Thursday, August 30, 2012.
The Book Of Isaac, Chapter Four.
I'm ashamed of myself that, for all the ardor I have for radio, I could not find a working battery-operated radio in the house. The one I had counted on only made its batteries heat up. I was saved by a little television set I bought years ago for use with my karaoke player. Since the advent of HD on-air television, sets like this are worthless for TV. But I remembered that it got AM and FM, too. It needed twelve C batteries, but I had them. My connection with the outside world was back.
I didn't need a radio to tell me what was going on, though. The rains had picked up overnight, harder and more continuous than what we'd seen so far. The winds were just as high. I wasn't surprised to see water ponding south of the house. I picked out a tree at the edge of the water and kept my eye on it the rest of the morning. In a lull in the rain, I checked a spot where ditches run to the road. Usually. Today, they were flowing the wrong direction. This meant that the Abita River had left its banks. Not good.
To cheer us up, I made pancakes. I bought a Cassette Feu stove about twenty years ago, with a case of butane. This little thing throw off tremendous heat, and for that reason it's much liked by chefs who give cooking demos in the field. I made a half-dozen pancakes, which the girls enjoyed. As always, the first one was the worst one. But I ate it, giving only perfect flapjacks to the girls. Who loves ya, baby?
Dire reports were coming in from all places where the watery storm surge--still being piled up by incessant, strong wind from the south and east--neared the tops of levees. The worst situation was in Plaquemines Parish, where water, driven by southerly winds, was nearly topping the western levees. Lafitte was in equally bad shape.
And then we began hearing about the water levels in Lake Pontchartrain. It was high enough that the Causeway was shut down. I heard a guy calling WWL again and again from Venetian Isles, in the levee-less eastern extreme or Orleans Parish. He blamed the enhanced protection of the rest of the city for his neighborhood's woes.
The western coast of the lake was clearly in for a repeat of Gustav, at least in terms of the flooding potential. Indeed, the first photos from Manchac showed Middendorf's surrounded by at water at least as high as what shut the place down in 2008. I wonder if the raised kitchen and new building Chef Horst Pfeifer built will be high enough. It's not something I'd bet on.
That water, in turn, was heading toward Laplace, where it would knock out electricity, flood neighborhoods deeply, and shut down the water system. Isaac was now well north of our latitude, drifting slowly northwest. But I kept pulling tricks out of its eye, as if to make sure that everybody was inconvenienced.
Still, by late afternoon things seemed to be going the right direction at the Cool Water Ranch. But for some reason, big branches began to fall from trees. One of them hit MA's car and put a dent in it.
She discovered that when she and ML decided they couldn't hang around the house anymore. They found out that The Chimes was open, and went there to satisfy a craving for (I am not making this up) cheese fries. I was going with them at first (not for the fries, believe that). But when I saw water running across the only road away from our place, I insisted we stop. They went back home, ejected me from the car, and headed right back out again. They came home after dark, the road still completely covered with water, making the deep ditches on either side invisible. I'm always joking that my wife never listens to me, and here was a prime example.
Storms are stressful. We've never had anything really bad happen to us, through. It's no wonder a lot of marriages break up after natural disasters.
I took a nap on the sofa and had a dream in which something was beeping and something else was buzzing. Ah, the power's back on! I said in the dream. That happy thought woke me up. And I saw that, indeed, the power was back on. Hurrah!
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
