August 29th hits a lot of folks hard in south Louisiana..even harder in St. Bernard.

But for me 8/27 is the date that is burned in my mind and soul as the last day my world existed as I knew it.

I woke up that morning in Baton Rouge for a meeting not really cognizant of what was about to happen (no smart phones back then and you had to check your email on a 10 pound steel-encased desktop).

While attending that meeting of the LAGOP state committee, I heard chatter about the approaching storm and that contraflow would start soon. I asked for the meeting to be adjourned but the leadership refused, with one obnoxious member from Lafayette mockingly commenting that the weather outside was beautiful and he wished that he had brought his golf clubs. They tried to leverage the storm to pass through measures that wouldn’t ordinarily be adopted aside from these circumstances.

My obligations were at home and left and they ended up lacking quorum (if you wonder why I challenge the party establishment so much, it’s rooted in this event).

Arriving home with family we struggled to convince my disabled grandfather to leave to no avail.

He demanded to stay and claimed it never flooded. As reason wasn’t working, we chose to literally carry him out of his home kicking and screaming into the backseat of my uncle’s car. The water that would engulf his home would be five feet, a foot above his hospital bed. As the house was one story and his physical condition being what it was, carrying him up a rickety ladder to the attic would’ve been impossible. And even then heat exposure would’ve been deadly. Thankfully a terrible tragedy (loss of home) did not become an unfathomable one.

After my family departed for Baton Rouge, I loitered in my childhood bedroom for a moment not realizing I’d never see it like that ever again. Almost absentmindedly I grabbed a binder of baseball cards, flipped through them and tossed the book on my bed. The bed ended up floating with those cards while the ones on the shelf were destroyed.

Back in my townhouse I engaged in the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, repositioning books on shelves that would end up being submerged below 11 feet of storm surge, and packed enough for three days. Though I suspected this storm would be different than any before, the magnitude of what would manifest was unthinkable.

After that I had the unhappy task of trying to convince a friend’s grandfather in similar shape to mine to leave, even going so far as to making arrangements to have the police drag him out (a tricky situation as he was well-armed and was an excellent shot). Fortunately his son managed to prevail upon him to evacuate, settling the matter.

As I was driving with my Ford Escort loaded to the gills with whatever I thought was important that could fit, I made a decision: I would eat at Rocky’s before heading out. Amazingly the restaurant was open yet empty and I peacefully had dinner while reading through the beespaper- a Sunday morning tradition for me now observed out of necessity that Saturday night. It would be the one moment of Zen I experienced that day.

I then visited friends and watched the Weather Channel. As my vehicle wouldn’t have made it far in the traffic I had the idea of using a Southwest Airlines pass that would let me fly anywhere. Making arrangements to stay with a friend and his wife in Arizona for a few days, a seat had just opened up on an early flight to Phoenix (hours before I had booked a flight out for 4 PM but I suspected the winds would lead to the airport shutting down well in advance of that, so I kept calling back looking for an earlier option).

MSY looked like Havana Airport on New Year’s Day 1960, bursting with people all trying to fly out before Katrina made landfall.

After boarding the plane I fell asleep immediately having been up 22 hours straight. I woke up when the plane’s wheels touched down at Phoenix Sky Harbor, gathered my life in three bags plus the clothes on my back and waited in heat I had never experienced before, having never been to Arizona in the summer.

Just over 24 hours before, the thought of a hurricane had not entered my mind as I was in Baton Rouge yet there I was now standing in Phoenix.

Though the first drop of water had not yet broken through the levees, my life and the world I knew would never be the same again.