Ten years ago today, I woke up in Crestview, not realizing the community I had come to love during periodic visits with an old college friend would become home.
I was a Hurricane Katrina refugee.
Two days before, I was an evacuee at the house of a friend's dad in St. Francisville, Louisiana, a historic English community upriver from Baton Rouge.
On his battery-powered TV, as the Corps of Engineers’ flood walls toppled, I saw boats launching from the Interstate 10 exit ramp a mile from my house.
Uh oh.
Katrina was supposed to be another three-day vacation, like Hurricane Ivan the year before. But it got serious.
Since roads into New Orleans were blockaded, and I couldn’t get to my Metairie house — less than two blocks from the now-famous 17th Street Canal — I accepted my college buddy’s invitation and headed to Florida.
On the night of Thursday, Sept. 4, 2005, I arrived, exhausted, in Crestview.
The next morning, I stood in Publix, an unfamiliar grocery store, and was dumbfounded when not one, but two workers asked if I needed help.
It was that “customer service” thing we heard rumors of but never experienced in New Orleans! It was just the first of 10 years’ worth of kindnesses I’ve had since I blew over here.
A BOOT FROM GOD
Sometimes, it takes God giving you a hefty boot in the rear to get your attention. A once-in-400-years hurricane is a little extreme, but was effective.
I was a cruise line's marketing manager when its Buffalo, New York-based parent company fired all 120 of its New Orleans staff in the wake of the storm. Many of my colleagues, rendered homeless by Katrina, were now jobless, but it liberated me for periodic visits home to New Jersey to see my dad, whose health was declining.
God kept steady freelance writing and design gigs coming my way; then, after he called Dad home in April 2007, he dropped this job in my lap.
God has a funny way of doing things. We sometimes shake our head in wonderment — if not bemusement — at what he does, but hopefully we learn our lessons, too.
Crestview was where he wanted me to be. So here I am, writing for a small-town newspaper, a job I’ve wanted since I was a kid, attending a loving little church and surrounded by friends, my new family and two amusing, decorative but not-very-smart cats.
And all it took was an unladylike lady named Katrina to get me here.
Thank you for welcoming me.
PS: In case you wondered, I lived on the “good” side of the 17th Street Canal, where the floodwall held. My house survived, unscathed, but came less than a quarter-inch from flooding.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: HUGHES: Storm of the century also was my nudge from God (PHOTOS)