In lieu of a cathartic free-write on my experience of evacuating and experiencing a hurricane, I have decided to dabble in a kind of hybrid genre--the hurricane memoir blog post. I have actually been pre-writing this thing since I was in traffic going through Lumberton the day before Ike hit--I just didn't have that urgent sense of my ideas "bubbling to the surface," as Peter Elbow might say, until now, months after the event. I do not write this in the hopes that it will be entertaining to an academic reader (all the better, since I actually have no readers)--rather, I am writing it because I have had an uneasy feeling of being unable to fully commit myself to any of my other projects because this "thing" was swirling around in my consciousness, waiting to be written. Therefore, I remember...
...sighing after getting off the phone with my dad (the day before Ike), who urged me to get out of Bum-out in a hurry if I wanted to make it through Lumberton in an hour and avoid the really heavy traffic...
...me and a grad student whose thesis I was engrossed in directing exchanging lighthearted emails poking fun at the impending "doom," and me promising to get him comments through email that day unless I really had to leave (oh, the naivete)...
...packing up Sissy, who, after Gustav only 2 weeks before, had caught wise to the evacuation rigmarole and had to be stuffed into her pet taxi...
...her sad yowling all the way from Beaumont to Huntsville, except for a few blissful moments when she was napping...
...my aunt and uncle offering to let me stay with them in Point Blank, and me gladly leaving the Huntsville Econo-Lodge to ride out the storm with my family...
...getting to Point Blank, to find that I would be experiencing Ike with my aunt and uncle, my cousin and her husband, his niece and her parents and grandparents (and a few others--there were 13 of us when all was said and done)...all of us in the living room...sleeping on air mattresses...
...noticing that the weather had that warm, calm kind of "hope you enjoy this because all hell is about to break loose" pre-hurricane aura about it...
...me walking by myself down to the lake where my uncle keeps his boat docked, and noticing what I thought was a huge fake apricot colored water snake, coiled, sleeping around the rim of a bucket, and me, because I thought it was fake, bending over it to take a closer look...
...my uncle (in his seventies) coming down through the back yard with a 410 in one hand and a 357 in the other (muttering something about not being a very good shot, and me skittering off the premises to avoid becoming an accidental target), planning to do away with said snake when later on someone in the group alerted him to the fact that this snake was now swimming around in its aforementioned bucket...
...night approaching, and all of us settling down on our strategially placed mattresses...the weather channel going at full volume...me wishing someone would turn it down, as we were powerless to do anything except worry about potential damage to our towns and homes...
...someone making a joke about us writing our social security numbers on our arms and wondering out loud whether we could all fit in the bathroom, or better yet, in the basement, where my cousin and her husband had put their five beagles (adorable pups)...everyone laughing at that...
..later on, when the wind kicked loudly up to 90 mph and the countless pine trees surrounding the house started blowing sideways, and the power went out, and all was complete darkness and silence except for that eerie howling, someone asking again if we could all fit into the basement...and no one laughing this time...
...several of the older people saying things like "Oh Dear God," which I actually thought was something people only said in movies... me realizing I had not evacuated far enough but powerless to do anything now...
...hearing the weather channel reporter say definitively: "Crystal Beach is gone," which saddened me greatly, as my best childhood memories were of Crystal beach...seeing the Balinese Room in splinters (by the way, if you don't know what that is, there is actually a ZZ Top song about the Balinese)...
...once, when we had all gone to sleep, a terrible howling came from the basement that made us all sit upright--it was the beagles, and something (no one knew what) had set them off...
...all of us scattering to safer places over the next few days (me to Dallas, some others to Woodville, others who knows where) after it became apparent that no, we could not simply return home within a couple of days...
...me being happy that a week later my dad (who had evacuated with my grandparents to Marshall and stayed in his RV while they stayed with my grandmother's cousin) joined me in Dallas after he got tired of his diet of beanie-weenies and cheetos at the RV park, which had no power and no grocery stores open close by...
...me wondering what form this disjointed experience would take when I finally had the time to put it into words...
As a postscript, I'd like to point out that in my original draft of this post, I had written 3/4 of this story as a rambling essay. For some unknown reason, the text disappeared as I was trying to save it. Instead of scrapping the idea, I decided to redo the story as a series of cumulative sentences (the closest I will ever get to writing poetry). I'd like to kind of indirectly credit rhet/comp guru Dick Graves with this idea, as I had recently attended his fantastic NCTE panel on teaching the cumulative sentence before I wrote this.
*If you don't get the Tanya Tucker reference from the post title, shame on you!
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