PHOTO BY ROMNEY CARUSO
wanted to get a better sense of what might
happen than I could get from the national
news outlets. It wasn’t reassuring. Martin’s
Ida projection map had Houma pretty close
to the bullseye.
I have a lot of experience with hurricanes
and understand all too well their destructive
powers. As Hurricane Audrey roared over us,
I recall being an eight-year-old kid hunkered
down with my family in my grandparent’s
small rental house on Gum Street in Houma.
The roof miraculously survived, but I can still
vividly remember the shrieking wind and the
candles throwing flickering shadows on the
wall after the power went out. I can admit it
now: I was terrified.
I was a junior at Terrebonne High School
in 1965 when the principal came on the
speaker in the late morning to say, “Well,
we’re dismissing school. There’s a hurricane
called Betsy headed our way and it’s looking
bad.” (Yes, we went to school that morning!
There was no early-warning Weather
Channel back then.)
5 6 R O U S E S N OV E M B E R | D E C E M B E R 20 21
We still lived on our little farm out on
Bayou Black — a charming but aging house
with a questionable tin roof. We sat on
the bayouside in the middle of sprawling
sugarcane fields which, as my nervous mom
pointed out, would provide little shelter if
Betsy hit us head-on with her projected 140
mph winds.
My father wanted to stay — until late
afternoon when winds from Betsy’s outer
bands started to really shake the roof. We
had an invitation from a Houma friend to
shelter at her substantial Victorian house on
Wood Street and so we made the decision
to flee.
It was a memorable drive down that old
Bayou Black clamshell road — scudding
clouds, pummeling winds, blinding rain,
thousands of acres of sugarcane already
blown flat as though a giant lawn mower
had descended from the sky. A time or two,
I thought our old Jeep Willys wagon was
going to blow into the ditch — if not into
the bayou itself. We made it, nerves frayed.
Betsy swooped in at night, and I kept vigil at
a window, at one point watching the tin roof
of a garage across the street blow off sheet
by sheet, the sections helicoptering away in
the howling maw.
I recall falling asleep on a couch only to
be awakened by a sound. Or, actually, the
lack of any sound. The eye stood over us,
and the night had gotten eerily quiet. We
ventured out onto a porch and stared at the
moon and a few twinkling stars. And then the
other side of eyewall moved in — shaking the
solid old house to its bones. But we made it
through unscathed.
Our farmhouse wasn’t so lucky, and we
knew the decision to leave was the right one.
We lost about a third of the roof. The rain
had drenched walls and buckled wooden
floors. We had a few outbuildings back
then, including what I called a corn crib —
a small wooden building about the size of
an outhouse where we stored feed for the
chickens we still kept. We’d rounded up the
chickens and locked them safely away in the
corn crib, or so we thought.
