After riding out the storm amidst a barrage of uprooted pine trees in Carriere, Ms., Eddie and I headed up to Chatham, La. to meet up with the rest of my family. The Jimmie Davis State Park, located on Caney Lake, was the site of the happiest reunion I've ever had. Besides my parents, sisters and brothers and their kids, I got to hug some people I thought were dead: my brother in law Clayton Davis Sr., my uncle Rumio, and his sons Rumio A. and Larry Pascual. They had stayed behind in "Da Parish", like so many had, thinking it wouldn't be so bad. They were wrong. The storm was not as bad as the wall of water that came rushing in afterward, when the storm surge topped the levee and washed it out. Clayton stayed on his roof for a couple of days; the  water wasn't as high at the Pascual home, but all of them hinted that the way they were treated after being rescued, and what they saw, was all too painful to talk about. But the kind people of Jackson Parish took care of us, feeding us, clothing us, helping us heal.

FACING THE DESTRUCTION

Ed and I stayed on Caney Lake until we had to come home to take care of things. Hurricane Rita delayed our homecoming, but we finally made it. What we saw was beyond our imagination. It was as though a nuclear holocaust had occurred. There was the smell of death, and the landscape of brokeness. Not a bird singing, not a mosquito, a fly, or a living animal to be seen. There was a dead deer, a dead 12 ft. alligator, and a dead boar on Interstate 510 coming in, but no sign of life.

We went to our mobile home first. A tornado had torn holes in the roof Ed built over the home. The flood level inside was only about 2 and a half feet, but water had streamed down the walls from the roof damage and rain. Except for a few things that I had placed higher up before I left, everything was ruined.

I went to my mother's house next. There was a brown substance on her fence and home, about 3 ft up, and we thought that was the water line. When we looked inside, we realized the water was actually about 12 ft. up, and the brown mark was the oil line, from the Murphy Oil USA spill. Inside, it looked like someone had picked the house up and shook it; the furniture was unrecognizable and there was 6 inches of oily mud on the floors. I cried.

I went to my brother Mickey's house, and, by the seagrass on the roof, I knew that the water was much higher there, near the Forty Arpent Canal.

I returned to Caney Lake, and could hardly speak to my mother about what I had seen...it was too much. I was in shock. I realized then that nothing would ever be the same for us again. Our family would be scattered over time, and we would never see many of our friends again. It was the hardest thing, next to the death of my eldest brother, that I have ever faced.