Hope

My county had a major (hurricane caused) flood in 1986, nine years before I moved here. Many of my neighbors who'd been through the flood were very worried about my building so close to the river (even though I am not on a flood plane). One dug out a paperback published after that flood and made sure I read it. It was a compendium of the newspaper stories from the time. Horrific. The pictures terrible.

One story I remember vividly, was a man who'd come to rescue a woman in a trailer. She was willing, but her father wasn't. By the time the water was five inches up the trailer floor, he relented. Too late. The truck was flooded. When they were sitting on chairs on the kitchen table, the rescuer took out his pocket knife, and cut through the ceiling, pulled himself up onto the top. Water kept rising, she wriggled up, too. Were swept away, but hit a tree, and pulled themselves up into the branches. The water kept rising. They climbed higher. He belted himself to the branch. He could go no higher.

At morning's light she was gone. As was the trailer, the truck, and the neighbors.

The pictures:

A house rested on the baseball field. A before and after of several trailer parks. Pastures strewn with boulders half the size of houses. Roads washed completely away.

The title of the book was "Pendleton County Destroyed" and the prediction was the county would never revive.

It has. Home is home. And people came back as soon as they could, and fixed what they could, and rebuilt what they could not fix.

This is all that gives me hope for New Orleans. Humans are cussedly, blessedly cussedly, obstinate critters, and home is home.