/2005 Where they were |
20:34 11/08/2005 Where they went |
18:41 11/08/2005 Scavengers |
20:35 11/08/2005 Work continues on the sewing room |
In preparation for another trip to Ruston, I drove back with the folks for a fitful night at the Best Western, Coushatta (i.e. Kinder den of vice).
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Quaint moment at the breakfast bar at the Best Western, Coushatta:
Attendant: What'er you lookin' for?
Me: Inspiration.
(pause)
Attendant: What's that?
Me: Something to put on my mom's bagel.
Attendant: Oh! We got creme cheese right there!
Notable quote from mom:
It would be nice to have one of those new places. But then you'd have those kids (next door) that like that pop music.
I had been in contact with Anita, our agent in Ruston for a few days and she lined up a few rental properties for us to view. Because of the growth in the area, the selection was quite limited. Also unfortunately, a house built with handicapped-accessible bathrooms was snatched up almost immediately upon listing and was gone by the time we got up there. However, she showed us a number of properties. Ironically, the best of the bunch turned out to be a '60s era house that Anita personally owned as an investment. We signed a six-month lease and made our way back to the reservation.
11:34 11/09/2005 |
13:28 11/09/2005 |
15:48 11/09/2005 Too expensive |
15:58 11/09/2005 |
16:54 11/09/2005 |
16:55 11/09/2005 Too dark |
16:56 11/09/2005 |
16:56 11/09/2005 |
17:09 11/09/2005 |
17:11 11/09/2005 Too student-like |
17:25 11/09/2005 Too scummy |
17:40 11/09/2005 |
17:43 11/09/2005 Too small |
18:09 11/09/2005 Well, I guess this will have to do. |
18:10 11/09/2005 |
Thursday, November 10, 2005
With the signing of a lease, we now had a destination and our packing could begin in earnest.
When I lived at home, I didn't have alot of clothing to fill the extremely large walk-in closet in my back bedroom. However, I did need a workspace for my electronics work, so I put up a shelf on one side and used it as a work room. It also served as a practice room when I was a promising high school saxophonist and tubist...don't ask.
As with every other unfilled space in that house, after I moved away, my mother began using the walk-in-closet for storage of old clothes. Much of this was clothing that was hopelessly outdated or worn, but she refused to throw anything away unless absolutely forced to. When I moved from Dallas to New York in 1991, I added to the problem by moving alot of my own stuff into that closet. Since I only took two trunks of material to New York, this constituted the bulk of my earthly possessions.
Thursday was devoted to cleaning out the closet. I made an effort to fold everything neatly, not so much to preserve the clothes as to reduce the space needed to carry them. I also marked this and other boxes that contained essentially unneeded materials as "Long Term" so that when I have to do the cleanout of my parent's final house, I will know which boxes should never have been packed, have never been opened and can go straight to the dumpster.
As promised the FEMA contractors came back for another load. Supposedly, they were paid by the cubic yard, so they were delighted to haul as much stuff away as needed...no questions asked.
12:57 11/10/2005 |
12:58 11/10/2005 |
13:14 11/10/2005 |
13:15 11/10/2005 |
The folks retired to the reservation...I to my bedroom.
Friday, November 11, 2005
As awareness of the sheer volume of material began to hit us, it became apparent that my idea of hauling everything up to Ruston in multiple loads of a rental truck would be much too large a task for one 41-year-old man. I contacted a local Mayflower agent, but their warehouse had been damaged in the hurricane and they were too preoccupied with their own problems to help us with ours. Moving down the phone book, I contacted an Allied Agent and a local company, Movin' On Up. Because of the variability of house contents, movers require a free appointment to assess needs and make estimates.
The Allied agent was extremely professional, taking careful notes and saying he'd get back to us with an estimate in a few hours...which he did. The folks from Movin' On Up took a cursory look at the contents, scowled at the sorry state of our affairs, and gave us an extremely low estimate while encouraging us to pay additional money for them to help us pack. When my mother asked for a written estimate, they said they'd get back to us and beat a hasty retreat. We haven't heard from them since. Draw your own conclusion.
Adding to the trauma of the past two months, my mother made a startling discovery about the nice cashier she always dealt with at the McNeese Credit Union. Mom had never used an ATM, choosing instead to deposit my father's pension check and get some cash back for her needs. Oddly, she was never receiving statements from the credit union, but she did get receipts that showed her balance.
It turned out that the cashier was embezzling. She would transfer cash into the account whenever a transaction was being handled, so the receipt would look fine. She apparently would repeat this with other customers, while doing something with all the cash she was piling up. Eventually she was caught and imprisoned and none of the affected credit union clients actually lost any money. But it shook up my already insecure mother.
November, 2003 |
14:41 11/11/2005 |
00:23 11/12/2005 |
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Work on the back bedroom closet was mercifully completed and it was quite stunning to experience an empty closet for the first time in three decades.
The desk in the Den was built-in under a set of bookshelves and hidden behind a pair of louvered doors. Certainly a product of its time, it wasn't a very good desk and defied attempts to use it to house home entertainment equipment. As the condition of the house declined, household goods continued to pile up under stacks of ancient books that were never opened and were largely invisible behind the louvered doors.
Although my instinct would have been to save a few valuable books and send the rest on to their reward, mom insisted on packing everything, including the jumbled contents of the drawers - which I dutifully did, while marking everything "Long Term".
21:49 11/12/2005 |
21:49 11/12/2005 |
23:55 11/12/2005 |
23:56 11/12/2005 |
21:49 11/12/2005 |
Saturday evening, I received my first call from Delores, a FEMA contractor, regarding the trailer we had applied for two weeks prior. She asked whether we still needed it and said it would be ready in 10 to 15 days. Since we had rented a house, we didn't need it, but our contractor might. I specifically asked whether this would be kosher and the agent responded that, "What your mother does with it is up to her." I said let's give it a shot.
The folks retired to the reservation...I to my bedroom.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
During my father's work as an electrical contractor, he accumulated a substantial number of hand and power tools - some of them quite expensive. As his workload grew, he had little time to search through the growing pile of equipment in his garage and whenever he needed a hand tool that he didn't have ready access to, he would just buy another one...adding to the collection. When a tool became damaged, he would...add it to the collection. After eight years of doing this, by the time of his stroke, the garage was a thing of beauty. In the aftermath of his stroke, I cleaned out the garage and made an effort to pack everything, deferring the inevitable and hoping that at some point the tools could be liquidated in some way.
12:22 11/13/2005 |
12:22 11/13/2005 |
12:23 11/13/2005 |
12:23 11/13/2005 |
12:23 11/13/2005 |
12:26 11/13/2005 |
Ten years later we attempted to contact a broker in Moss Bluff, but to no avail. I discarded a number of items in the shed cleanout, but laid out the apparently good and expensive tools in the newly emptied shed. I asked our contractor if he could use them and/or help us liquidate them, to which he responded affirmatively. Shortly thereafter we heard from the guy in Moss Bluff.
Packing efforts for the day focused on finishing up the Master Bedroom and starting on the Living Room, which contained a number of extremely heavy items and a shag throw rug that the folks refused to throw away but was completely out of place on top of old wall-to-wall carpet.
16:04 11/13/2005 Yup, that's mold |
18:59 11/13/2005 |
18:59 11/13/2005 |
20:29 11/13/2005 |
19:00 11/13/2005 |
22:33 11/13/2005 Living room rug |
19:00 11/13/2005 Work continues on the sewing room |
19:07 11/13/2005 One last wearin' of the fedora before it went the way of all flesh |
19:11 11/13/2005 |
The folks retired to the reservation...I to my bedroom.
Monday, November 14, 2005
A relatively uneventful day focused on the living room, china cabinet and kitchen, which were tedious because of the numerous fragile items.
20:52 11/14/2005 |
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
In moving, the surprises usually come in closets. They are used for hiding things people don't want to think about, yet they must be dealt with at moving time. Thankfully, the Den closet and the foyer coat closet were not too densely packed and each were freed of their ancient contents in about an hour.
The bigger task of the day was the "pantry" closets. My father built enclosed shelves along the rear hallway wall for food storage. Taking after her own mother, my mother was an avid gardener and canner in the '70s and amassed a large number of mason jars and ordinary food jars that she would reuse for canning. As the fires of domestic food production waned for her in the '80s, the jars remained on the shelves, supplanted by various other foodstuffs and containers that were kept around in case they could find reuse some day. They never did and November 15, 2005 was the end of the road. In keeping with my mother's wishes, the mason jars were wrapped and packed, but pretty much everything out got bagged and sent to the curb.
The evening brought a cold front that carried high winds and heavy rains. Ironically, the area suffered from drought conditions both before and after Rita and this evening's rains represented the first significant rainfall since the hurricane. After my parents left in the rain, I noticed that there was water leaking in the sewing room and I moved some of the boxes stored there to a dryer location in the house.
13:20 11/15/2005 |
13:20 11/15/2005 |
13:20 11/15/2005 |
18:52 11/15/2005 |
19:16 11/15/2005 |
19:16 11/15/2005 |
19:17 11/15/2005 |
19:17 11/15/2005 |
00:03 11/16/2005 What's that dripping sound? |
00:38 11/16/2005 Voila! |
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Although we were able to obtain the services of a moving company for the bulk of the materials, they were not able to schedule our pickup until November 29. Since the packing would be done well before then and living in motels was causing much mental distress, we needed a way to get some essential furniture and items to Ruston in advance of the major move. Toward that end, I arranged for a U-Haul rental on line with the idea of picking the truck up in the morning, loading it in the afternoon, driving it up, unloading it and having it back within 24 hours. However, when the U-Haul agent called to confirm a pickup time and I told him about my plans, he said that trucks rented for "In-Town" use (i.e. pickup and return to the same location) could not leave town because the engines were too old. Therefore my plan to start the move on Thursday would not be possible.
In this experience, I learned how U-Haul rotates their equipment. New truck are devoted to intercity (i.e. one-way) service. After they reach a certain mileage, they are retired to low mileage intercity service. I had assumed that renting a truck one-way would be more expensive than driving the round trip, however when I inquired, it ended up being somewhat cheaper after mileage charges and gasoline were figured in. The one-way rate also included two days of rental, allowing a more relaxed moving schedule than the round-trip option. Armed with this new knowledge I reserved a truck for Saturday pickup.
The high winds of the previous night continued during the day and my mother mentioned that she was noticing a strong flapping noise. I initially dismissed it as being caused by the poor job I did securing it to the roof. When I did go outside to investigate, it turned out that the tarp had blown off the Northeast side of the house, also explaining why there was water leakage in the sewing room. Because I did not have slats to secure the tarp, the heavy winds simply lifted the roofing tacks out of the roofing plywood. A quick trip to Lowe's (my new favorite store) yielded some 1x2s that I used to reattach the tarp.
16:56 11/16/2005 |
16:56 11/16/2005 |
19:12 11/16/2005 |
19:12 11/16/2005 |
19:12 11/16/2005 |
19:13 11/16/2005 |
Wednesday was also notable for my mother completing the cleanout of her packed, mold-damaged walk-in closet.
21:28 11/16/2005 |
21:29 11/16/2005 |
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Thursday was devoted to further work on the sewing room, which ultimately would not be completely emptied until our final day in the house. As unessential as most of the contents of that room were, the amount of time spent packing its contents was extensive. And it's hard to imagine putting my mom's wedding dress or my dad's graduation robe out on the street for such an ignominious end.
19:09 11/17/2005 Work continues on the sewing room |
19:09 11/17/2005 From my earlier career as a visual artist |
14:22 11/17/2005 Rectifier tube for an industrial electrostatic precipitator. Makes a great gift. |
Thursday was also the third pickup by the FEMA-contracted garbage collectors.
13:39 11/17/2005 |
13:39 11/17/2005 |
Friday, November 18, 2005
With the impending Saturday move to Ruston, we devoted most of our energies on Friday to packing the kitchen. Emptying the cabinets was a trip back in time as long-forgotten items from the '50s, '60s and '70s saw the light of day for the first time in decades. And while it should have been their last time, mom insisted on packing almost everything. And because she was not inclined to sort into groups of essential and ancient, the two groups got mixed up in every box and defied my effort to isolate "Long- Term" items for later safe disposal. Indeed, little effort was made to provide any order or accurate labeling to the boxes, making it necessary to open numerous unnecessary boxes when they got to their considerably smaller Ruston rental home.
21:56 11/18/2005 The state of the sewing room |
21:56 11/18/2005 |
21:56 11/18/2005 |
21:56 11/18/2005 |
21:58 11/18/2005 |
21:58 11/18/2005 |
When we contracted my cousin to perform the house repairs, we all assumed that he would handle everything and leave us free to move and live our lives. It turned out that getting building materials in that part of the country were harder to acquire then expected. While Sean had tentatively planned on starting work on 11/14, he ran into a legal dispute in Missouri between his client and the developer of his client's neighborhood over the color of the shingles he was installing. Shingles also became a delaying factor for us as the only outlet in our area carrying our desired color (ABC Building Supply in Nederland, TX) was facing extraordinary lines at the store and would not accept our contractor's credit card over the phone. They were also backed up for delivery. They finally were able to schedule a delivery on November 17, but required payment on the spot (strangely, via check which was much less secure or verifiable than credit card). The shingles arrived on November 18, although they refused to take part of the order behind the house out of fear of getting stuck in our damp and rutted lawn.
13:43 11/18/2005 |
13:48 11/18/2005 |
13:48 11/18/2005 |
With all the damage to roofs in the area, people with roofing skills suddenly became quite in demand. The sounds of Spanish music and dialog testified to the importation of cheap labor, sometimes by less than scrupulous employers. Our next door neighbor contracted an otherwise reputable firm to repair his roof. However, when going to bed that evening, he looked through the studs in his gutted bedroom and noticed that the holes in the roofing wood had been covered with sheet metal. He contacted the roofer, who insisted that was common and perfectly adequate practice, but consented to send his men out to redo the repairs. On the second pass, our neighbor noticed that they were using plain pine rather than the tongue-in-groove wood that the house had been built with. When he called the roofer again, the roofer insisted that tongue-in-groove was unavailable due to the shortage of building materials in the area. However, when my neighbor said he wouldn't pay until the job was done right, they found a way to get it. Squeaky wheel and all that. Yet another demonstration of why I have no interest in owning a home.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Mom drove me over to the Sale Street U-Haul office at around 10AM on Saturday and the truck pickup was uneventful. The two days alloted with the rental proved quite beneficial as it required most of Saturday to load a surprising amount of "essential" stuff into the 26" truck.
13:28 11/19/2005 |
13:29 11/19/2005 |
13:29 11/19/2005 |
16:27 11/19/2005 Just say no!!! |
19:03 11/19/2005 |
19:04 11/19/2005 |
Throughout the past three weeks I had suggested that rather than spend the time and money on hotel rooms, my parents spend the night with me in the back bedroom. My mother consistently declined stating her fear of the mold that was growing just around the corner. However, when it became impossible to find a hotel room for them on Friday night, they relented and my old full-size bed from my days in Dallas served quite comfortably as I cloistered myself in the walk-in closet to avoid the nocturnal disruptions caused by my father.
02:22 11/20/2005 |
03:04 11/20/2005 |
03:05 11/20/2005 |
Sunday, November 20, 2005
With a little additional packing we were ready to go a bit after noon. Despite our efforts for the past three weeks, it was obvious that an additional couple of days of packing would be needed before we would be ready for the movers. However, we needed a break, and with Thanksgiving coming up and a planned visit to an aunt in Nashville, it was time to leave.
Knowing the difficulties of negotiating a large truck and the difficulties of traveling with an invalid who would declare his need to evacuate his bowels at the most inconvenient times ("Poo down 'dere!"), I convinced my mother to leave a half-hour before me. This would also leave me time to check my e-mail before venturing into the wilds of North Louisiana. Unfortunately, my mother had elected to have our phone service turned off on Sunday morning and I was unable to connect.
I left the house with some sadness at it's newly vacant and forlorn quality. But, ultimately, when you return to the home of your youth, you find it's not the home that you miss...it's the youth.
The arrival on a misty night in Ruston was relatively uneventful, save for the fact that my mom said they were waiting for me at a Shamrock station south of town, while they were, in fact, waiting at an EZ-Chek station. I began unloading immediately upon arrival around 8PM and was largely completed by 11PM.
16:31 11/20/2005 |
16:31 11/20/2005 |
16:31 11/20/2005 |
16:32 11/20/2005 |
16:32 11/20/2005 |
16:32 11/20/2005 |
16:32 11/20/2005 |
16:57 11/20/2005 |
20:31 11/20/2005 Yet another Burger King |
01:23 11/21/2005 Voila! |
01:24 11/21/2005 |
01:24 11/21/2005 |
01:24 11/21/2005 |
01:25 11/21/2005 |
01:25 11/21/2005 |
Monday, November 21, 2005
Monday was basically restful as we ran some errands, had the power switched over into our names and had the gas turned on. I also fabricated a ramp for the front door from lumber my dad had used for the computer desk in his university office. Swords into plowshares, perhaps.
The rental house had rather strange proportions with small bedrooms and a huge living room. Apparently the owner liked to entertain and devoted the bulk of the square footage to the common area.
One disconcerting incident. As I was moving some boxes, I noticed a strange burning smell. My mom had left a small aluminum sauce pan on the stove to warm up for some coffee and forgotten about it, resulting in a melted pan, but, thankfully, no fire. The story could be different some day.
01:25 11/21/2005 |
15:05 11/21/2005 |
16:32 11/21/2005 |
20:43 11/21/2005 |
20:44 11/21/2005 |
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Another sleepy day, made even more so by the fact that the house is surrounded by tall pine trees that keep the house very dark. The use of dark knotted pine paneling in the kitchen and living room doesn't help either.
My mother also came to the unfortunate realization that she preferred the front bedroom to the back bedroom (which was, at that point, filled with boxes). The hard part of the move wasn't the boxes but the very unwieldy king-sized mattress. I'm quite thankful that I was not injured trying to move that damn thing. I now have a deep enmity against king-size beds and will eschew them at every opportunity.
21:20 11/22/2005 What evil looks like. |
22:31 11/22/2005 |
22:31 11/22/2005 |
Wednesday / Thursday, November 23-24, 2005
Around 11AM we left to accept an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt's home in Murfreesboro, TN. (Tying everything together, she was my mother's bridesmaid seen at the top of this page) The drive was somewhat shorter than it would have been from Lake Charles, with a quick jaunt on I-20 over to Birmingham and then North on I-65. Nevertheless, travel with my father is always an adventure and we elected to stop in Birmingham for the night at a Super 8 built onto the side of a very steep hill.
Thanksgiving was extremely pleasant and we were joined by another aunt who drove down from St. Louis.
13:50 11/23/2005 |
09:13 11/24/2005 |
09:15 11/24/2005 |
09:15 11/24/2005 |
17:42 11/24/2005 |
17:42 11/24/2005 |
Friday, November 25, 2005
After spending the night with my Aunt we took the return trip to Ruston in one day. As was expected, as night began to fall, my father began to yell "How Far!!???". Mercifully, the drive was otherwise uneventful and we got in around 8PM.
10:22 11/25/2005 |
10:23 11/25/2005 |
23:05 11/25/2005 |
23:05 11/25/2005 |
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Saturday was a recovery day from our Thanksgiving journey and a chance to rest up for one additional burst of frenzied packing prior to the final move.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
We left for Lake Charles around 11AM, stopping for a late lunch at my parent's favorite restaurant (and a favorite of old folks everywhere), the Piccadilly restaurant in Alexandria. Immediately upon arriving, we began finishing up the kitchen and clearing up loose ends around the house. And we finally got the sewing room cleared out!!!
14:54 11/27/2005 |
17:03 11/27/2005 |
23:55 11/27/2005 |
23:55 11/27/2005 |
23:55 11/27/2005 Voila! |
Monday, November 28, 2005
Monday started early and ended late. It was especially troubling for my father since his cable-ready TV was now 300 miles away in Ruston and he was left with a small portable TV and network broadcast programming. TV, and especially televised football, is the center of his life, somehow helping him make some sense of a world he is increasingly unable to participate in. In the absence of TV he becomes quite irritable.
When I went running that morning, I was greeted by a lonely dog wearing an invisible fence collar that gave him an apparently quite painful shock when he strayed too far from the house. He was obviously looking for some companionship, so I walked into the driveway and shared some physical contact with him, careful to move closer to the house when I heard his collar start beeping. But I had things to pack and I walked away. However, the dog's need for affection overwhelmed his need for physical comfort and he suddenly came bolting at me, yelping all the way from the pain caused by the collar. I finally started yelling at him to go home and he relented. However, I am now a firm opponent of the invisible fence, that, like the "No Child Left Behind" legislation, is strong on the punitive but lacking in the remedial.
One notable item from the final day of packing was a bag of pills that my mother collected from all the unused prescription drugs that has built up in the kitchen cabinets over the past three decades. I ended up burying them in the backyard, but I would imagine they have some toxicity in such concentrations. I recently read about how many popular drugs do not break down in sewage treatment plants and are becoming observable in rivers that are used for drinking water by downstream residents. Guess I'm part of that trend.
My cousin Sean and his three-man roofing crew (Jerry, Jimmy and Timmy) arrived around 3AM. They had been delayed from leaving St. Joseph, MO due to an acrimonious dispute with another client. My mother did not realize that I had planned for them to sleep in the living room and she was a bit taken aback by this invasion of her privacy. I made some perfunctory phone calls to area hotels to confirm my belief that there were no available rooms in the inn - thus necessitating the men sleeping on our living room floor in the first place. But there was no problem as the guys were quite friendly (despite a 16-hour drive in a pickup) and they immediately retired for what was left of the night.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2005
At 6AM, my father demanded to get up for his regular morning TV regimen. However, there was a problem in that his TV was now surrounded by four large, snoring men who probably wouldn't take kindly to being rolled over by an old guy in a wheelchair. I tried explaining the situation to my father, but he insisted on going into the living room. Thankfully, we had an old black-and-white portable in the garage, which I retrieved and set up in the back bedroom...placating my father but making it impossible for my mother and me to get much more sleep.
Interestingly, I did hear a news report that explaining the shortage of workers in the area. Pretty much every store and restaurant had a help wanted sign out front. Although the reporter gave no source for his information, he said that the low-wage workers were on "vacation" drawing unemployment. "They'll be back when the unemployment runs out."
The movers arrived on-time around 8AM as the roofers were rising for the start of their workday. Suddenly the peace of our little home was shattered by the presence of nine burly men performing various acts of physical labor. As the roof was coming off, the furniture and boxes were going the door. The movers completed their task in around three hours and drove off into the sunrise.
Meanwhile, we discovered that our shingles were old and inadequately installed. Each shingle had only three nails instead of four and they appeared to be 20-year shingles rather than the more durable 30-year shingles. If we had gotten the roof replaced before the storm, perhaps the shingles wouldn't have blown off and they'd still be living there today. But there wasn't much we could do about that now.
Special mention should go to our old piano. In keeping with their habit of trying to do things on the cheap, in 1974 they purchased an old player piano (without the player mechanism) replaced the ivory and refinished the cabinet to give me an instrument to learn on. However, the age of the piano led to early development of a number of dead keys. Plus, it always sounded a bit like a player piano even when played by a human. I hated piano lessons and stopped playing after a couple of years (Despite my love for music, I always hated someone telling me how to make it). 30 years later, the piano's a wreck and it took all five grunting men to get it out of the old house and into the new one. Mommas...when in the market for a piano, I say go digital. They're cheaper, sound alot better, have better action (at least the good ones), never require tuning, take up less space, and when your kid loses interest, you can sell it quick and move it out with a small dolly.
Our old home was now quite empty and ready for the impending remedial demolition. My parents said goodbye to some old friends and we drove off into a new town and a new life.
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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
The movers called at 6:45AM and arrived around 7:15, having left Lafayette around 2AM. When I told my father the movers were coming, he asked for tissues. He remained quite oblivious to the tons of junk that the five men were hauling into our living room just inches behind his recliner.
I asked the foreman if he had any idea of the weight of the move and he said it was around 15,000 pounds. Normally that weight would also fill the complete volume of the truck, but since we had so many books, the load was very dense and only filled the truck by about half. One of the mover's comments was "You could open a book museum here!" Much like the load out, the load in was quite efficient and made somewhat easier by the fact that most of the furniture and boxes were going right into the living room to be stored until a more permanent living situation could be found. Three hours later it was all over.
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Later, my cousin called and asked about the status of our FEMA trailer, which I had not thought much about for the past two weeks and which I assumed would never arrive. I had seen hundreds of those trailers stored on the tarmac at the old Chennault Air Base, but a variety of rumors were swirling about what was going to happen to them. Trapped either in bureaucratic malice or inefficiency, they were too late for us. However, Sean could certainly use one.
One of my mother's neighbors who was retired from Conoco had heard a rumor that 500 trailers were going to refinery workers, which would make sense since the primary value of Lake Charles to our country is for its refineries. There certainly were trailers sitting out at the air base.
I called the FEMA number that I had been left a couple of weeks earlier. I got no answer, no voice mail, no nothing. Unclear about my own handwriting, I tried another number that I thought it might be and got another FEMA contractor who was not aware of our case or our agent, but said she would try to find out what the situation was and get back to us. At that point, my mother and I discussed it and agreed that it would not be right to take a trailer away from someone who really needed it. However, I was curious whether anyone would ever get back to us, and, to my surprise, someone called a few hours later.
It turned out that our application had been closed for some unknown reason. I suspected it might have been related to the failed attempt to arrange a visit by a FEMA adjuster in mid October. Regardless, moving ahead with the trailer would require going through the application process all over again and I politely said we had decided to relocate and would no longer need their services.
I also explained the situation to our contractor and he was in complete agreement that we shouldn't take an emergency trailer away from someone in a much worse situation than ours. He had been considering purchasing a travel trailer anyway and ultimately did when he returned to Missouri after completing the roof.
December 1 - 4, 2005
With the task of moving my parents complete, I began to make plans to return to New York on the following Monday. There were a number of little household chores that needed to be completed, but a large portion of my time was devoted to scanning some of the photos and slides that had been newly rediscovered in the move - some of which appear on this page.
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On Friday we took a trip into Monroe in search of a mattress for my father's adjustable bed. Our first destination was B-Joe's Wholesale Furniture, which was just a vacant slab since it had burned down some months earlier. We did find a place called Sleepy Hollow Furniture that was willing to order one and deliver it for a $35 fee that my mother was strangely averse to. We did do some searching at furniture stores in Ruston, but ultimately my mother called Sleepy Hollow and got exactly what she needed. And they hauled off my old nemesis, the King-Size mattress!
We celebrated my birthday on Sunday with a trip to a surprisingly unfriendly church and lunch at a Chinese buffet. As with many churches, they have divided their morning into two services: an 8:30 traditional service and an 11:00 contemporary service. Although my folks would have preferred the traditional service, the the time required to get my father bathed, fed and dressed makes it extremely difficult to get anywhere by 8:30AM. So, contemporary service it was. Although the music is a bit too loud and catchy, in form and message, it really wasn't that different from the traditional services I grew up with and continue to seek out.
Aside from the perfunctory ritual of friendship, there was an uncomfortable moment when the pastor popped up a Power Point (tm) slide of Bush, Blair and Aznar Photoshopped into royal clothing, with the commend, "Three wise men... Bush, Blair and some other guy. At least we hope they're wise." I'm not sure whether it was supposed to be a joke or some subliminal plug for Faith-based Initiatives (tm), but there was no laughter. The discomfort came because my father detests Bush and has a tendency to yell, "Shit" whenever he appears on TV. Fortunately, my father's dementia did not overwhelm his sense of propriety and there was no ugly scene.
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We picked up a carrot birthday cake at the Country Market and discovered after a few bites that, appropriately enough, the bottom of the cake was moldy.
December 5 - 7, 2005: The Trip Home
As with the Rolla bus station, the Ruston bus station is the parking lot of a convenience store, although the clerk in the convenience store serves as a ticket agent. The itinerary home involved a 6-hour bus ride to a overnight stay in Meridian, MS, followed by an 11:17AM train to New York.
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The bus was exceptionally crowded and characteristically nasty. When I got off in Meridian, it was so crowded that only a few of the dozen or so people waiting to board could get on the bus.
The Motel 6 was a brief cab ride away and featured a view of the entrance to a long departed amusement park and drive in movie theatre.
19:52 12/05/2005 Jackson, MS |
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Amtrak is great...for people who aren't in a hurry to get anyplace fast. "The Crescent," originating in New Orleans was delayed four hours and twenty minutes by freight congestion associated with track damage caused by Katrina. Because Amtrak does not own the tracks in this part of the country, they take second priority to freight trains and much of the delays involved sitting on sidings waiting for freight trains to pass.
The delay was not unexpected or entirely unpleasant as it gave me the opportunity to take a walk around historic downtown Meridian, MS. As with most American cities, the older central business districts were largely abandoned in the '60s, leaving behind the vandalized shells of vacant businesses. Although there was only a limited amount of business life, the old stores were remarkably well preserved, almost as if they had been frozen in the '50s when all the nice white folks moved to the suburbs. As with the downtown in Lake Charles, there were architectural remnants of feeble attempts to revitalize downtowns in the '70s, but there was no fighting progress.
Some of the old "ghost" wall advertisements had obviously been restored, giving evidence that there are historic preservation forces at work. I also discovered Jean's Restaurant, just down the street from the train station, which featured fine Southern cuisine and was justifiably packed.
It is curious how some people respond to the sight of someone taking photos. After 9/11, some have become especially sensitive to tourists taking photos of public buildings and photography has become an act of civil disobedience. For awhile there was a ban on photography of any New York transportation facility and I still find myself looking over my shoulder before snapping pictures of the subway. In the St. Louis bus station, a Greyhound worker asked me to stop taking photos of the station, although he was quite happy to chat about it's construction in 1927 as the Cass Bank. During my walk around Meridian, I got numerous stares and a unusually friendly greeting from a gentleman who appeared to be driving an unmarked police cruiser. The needless level of paranoia that has been nurtured in our country since 2001 is quite stunning and it will be nice when we have politicians who don't use fear as a primary tool for consolidating their power.
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On the train, I had an opportunity to chat with four evacuees and a recovery / demolition worker from New Orleans, who was taking the train to Florida save money (gas is $3.09 in New Orleans). The worker's comments were especially troubling. Unbeknownst to the larger public, they are still finding bodies in attics every day as they demolish homes amidst the toxic rubble. The National Guard didn't do as thorough a search as might have been reported, although given the conditions, it's hard to fault them. For political and economic reasons, the desire seems to be to create the illusion that everything is fine. Given the toxicity of the area (requiring recovery workers to wear hazmat suits), it doesn't seem likely that there are intentions of rebuilding many of the destroyed areas as FEMA "slips out the back and hands it to the Corps of Engineers." While FEMA is paying $28 per square yard for demolition, the rate is $7 for his company after everyone in the corrupt chain of contractors and subcontractors takes their cut. He mentioned personally seeing 500 trailers that were sitting and waiting, while numerous evacuees continue to fester in hotels.
The four evacuees were surprisingly cheerful, although it masked a deep and obvious sadness, with one gentleman saying simply, "I'm homesick." He mentioned that, "The media didn't portray it the way it was. Some of it was like that, but not all." One evacuee described symptoms that hinted at PTSD; inability to sleep or make decisions.
Although everyone in the group had been able to get out of the city before the storm hit, I asked why some people chose to stay. "Lots of different reasons," they told me. Previous evacuation orders had turned out to be unnecessary and there was a sense that the authorities were "Crying wolf." Evacuation is more than just jumping in a car, and some people were, in fact, too poor to evacuate. Finally, there were the old folks, set in their ways, and having a false sense of security from surviving previous storms.
This also resurrected the question in my mind of why people would want to keep living on the brink of disaster in areas subject to frequent hurricanes. In our family's case, the primary reason we were in Lake Charles was because my father had a job there...a non-issue now that he is disabled and retired. We have no family there and while they still had friends there, more and more were passing away as the years rolled on. The evacuations were awful and the house was too much work to take care of. Time to move on.
But for people who have lived there for their whole lives and have family there, it is a different story. Disaster can and does happen anywhere. There is no escaping it and, thus, it is arguably worth the risk to continue living in a place you like and have roots in. Despite the questions surrounding the future of New Orleans, the market for houses in areas that are "high and dry," is quite active as area residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed are making the choice to stay in the area. Ironically, as we are trying to get out, our contractor from Missouri was considering relocating to the area because he likes the weather and there is plenty of work.
The four hour delay persisted through to the final destination in New York's Penn Station.
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20:13 12/07/2005 The mail |
20:14 12/07/2005 Mission Accomplished |
Epilogue
The move to the rental house in Ruston is temporary and there will probably be another move (albeit much less complicated) in the first half of 2006. My mother is looking around for a permanent home to purchase. But since old and new homes in all price ranges are usually outfitted with doors and other features that do not have the handicapped in mind, it is also quite possible that she will have to build a house...which is, of course, a major pain.
We managed to get my folks moved within 10 weeks after the hurricane struck. I am, perhaps, most thankful that we got through it all with no significant illness or physical injury. The mental scars are another story, but pain is weakness leaving the body.
Perhaps the major lesson learned from this experience is the reinforcement of my pre-existing belief (necessitated by my tiny NYC apartment) that the number of things you keep should be limited to a bare minimum of items that have personal or practical value. Your "things" will consume you and distract you from what is really important in life.
When in doubt, throw it out. Ultimately, someone will have to toss it out anyway. But it's your life...do what your heart tells you.
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If God had meant for me to see the sunrise, he would have put it later in the day.
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