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The irony is that the National Hurricane Center had forecast that New Orleans would be hit head-on by a category five storm. That didn’t happen. In the last hours before landfall, the storm shifted direction to the northeast and its full brunt struck Gulfport, Mississippi, rather than New Orleans. Had the forecasters’ prediction proved correct, the levees surrounding New Orleans would have been turned into little more than strings of silt and the loss of human life would have been incalculable.
Weeks later, Hurricane Rita churned ashore at Cameron, Louisiana, just south of Lake Charles, the exact same place Audrey made landfall in 1957 when my half brother and I worked on a seismograph barge west of Morgan City. It is no exaggeration to say the southern rim of Louisiana is gone. Fishing villages, towns, hundreds of square miles of sugarcane and rice fields look like surreal footage from a film depicting an apocalyptic event.
But as Clete suggested, you don’t surrender the country of your birth to either the forces of greed or natural calamity. The songs in our hearts don’t die. The spring will come aborning again, whether we’re here for it or not. Clete Purcel always understood that and as a consequence was never defeated by his adversaries.
Southern Iberia Parish was under twelve feet of water after Hurricane Rita. East Main, where we live, was virtually untouched. The flowers along the street are blooming, our lawns green, the days balmy, the bayou hammered with a brassy light through the trees. Why is one person spared and another not? Why do the Yvonne Dragoons of the world suffer? If age brings either wisdom or answers to ancient questions, it has made an exception for me.
But I don’t dwell on the great mysteries anymore. Alafair will be home for Christmas, and Molly and I greet each day as lovers just discovering one another. I live in a place where Confederate soldiers in ragged uniforms hover on the edge of one’s vision, beckoning from the mist, calling us back into the past, reminding us that the mythos of winged horses and Grecian warriors was fashioned in our collective souls, that our story is one of ancient gods and peoples, inseparable from our own.
I think it’s not bad to be a player against a backdrop like that.
