A post for hurricanes

When we lived in Slidell, LA, we watched hurricane preparation movies akin to the blood-and-gore movies of driver's ed. This was in the late 1970s, so the movies focused on hurricane Camille. There was a bit about a house full of people at a beach somewhere who were having a hurricane party: a bunch of the party-goers were interviewed, already drunk, about how much fun they were going to have. Then the movie cut to afterward, when all that was left of the house was a concrete slab on pillars with bits of twisted metal sticking out the top.*

What I remember most strongly is an image from the part about all the flooding: a pair of small white feet sticking out of a red rolled-up blanket. The feet looked about my size at the time, and for days I shivered to think of it.

Camille was very much a legend of my childhood. My maternal grandparents lived on the banks of the James River in Virginia, on a hobby farm carved into a hillside. The hill went up and up, away from the river, with the road cut into it, the house carved lower than that (3 steps up to the front of the house, 18 to the back), 5 brick steps down to the dirt road leading to the barn, a jumpable descent to the first level of fields, and two more lower than that. Grandpop grew Silver Queen corn in the lowest field, just on the banks of the river (the best corn ever in the world). When the river was low, Pat Price's cows would wander across and eat up the crops.

During Camille, the James River rose all the way to the back steps of the house. It flooded out the barn almost completely. There was a house just on the riverbank: a big, gorgeous thing, that was destroyed by that flood and was a ghost house for over 20 years, until some guy moved his family in there to "hide from the gubmint."

*Funny that the Wikipedia article says that never happened. I guess the movie was perpetuating a myth.

(cross-post)