I am from the North, and I am in the South right now.
Quite opposite the two regions are.
The North is cold in temperature, clean in air and sort of nicey-nice.
The South is hot in temperature, has the appearance of dirty in air because of the thick and humid air and is also sort of not nicey-nice but nice but really sort of, well, “I may shoot you if you don’t be nice to me” kind of place.
Frankly, I enjoy both the North and the South. Both nice places.
When hurricanes came into New Orleans and the Southern states before tractors and dump trucks and modern excavating tools were invented, I am not sure how people traversed after the storm.
Think about this… Can you imagine how long it must have took to clear all the debris spread over hundreds of miles? Unreal! How do you get a horse and big carriage through a dirt road that has thousands of downed trees on it? Or, where do you find clean water? Or, how about the number of people that died -- yes, dead people everywhere.
Imagine this, there is no National Weather Service, no radio, TV, Internet, nothing to tell you that a hurricane is coming, nothing. So, one night you go to sleep in your horrible 18th-century bed and everything is fine with the world because you are thinking “ahhh, I can’t wait to get to work tomorrow at the local alligator catching swamp” or “the wood-cutting forest that builds log cabins.”
And then you yawn, because it’s morning and you heard a noise that woke you up and you get out of bed and go over to the window that is foggy because that’s what glass looked like back then and you can’t see out of it, so you then go over to the door that barely opens because no one had invented a hinge that screwed into drywall back then, and you say, “holy Christ in heaven” because you just got hammered with bullet rain, wind that made you lose your breath and everything in front of your 18th-century eyes is frickin’ demolished…
Gone, baby.
And so you make it through the “real bad storm,” as the folks in town was callin’ it, and you ask yourself, “self, where am I going to live now, what will I eat, how do I leave here and survive, and when will this hand of mine that is partially bloody because some of the glass that is foggy hit it during the storm and severed it stop hurting?”
Hurricanes are bad, and they never lose, no matter the modern system of path trajectory and category-filing systems and low and high pressure and eye-wall jargon. They are tough roughnecks and they always win.
The good thing about 2008 is that people get a heads up and people can leave no matter the time spent in the car or the money you don’t have on food and hotel rooms , it’s worth it. Just think, at least you’re not that 18th-century fellow who just wanted to wake up and go work at the alligator catching pond business but got caught in a real bad storm.
Overall, I think people learned from Katrina -- but as you know, people have short memories, and mistakes are often repeated. Good luck Gulf Coast, I hope this is the last hurricane of 2008 -- but something tells me you got one more coming.
