This account is copied, as written, from my journal of a trip home in April 2006. These are the observations six-months after the storm.

Hurricane Rita: 2005 track

The Ruby Tuesday closes every day at two in the afternoon because there are not enough workers. Most of the apartment buildings in Lake Charles are closed pending repairs. All the fast food signs are gone. It is six-months since Hurricane Rita hit and the casinos are up and running for the Texans looking for the good life, even if that good life is arrears in rent.

Dad and I left town at eight in the morning heading down LA 27 out of Calcasieu Parish for a tour of Cameron Parish. If the damage in Calcasieu is readily apparent, Cameron is a different planet. Hackberry, the last town before the parish line, and the Catholic church looks like an open-air pavilion. The east side is missing, scooped out like a melon.

Crossing the intracoastal we stop and inspect a construction project dad is working. At this juncture in our trip the devastation becomes complete. Cars stand on end in canals. Mattresses are suspended in branches of Live Oak trees. Houses rest a mile out in the marsh or prairie. Whole commercial buildings blown astride the highway have been bulldozed into the adjoining ditches. Shrimp boats and oil tenders lay at crazy angles on dry land. A coke machine, upright and ready for customers rests on a clump of sawgrass fifty yards from the road. Every line of trees is packed with fragments of lumber and personal belongings. Mile after mile, nothing is left, and nothing changes.

The prairie and marsh grasses are dead, killed by the surge of saltwater. The roads are packed with dump trucks and commercial traffic. The sides of the road are equally packed with families fishing or netting crabs. Life goes on.

Holly Beach on the coast is vacant of any surviving structure. We drove through a few miles of neatly laid out streets with drives leading to concrete slabs. Often a couple of cinderblocks are used to prop up an American flag. No debris clean up was needed. The hurricane blew the town twenty miles and scattered it among the marsh. One elderly woman (it was reported) found her home fourteen miles away with all the family pictures in place on the walls.

Driving the coastal road, we arrived in Cameron, the parish seat, after a wait for a ferry across the Calcasieu River. Cameron had one structure survive, the courthouse. A few well-made brick homes initially appeared to have survived. Closer inspection showed the interior gutted by the surge and the telltale eastern side shorn away.

Everywhere we looked the landscape was dotted with debris. As we exited Cameron the debris from the town had been piled twenty feet high and covered an area of several football fields.

A few miles on and more concrete slabs indicated the small town of Creole. Home of the Tarpon Freezo, where we often stopped for malts after a days fishing in the Gulf. Oak Grove, two miles south, was the same, wiped clean. As was Grand Chenier, twelve miles east.

We turned around and drove back to Lake Charles.

Be appreciative of what you have.