HURRICANE CAMILLE’S RECORD, set fifty years ago, is one of dreadful superlatives. Her eye moved across the mouths of the Mississippi River and the lacings of marsh and sounds east of it to come ashore on the Mississippi Coast packing sustained winds of 190 miles per hour, gusting over 210. Her barometric pressure was measured at 905 millibars, 26.80 inches, the second lowest, after the mass-killer Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that hit the Florida Keys, ever recorded on the United States’ mainland. Hurricane-force winds spread wings a hundred miles east and west of the eye. The storm surge was the highest in American history — until Katrina pulled a repeat bull’s eye on the very same coast at very nearly the same point of landfall four decades later — at an official 22 to 25 feet. It was measured by a survivor at 28 feet inside one building, but the building collapsed, and the record couldn’t be verified for the books.
Seventy-some hours after my mother and brother and I had hopped into a car to ride from our family’s farm in coastal Mississippi, where I’d just spent my sixteenth summer driving tractors and milking cows in Uncle Frank’s dairy barn, to the New Orleans airport and fly to London and my expatriate American family’s newest overseas home, (I’d grow up in four), Camille moved over the farm by night. Mammaw (my grandmother, in Southernese) and Frank and Aunt Elouise and their four girls hunkered in the darkened living room of the farmhouse, candles and lanterns sputtering in drafts, misty spray jetted into the room by extreme wind pressures through places you wouldn’t think of, sills and door jambs, out of light sockets and keyholes and at the worst even the joists of walls and ceilings. The eye passed over their heads a little after midnight.
Talk to my family of the eye today and they’ll speak with awe of frogs. The forests were splintered and flooded and the frogs appear to have concluded that their patron element of water had finally won its age-old struggle against dry land and they were free! Freed from the tyranny of mammals for amphibians to once again rule the Earth! In the dripping stillness of the eye they sang a full-throated pipe-organ victory chorus that night that’s etched in survivors’ memories. A few hazy stars appeared, swimming weakly overhead. A cousin who was on a farm just south of ours swears he could hear the boom of surf pounding at the ocean’s rim, on a shoreline temporarily driven several miles closer by the monstrous storm wave.
The cloud and wind of the southern edge of the eye wall drew near to the farmhouse with first a rustle, then a roar, to the explosive pops of tree trunks snapping and toppling to the ground as winds returned at maximum pitch coming out of the opposite direction from which they’d blown a few minutes earlier, whipsawing heeling trees already barely clinging by their roots to the rain-saturated soil. Some time during the night, flying branches struck the house as a tornado skipped close overhead, lifting shingles and shearing the top off the big live oak that overarched the back yard, then danced away through torrential darkness.
But the storm and the Almighty were kind to my uncle and his family, and to those many of us who loved them, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, the wind softened, and the hours crept toward a bleak dawn.
I read about Camille in the Times of London, in my family’s suite at the Royal Kensington Hotel, eating breakfast seated on a balcony overlooking the dark green treetops of Hyde Park on a perfect English Rose of a late-summer morning. It would have been difficult to get farther away in body and mind from the chaos wrought across the tidy working farm I’d left only three days before, where reality had become a Through-the-Looking-Glass world inverted into the unbelievable. That was the waking nightmare that greeted my relatives at daylight, a Boschean vision of the familiar distorted past easy comprehension, when they shoved the back-porch screen door open against a tangle of fallen oak branches.
Every metal shed and barn, some old and red-rusted, had been stripped of their cladding. Bare wooden frames stood skeletally around dented cars and unmoved tractors they’d housed at sunset. Pecan trees behind the house and around the cowlot were denuded of leaves, their branches starkly bare as in mid-winter, trunks scarred with white gashes where limbs had torn away. Many old trees had fallen, but the dairy barn still stood, though Uncle Frank noticed that its roof had been lifted in a piece a few inches up and set back down atop the cinderblock walls just a shade off square, and thus it would remain for the rest of its days. The barn’s survival was critically good luck, for it gave Frank and the whole family (excepting Mammaw, who had her kitchen to rule) a place to milk the dairy herd, by hand into buckets that had to be poured out, twice every day until help and generators arrived to power the barn’s milking-pumps system and refrigerate the milk storage tank. Full udders take no notice of hurricanes.
The storm sounded the death-knell of wooden fences that had endured from the farm’s Old-South beginnings, posts of indestructible resin-rich heartwood gathered from virgin Longleaf pine forests when my ancestors and their slaves cleared these fields, by hand and animal power, two decades before the Civil War. In their place, outlining fields and lanes, would come rows of business-like aluminum chain link…storm fencing, it’s called.
The woods themselves — and we have ample woodlands on our property, plus the deep dark cold creek called Catahoula running through the dense thickets of its flood bottom — had been rendered impenetrable, their edges woven into giant mats of wind-hurled branches and broken trunks, their depths hopelessly tangled by deadfalls and matted vines. For several years thereafter, Frank’s work around the farm in most of his spare time, and mine during my next and last summer spent there, was with chainsaws in the ravaged woodlot that lay at the end of the arbor-like Lane that reached a quarter mile towards our back pasture and its surrounding woods from behind the old white shingle-board farmhouse. It had been a wildwood forever, home to bobwhite quail, foxes and bobcats and red fox squirrels, but now the wrecked forest would be cut and bulldozed and burned into new open pasture, shaded here and there by the storm’s tallest survivors: One little patch lost in the quilt of the Deep South’s wilds, one small example of a hurricane’s power to wreak permanent change with its violent, insentient touch.
Wild turkeys made a comeback in the region following Camille, after a century of over-hunting had turned them into a kind of hunter’s holy grail, and deer numbers exploded, for the ruined woods were too dense for hunters to enter. Most farmers on the Mississippi Coast had too much on their hands, anyway, in labors of recovery, to do much of the hunting so many habitually pursued.
But the Lane was gone. For every one of us in my large extended Southern family for whom the farm was something precious, our real hearts’ home, the Lane, a leafy gallery shaded its entire length by overarching trees, had been its most delectable secret place. I’d sit in the dappled shade of its tung nut trees in the quiet of an afternoon with rich and idle time to dream, and watch breezes ripple the nodding seeded heads of Bahia grass into golden waves billowing across a sun-drenched inland sea.
A small band of Native Americans had camped in the woods at the end of the Lane within Mammaw’s early memory. My cousins and brother and I found stone arrowheads there. I showed one years later to National Geographic’s staff archeologist George Stuart, who at a glance identified it as having been chipped into shape 5,000 years ago by the hands of a mid-Archaic-period Paleo-Indian, out of flint quarried from the Alabates deposits in the Texas Panhandle 800 miles west of here. Carried by a chain of ancient hands, the point had rested in the humus of the forest floor untouched these long millennia. The Indians Mammaw glimpsed as a little girl were fleeting, ethereal wraiths of an ancient human saga now vanished into the mists of history, the last of an archaic line reaching far back into the unwritten past who’d made these woods their home. And in my grandmother’s lifetime, a last, lingering band had departed them as silently as smoke wafting away through the trees under the press of my ancestral Europeans’ tidal wave of conquest and subjugation and habit of turning forest into farmland, finally and forever gone.
I found a leather-bound Bible in the woods lying open to the sky, parchment pages rain-soaked but well preserved, where Frank pointed out the ruins of an old foundation, and moldering boards from a long-collapsed wooden shack. An aged black man had lived alone in the cabin when Frank was a child, he recalled, but my uncle had been very young, and remembered nothing more about him. A spring bubbled up at the edge of the woods nearby, tapping the rooty sponge of the woodlot’s floor, and it was the clear, sweet water, quite likely, that drew the Indians and the solitary black man and the white farmers who built the old farmhouse that abides today.
The woods are pasture now, the spring a boggy briar patch. The Lane’s ancient, thick-grown fencerows were replaced after Camille by the parallel gauntlets of wiry metal fences, unshaded by trees that will never grow back. But hurricanes’ winds of change are not always agents solely of destruction. The shocks of Camille set in motion events that led within a couple of years to an epochal shift in our farm’s raison d’etre, from dairying to raising soy beans. My uncle graduated from the confines of a small family dairy to join the ranks of Farmers of the New South, and went on to enjoy a glorious decade and a half raising the South’s first-tier money crop, putting extra jingle into his pockets and freeing him at last from the shackles of inexorable twice-daily milking times, the jail sentence that is every small dairy farmer’s lot.
Camille’s visitation in August, 1969, may have indirectly saved the lives of family when Katrina struck on virtually the same path in a ghastly reenactment in August, 2005. My relatives had not forgotten the awful helplessness of imprisonment beneath the roaring pitch blackness of Camille’s fury, and everyone left for safer havens well inland before Katrina once again sent the eye of a major storm raging directly over our farm’s fields and treetops.
With one exception: A young cousin stayed on with her boyfriend at his family’s house a block in from a Mississippi beach. The storm surge drove them up to the second story, then into the attic, then onto the roof after they chopped their way out, in company with the young man’s aged father in his wheelchair — the reason they’d stayed. The rooftop was soon to go under as the house collapsed, and they missed grabbing an empty boat that floated past. But they were saved when the young man swam to another boat, one he’d tethered nearby, and they rode it through the storm waves to safety. The enduring lesson was taught again, that once delivered up to a hurricane’s whimsy, an individual’s fate will be determined by the improbable hand of chance, governed by laws of physics and indifferent storm gods reigning over chaos with a throw of the dice that may preserve or end, but will invariably mark forever, the lives of fragile mortals.
Our farm lies far enough inland, just under twenty miles by crow’s flight from the closest beach line, that storm surges can’t reach us. But the dangers from winds are acute. They can arrive still salty with spray from the Gulf, barely tamed by their brief acquaintance with land, and sometimes concentrated in the funnels of a hurricane’s frequent tornadoes. Yet when Katrina struck, her winds once again spared the old farmhouse anything worse than roof damage, though once again they demolished all things aluminum.
Katrina’s winds weren’t kind, though, to our hundred-year-old, ten-acre pecan orchard. We’d re-rooted the trees after Camille pushed most of them over and left them reclining but unbroken, their root balls bared but intact. We trimmed away damaged limbs and straightened tree trunks back to the vertical with a giant’s hoist and tackle, for a successful recovery of almost every one. They’d stood all my days as a cool vision of shade within sight of the house and the dairy barn. This time, in full summer foliage they were taken aback by a tornado’s swirling winds like a galleon’s sails in a waterspout, and went down so twisted and tormented that all but one were smashed beyond revivification, or even sale for lumber.
One young pecan tree survives, out of ten acres of old trees that had stood there for a century, and fifty seedlings I’d planted around the orchard’s edges and in holes torn in its grid by Camille, when I lived on the farm in my early twenties. After thirty years of life they’d matured into their most productive prime — like me, I had liked to think.
This time there was to be no transforming resurrection. Uncle Frank died a few days after my fiftieth birthday, in a fullness of years and surrounded by his wife and generations of their descendants. My aunt and a cousin live in the farmhouse now, their daughters and families nearby, three generations of offspring in and out the door.
A neighbor seeds and fertilizes the fields we worked, and cuts and bales and hauls away our hay in recompense. My aunt and my brother now own the land that was Frank’s life’s work, the woods and fields, a scattering of ponds and the living thread of the old Indian creek buried in its deepest forest shadows. But the farm that was the heartwood of my childhood is no more, along with my youth, and the boy who adored the uncle who made of it all a gift to him.
But not all gone. The woods are as tangled as ever, and the creek’s black water still runs between shaded bottomland banks thick with old-growth gum trees and cypress and sycamores, hickories and magnolias and white oaks. I’ve discovered beehives in them, and watched with fascination as the insects came and went, greeting each other with news of where flowers were to be found. Mammoth bewhiskered catfish and snapping turtles of an outsize sort with cruel beaks and hoary mossy shells who were ancient when I was young lurk at the lightless bottoms of its cold, deep bends. Fat-bodied cottonmouths of girths greater than a man’s forearm bask in beams of sunlight on fallen logs, to flop into the water with a hollow splash when footfalls come near.
So, too, run my memories of the shady arbors and sunlit fields of the farm at the edge of the Mississippi woods, and those I loved there, as deep and eternally flowing as Catahoula’s dark waters.
END