EXODUS or HAN SOLO, COOLEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE
Running the hell away from Hurricane Katrina

Last Sunday afternoon, as Becky and I were making final preparations for riding out Katrina here in Baton Rouge, I called my parents. No one was home, so I left a message: “Um, isn’t anybody worried about us? Well, don’t; we’re taping windows, and have supplies, so everything should be okay.” I hadn’t yet heard from them, because they had only just returned from a vacation trip to Corpus Christi.

About an hour later, my Dad returned the call. He was worried about the fact that it was a category five storm. “Let me watch the news for a while and I’ll call you back,” he said. In my family, Dad is the hurricane expert. As a former lifelong telephone man, he had worked through four hurricanes, sometimes outdoors. I’ll always remember him getting in his car at the height of Hurricane Alicia back in 1983 and driving to work: communications are an essential service during an emergency—indeed, his work for Southwestern Bell was so important that it superseded any emergency obligations he had as a chief master sergeant with his Air National Guard unit, which was always activated during hurricanes. While I was growing up, I also watched him reading obsessively about hurricanes, and tracking them on his own map whenever one seemed to have the potential to be headed for Houston. It’s hard for me not to think of him as something as my personal tribal elder when it comes to the enormous storms that the Atlantic periodically shoots at the Gulf coast.

I was really hoping he was going to tell us to stay put. We weren’t really ready to bug out, and our three cats made things all the more daunting. I heard from him again pretty quickly. “Ron, I’ve never run from a hurricane before. But this thing is a category five storm, and I have to admit that the heaviest I’ve ever dealt with is category three. This is a really, really dangerous storm. I know it’s not supposed to be hitting Baton Rouge head on, but all it has to do is swing a few miles to the west, and then you’d be right in the middle of it. Please, please, please, get out of there now.” His logic was impeccable: the odds were in my favor, but if I lost the roll of the dice I could lose everything. This was an easy decision for me.

Becky got out the maps and asked where we could go—I 10 was at that point a virtual parking lot. My older brother, through my Mom, suggested that we head north, to Alexandria, where he had clerked in the early 90s at a Federal court. Becky plotted a course. We packed a few days worth of clothing, put the cats in their carriers, and headed out at around 4:30, knowing fully well that there would probably be no place for us to stay once we got to Alexandria. In other words, we hit the road not really sure of where we would end up. Having stayed up really late the night before, however, I was prepared to drive all night if necessary.

We did get stuck in traffic for about an hour trying to get over the Mississippi River and out of town, but once we got on Louisiana Route 1, it was smooth sailing. The traffic was heavy, of course, but not bumper to bumper. Really, Route 1 is something of a back road, which is how we were able to avoid the parking lot conditions we would have faced heading west toward Houston.

It was totally surreal seeing numerous military vehicles headed south while we and other evacuees were headed north.

As we finally approached Alexandria, we caught the only bit of storm that we would see. The rain started coming down heavily, in sheets blown by heavy winds. One of my windshield wipers was starting to come loose due to a botched replacement job I had done a couple of weeks before, so we pulled into the first convenience store we could find. Unfortunately, the parking lot had some enormous potholes that I just couldn’t see because the rain was so intense. I hit bottom twice, and my stress level ratcheted itself up accordingly. Now I had to check for damage under my car in addition to figuring out how to repair my windshield wiper.

At first glance, everything seemed okay under my car, so I looked at the wiper and decided it could be temporarily repaired with a twist tie. I headed into the store and bought the most expensive loaf of bread I’ve ever bought, at a whopping $2.17. But that was okay, because my repair job worked well enough. We headed into downtown Alexandria.

Soon after, we pulled into the local Holiday Inn at around 9:00. Becky went inside to check out the situation, while I stayed with the cats out in the car. I also called my parents to let them know that we had made it to Alexandria. My Mom told me to call my brother because he had been talking to a friend there who might be able to help us out. Becky got back in the car and told me that she had learned that the entire state of Louisiana was booked solid, and that maybe Longview, Texas was our best bet. Longview was like four hours away. The rain continued.

I pulled the car into the hotel’s parking garage and called my brother. Unfortunately, the “help” he offered was directions to the nearest Red Cross shelter, which had some sort of provision for dealing with pets, albeit elsewhere. That is, we were going to have to trust somebody else, in a wild and chaotic situation, to take care of our beloved kitties. Becky and I both felt that we were better off driving into the night. My brother was clearly disturbed when we rejected his suggestion, but it all worked out in the end. Still, Becky and I had no idea what we were going to do at that point: we didn’t know there was a room for us in Longview; we only had a suggestion from a random hotel clerk. But off we went.

We figured that we’d head up to Shreveport, and see what the situation was like there. If we couldn’t find a place, we’d cross the border into Texas. At this point, the rain had stopped, and I was feeling less stressed out, which was the perfect time to discover that there actually had been some damage from the massive pothole in Alexandria. I heard something dragging along my front right tire, and felt a drag on the car’s acceleration. Damn. I pulled the car over to the side of I 49, which we had transferred to in Alexandria, to check it out. Cars zoomed by at 70mph while I got out into the darkness with a flashlight to take a look. At this point, I feared the worst, being stranded on the road, with three cats, waiting for the hurricane to blast us. I’m not even a car guy; I only know how to change tires, batteries, and headlights. What if this was beyond my engineering abilities? I was pretty scared.

Quickly, I discovered that it was just a piece of molding that had come loose, and shoved it back up such that it seemed secure. I got back in the car, and once again we were on the road. I had to repeat this emergency repair job a couple more times until I removed a screw that was holding part of the molding up near the tire, allowing me to cram it further into whichever dark crevice I had been using. That seemed to do the trick, but I couldn’t get away from the fact that I felt like I was in the Millennium Falcon, making repairs on the fly, trying to escape a dark malevolent force, not knowing where to go.

Okay, I’m a geek, but little fantasies such as this make a nerve-racking situation a bit less painful: I’m not some schlep running away from a hurricane that probably wouldn’t even hit my home; rather, I’m Han Solo, coolest man in the universe. I said I’m a geek, didn’t I?

As we drove toward Shreveport, we looked at the parking lots beside all the roadside motels we saw: every single one of them seemed totally packed, no doubt, with New Orleans residents fleeing the storm. When we got to there, it was the same thing. All the motels appeared to be completely full. We even pulled into one place, but no one was at the front desk, and no one answered the bell—their parking lot was full, too. Onto Longview.

Somewhere along the way, Becky, our intrepid navigator, got a great idea. She called her friend Jeanne up in Ohio and asked her to hit the Internet to try to find us a room. This got a bit tricky because Becky was unable to charge her phone before we left, and my crappy phone has only a limited number of minutes, which are charged double when roaming. We had to conserve our phone time, which meant that we had to periodically check in with Jeanne to see if she had found anything. Just another stress-inducing difficulty to make our exodus all the more interesting. Or maddening. I forget which one. No, wait, I remember. It was maddening.

Finally, she found something in Tyler, Texas, hometown of football great Earl Campbell, but also a home for the Ku Klux Klan. Just our luck. We kept losing phone service, which was no surprise given that we were traveling—we also found out later that the Baton Rouge area code was jammed solid; no one could call in, but we could call out. Jeanne gave us a number right before we lost her. So we called Tyler’s Scottish Inn, and got some vague and confusing responses from the guy managing the place. Maybe he had a room; he wasn’t sure. Becky sweet talked him for a time, but in the end we had to wait for him to call us back. For a short time we were headed for Tyler, not quite sure if there was anything for us there. It was a pretty agonizing ten minutes.

Fortunately, he said he could set us up, and gave us directions. We continued to drive through the east Texas night.

When we got there at around two in the morning, the manager checked us in, but was again vague about our prospects for staying the next night. He said that maybe he had a room, but needed to see “how the reservations would work out.” We pressed him further on what he meant by that, but he simply repeated himself and told us that he would know better after lunch the next day. Becky and I speculated that, because this guy seemed to be a Middle Eastern immigrant, this was just some sort of cultural thing. Maybe it was some weird Bedouin-trading ritual, of which we had no knowledge, but I just couldn’t figure out what he hoped to gain by being so weird with us—it’s not like he was going to change his clearly posted rates by playing us for rubes. I still haven’t figured out what it was all about, especially because he immediately let us keep the room for a second night once we called him the next morning.

Because this place prohibited pets, we had to sneak the cats in, which was easy enough in the middle of the night. Our two older cats, Paz and Phil, were happy to be out of the car and their carriers, but our one-year-old, Frankie, went almost catatonic. He stayed in his carrier for a couple of hours, and then crawled under the bed. He didn’t emerge until I pulled him out when we left. Actually, we were a bit worried because he didn’t want to eat; he didn’t even want to hit the litter box that we brought with us. Fortunately, he recovered quite nicely once we returned to Baton Rouge.

In the room, I set up my laptop and used Becky’s AOL service to get on the net for some info. Unfortunately, our only option was dial-up, so it seemed to take forever for pages to load. Again, the Han Solo feeling guided me through yet another stress out. He dealt with crappy equipment during a crisis, and I did too—I keep telling you, I’m a geek at heart. Anyway, that’s why I didn’t really try to post from Tyler. The damn thing was taking too long. I can’t believe I’ve been using broadband for only three years. At least I managed to find out that LSU had cancelled classes Tuesday, which also eased my stress.

Still more Han Solo stuff: my car’s brake lights somehow got stuck in the “on” position. My Dad had no idea what to do about it and suggested unscrewing the bulbs in order to preserve the battery. Fortunately, a guy in the Wal-Mart automotive section suggested that it might just be a stuck sensor button, and he was right. I fixed it with duct tape. Just like Han Solo would have done.

It is also important to note, if only for local color’s sake, that I was slightly menaced by a big burly redneck in the Wal-Mart parking lot: he was walking right past me as I was getting out of my car and I said, “Hey, what’s up?” He just stared at me and moved toward his huge pickup truck, which, ironically, didn’t start. I really should have seized the moment, loved my enemy, and offered to help him jump-start it, but he made me nervous, and I had my own problems. I’ll do what Jesus would have done next time, I guess.

At the motel, we noticed that most of the license plates in the parking lot were from Louisiana. The scale of the evacuation was slowly sinking in. Here we were in the middle of nowhere, eight hours from the Big Easy, and most of these people appeared to be from the New Orleans area. Here’s what I wrote a couple of days ago about a brief conversation I had with one of the evacuees:

I spoke with an older woman who told me that she had lost everything and that she was pretty sure that a couple of family members had drowned. What can you say to that? My simple statement, "that's terrible; I'm so sorry," seemed trite, especially because I then broke off the conversation because Becky and I had to check out to leave for our home in Baton Rouge.

Indeed, the night before, we had seen on television what appeared to be the first report about the levees breaking. Even then, I still hadn’t quite figured out that my favorite city’s goose was cooked. Actually, it’s still pretty difficult to accept now, even after the wall-to-wall television coverage, even after witnessing the enormous triage set up just a few blocks away from where we live.

After sneaking the cats out, we hit the road again Tuesday morning, not knowing what the situation was like at our house in Baton Rouge, but happy to know where we were going. The trip back didn’t take nearly as long as the trip there and, with no hurricane threatening us, and plenty of daylight, it was much more pleasant. In addition to more military humvees and trucks, we also saw quite a few trucks and emergency vehicles, which had “disaster relief team,” or something to that effect written on them, headed south with us. Surreal. We made sure to get some more batteries, candles, and gasoline along the way, given that we expected the power to be out all over Louisiana’s capitol city. Amazingly, all was well at our house, just one tree branch down in the back yard, and the lights were on. Nothing bad had happened to us.

We unloaded the car and turned on the TV. Then we started to cry.

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