Moonlight Mile

I found that there are some things I got to do while RVing that I wasn't able to do when I lived in a regular neighborhood in a regular house living a regularly scheduled life. After my mother died I found it most soothing to ride my bike late at night (midnight even) around the perimeter of the RV park in Hoover, Alabama. It was a smooth ride, paved and mostly well lighted. It was peaceful, with zero traffic. In the summer the heat usually broke after dark so a cool breeze would envelope me as I made my laps on a purple mountain bike that used to belong to my niece Emily. There's not a regular street too close by so there was no other traffic to even think about. Even the other residents weren't stirring that late. The RVs scattered throughout the 2.5 acre park were quiet, with no lights on. Sometimes the dogs would come with me, leashes left behind. Who was to mind? You can do a lot of musing on a bike when you don't have to be conscious of traffic or other people. I would look at the stars, the night clouds and the occasional bat that would be attracted to the insects around a parking lot light. Often John would join me in my cyclic wandering. Sometimes we would hear deer moving through the woods on the edge of the park. The dogs would be intrigued and stare into the darkness, ears on high alert. The few times we did see deer my dog Tumbleweed thought it a good idea to chase them up to the tree line, which overjoyed him but exasperated me. He's 14 years old and in great shape, save the fact that he's missing most of his teeth.

"With what exactly were you going to take those deer down?" I asked him one evening, "You have 8 teeth." He wagged his tail happily.

Grendel, our food-obsessed spaniel hound mix, loved these late outings for the simple reason that it gave her the opportunity to see if anyone had left a crumb of food around the park after a cookout, picnic or pet feeding. Her nose drove her to and fro as we would make our way around the perimeter or up and down the mostly empty parking aisles. The night she found a leftover chicken wing was both the happiest and saddest night of her life. She found it, she was in love with it, she wasn't allowed to keep it.

Boomerang, the stray dog we found and adopted while hiking in Rising Fawn, Georgia, would keep to the edges of the park and her steady pace only changed if she saw what she surely considered her main nemesis in life : rabbit. Boomerang loves to chase rabbits. She turns into a blur when the rabbit chase is on. She's very fast, but even so, doesn't seem to want to catch them and eat them, just chase them. And they gave her ample opportunity for that.

So, as it turned out, everyone in our little RV family got something from our midnight rides: John and I could muse on life or smaller questions, Tumbleweed might get a chance to feel like a wolf with a mouth full of teeth , Boomerang could possibly find a rabbit she hadn't raced yet and Grendel could dream of finding treasure in the form of yesterdays fritos.

Everyone Knows It's Windy

In some ways my life is now 3 years old - my new life that is, for it's been 3 years today since Katrina turned my world completely upside down. I saw so much destruction, so much quiet suffering, so much disappointment, heartache, fear and frustration following that storm that it changed me and my world view forever. There's little more disconcerting than having your entire emotional and physical landscape re-arranged in a matter of hours. To have your world collapse in on itself. To have the systems you counted on break down completely right in front of you. It's confusing to know you survived and others didn't and later that the joy of surviving would often give way to the pain of loss and irrevocable, catastrophic change.

It's easy to get lost in the leftover effects and damage caused by Katrina but as I sat today and reflected on what it meant for us to have experienced it I realize that I lost a lot, including, eventually, my mother (she was injured during the storm and never walked again, subsequently dying of pneumonia and a host of causes primarily related to her being bedridden...and I suspect a contributing cause might have been a broken heart, for Katrina and its aftermath completely broke her heart) but even so, I didn't lose as much or suffer as long as some folks did. Finally, when we were able to leave, we left. I've only been back to Biloxi a few times since Sept. 2005. Over the years I would often sorely miss my South Mississippi beach haven. Then I would go visit, and watch the community struggle to rebuild....brave and determined, that's no lie...and I would walk around streets that no longer looked familiar and have to track down businesses that I'd patronized for years, because they moved. Last time I was there, in July, I looked around at the beginning-not-to-look-so-battered landscape of my sweet Mississippi home and thought again, "I miss Biloxi."

At that moment I realized what I was yearning for was forever gone with the wind and the water. I would miss Biloxi whether I was in Biloxi or not. It's a yearning for a missing friend. It's the mourning for a dead relative. The sadness over an intregal part of the heartbeat of your life that has changed forms and left you to figure out the rest. And we will. The Gulf Coast will recover. And yet the Gulf Coast, and we Katrina survivors, are forever changed.

Now Gustav threatens. Katrina's bad boy brother is, at present, taking aim at an area not yet recovered from the last disaster. I can promise you that while the rest of the country finally went on with their lives after Katrina no one who experienced it has gone a day since without thinking about some aspect of what happened. Today, for the first time in 30 years I have neither a home nor a parent nor a sibling down on the coast and nothing of immediate worry except friends and humanity and all the animals down there, a generalized brooding over a dangerous situation. To watch the dire predictions on the Weather Channel and the cable news coverage without it connecting directly to me and mine is an odd sensation after experiencing the best and the worst of hurricane seasons from the 70s until 2005. This must be, I mused, like a veteran of one war watching another one on TV from his living room instead of from the inside of a tank. It's a totally different perspective of an upheaval that you know only too well.

I know what the people who are hunkering down and staying in the path of this storm are thinking and feeling. I know what they are steeling their nerves for. I know what the evacuees in the heavy highway evacuation traffic are thinking, how they are determined to do what needs to be done and hope to save their energy for the days ahead. I know the worries over water and gasoline and pets and houses and friends and neighbors. I know all of this and I will pray hard for the Gulf Coast states. I hope you will too.