Hurricanes Personally Felt by a Land-Loving Nebraskan
I’m a Midwesterner. I was born here in Nebraska. My parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and great-great-grandparents all were Nebraskans. And yet I have learned to live with one eye on hurricane season.
When I met my wife some 24 years ago, I never knew that something annual occurring in the oceans would influence my life the way it has. We’ve never lived in the South. And with in-laws moving closer to their grandchildren here in the Midwest, we don’t even visit the South very often anymore. But hurricane season, and specific hurricane events, have greatly affected my life.
My wife’s family is from Louisiana. While they had several homes across the state, the two center points were always just north of Lake Charles and on a historical property just upriver from New Orleans. I was married there. And in some ways, it was a fairytale wedding with pomp and circumstance found more in the antebellum days of the 1800s. Her family’s heritage, in particular her father side, almost exclusively found for generations in the deep South.
And here is how that heritage, and more importantly hurricanes, affects this land lover from Nebraska.
Katrina, in 2005, caused us to drive from Minnesota into the South to get our six-year-old niece and four-year-old nephew. They came with clothes in plastic shopping bags and medical documents in paper bags because my brother-in-law didn’t have time to pack with any certainty. We had them long enough to put them in school in Minnesota as my brother and sister-in-law tried to recover.
Rita, that same year, caused massive damage along the western side of the state causing us to help out family again.
Several more hurricanes have come, causing my wife and I to try to be helpful a time or two over the next decade plus.
But it was a year ago where we were most tested.
Laura came ashore and devastated Lake Charles and the surrounding community. Almost a year ago to the day, I got on an airplane for Dallas, landed, and spent a full 24 hours collecting food, water, gas, generators, a satellite phone, and supplies and drove that overloaded suburban into a devastated hurricane zone of Southwest Louisiana to rescue my 77-year-old father-in-law. I stayed a week, with no electricity or running water, helping him clean up the acreage to the best of our abilities in some hundred-degree heat, and then drove him out to our house some 18 hours away. As a side note, after eating food out of cans for seven days, that Burger King hamburger in Jasper Texas, the first real food we had in seven days, was the best hamburger either one of us had ever had.
Three months after Laura, my father-in-law literally picked up and moved into the Midwest from a home and farm/work buildings that he built from scratch over a half-century.
Now Ida has shown up in the Gulf and is moving onshore. My wife sits on the phone with her mother and her brother making sure they’re OK. She rocks in her chair in the bedroom watching the Weather Channel. And even if relatives weren’t there, having a long heritage found in that part of the country, she would still worry for friends and communities, many of whom don’t have deep pockets to begin with.
A personal history with hurricanes, massively limited by time. Having been a witness through this, I also know that the Red Cross, churches, and other nonprofits will help those in need. It will make the news on the major networks and people from across the country will donate to help their fellow citizens. I am reminded the word philanthropy doesn’t mean “money” but means “love of humankind.” We need a lot of that right now.
