Growing up fast with Gustav

In 1998, some friends and I drove down to New Orleans for a night out during the averted menace of Hurricane Georges. Later, from the basement confines of KLSU-FM, I dedicated The Who’s “Pictures of Lily” to the mere rainstorm that Lili had become in 2002. A few years after that, to me, Ivan was just an excuse to throw a party.

Point being, hurricanes used to be fun.

Peering from inside a bubble of innocence and the seemingly safe buffer between Baton Rouge and the Gulf Coast, anything other than incidental damage or a minor inconvenience seemed remote, something that happened to other people, God bless them. But not us.

Many in Baton Rouge thought Andrew was a once-in-a-lifetime storm. And for this 12-year-old, weathering that 1992 storm was like camping indoors. In a strange way, even Katrina bolstered our spirits here in the Capital City. When friends and cousins cling to you for refuge, just one look into their weary, devastated eyes brings a sense of your own personal safety.

Scientifically, I’m not sure what fraction of a second it takes for glass to break, but that’s exactly the time it took to shatter my feeble perception of security. The sharpest sound spiked through our house, and my wife Courtney screamed desperately over the eerie howl invading the room. I was in the kitchen getting water when it happened, and I pictured the worst: her lifeless body on the ground, the centerpiece of an ugly mosaic of blood and glass.

I had been telling her all morning to stay away from the windows. It was probably the skyscraping oak tree barreling into the neighbor’s yard across the street that piqued her interest. If she wasn’t standing on our porch, arms crossed and shoulders hunched into the gusts with me yelling for her to get inside, then her eyes were just inches from our living-room windows watching Gustav rearrange Southdowns.

Fortunately, Courtney had just sat down 15 feet away at the end of our couch when a branch broke through those windows, spraying glass and pinecones like bullets in all directions, with one two-inch shard plunging into her leg.

She removed it while scrambling to the remains of our living-room windows to survey the damage, and I combed the bathroom cabinets for a bandage. Anything to feel like I was protecting her, and the red rivulet running down her leg to her heel had to be dammed.

I found a roll of duct tape and hung our old couch slip cover—the thick uncomfortable one we both hated but for some reason never had the nerve to give away—over the broken panes. We huddled on top of our coffee table in the windowless hallway at the center of the house and counted the thuds on our roof. She curled up under my arm. We caught our breath.

When the rain finally slackened, our next-door neighbor Jason screwed a piece of plywood over our windows.

The first night without A/C was only 76 degrees. Not bad, though it would soon climb to 82, and falling asleep to the industrial hum of surrounding generators took some adjustment.

The day after the storm we ran into several friends at Zippy’s. With his young son and a small staff, owner Neal Hendrick chopped and grilled steak after steak for the somber Southdowns masses now resting on his outdoor patio and swapping hurricane stories. And it was a good time. For a couple hours, at least, our accidental congregation forgot about the mountains of labor and traffic and the days of darkness and heat ahead of us. The drinks were cold and the quesadillas fresh. It’s amazing how instantly communal we become when electricity is jerked away like a plug yanked from an outlet. No one had anywhere else to be.

In some ways, Gustav broke through the modern cocoon that keeps me perpetually occupied and often isolated. Nothing focuses the mind like an 8 p.m. onset of darkness and near-silence. In the week after the storm we talked more to our neighbors than we had all summer. One chopped up some of our branches with his chainsaw; another lent us an ice chest. We cooked eggs and sweet-potato pancakes on our gas cooktop for our friends down the street. People spilled out of their homes to sit on their porches. The ice cream truck parked on our small street—a first, I believe. Courtney lined up with the crowd for a frozen strawberry bar.

Not that everything was hugs and ice cream. Tempers rose with the heat of our home. What was once a gorgeous neighborhood is now bruised, some of Southdowns’ oldest trees torn up by the roots. Our home is stripped bare of the shade it once enjoyed, our cover of protection blown far away.

Clearing a yard that was literally blanketed with huge branches and mysterious chunks of trees was tedious, even with help from family and friends. But our parents, as usual, were as supportive as they could be. “Just wait. A month from now we won’t even know we had a storm,” my dad said. Hope so, I thought. But I think what we’ve learned about ourselves will last much longer.