Katrina....Stop already with the "gifts"!

  Living on a bayou, one expects (or at least should expect) storms to roll in from the Gulf.  Most of these storms are not so severe that the damage is lasting but every so often one will ravage the area. Hurricane Camille was the "benchmark" storm for a long while.   It was the storm that made history.  For years, tales from those surviving the storm were regaled during front porch visits.  Although the farm where I grew up was not right on the water like the Little Bayou House, we did see a good bit of damage from that storm.  Then, along came Hurricane Katrina.  A new benchmark was set.  This was the storm that beat all storms.  It is one that will be in our lore for years to come.  Someone once said that Hurricane Camille killed more folks during Hurricane Katrina than it did when it hit the Coast.  People never expected a storm to be stronger than the one that they survived. I say...never trust a hurricane. (And, for the sake of argument, Katrina did hit here.  We did get the brunt of the winds and surge because we were in the northeast quadrant..the strongest part of any storm.  But we did not get the news coverage that other places did.  So be it.  We survived.)  Hurricane Katrina was one to reckon with and one to deal with even twelve years down the line. 

  Now, dealing with what Katrina left behind is becoming quite evident. The recent rains did not do us any favors.  During the month of June alone, our area received over 24 inches of rain.  Hmmm, that is more than some places see annually.  With the Little Bayou House sitting high on a hill overlooking the Bayou, we had little worries of flooding from these rains.  What did happen was that the torrential downpours washed dirt and sand down into the marsh.  While this is not too bad for the marsh, it is bad for the hillside.  Ruts have been washed wherever there was a lack of good sod.  These ruts now have exposed a previously unseen hazard.  Both of the aforementioned storms dumped tons of debris on our property.  A lot of this debris was covered over with several feet of sand that had been carried on the tidal surge all the way from the beach.  For over a decade now, stuff laid buried beneath the sand and presented no problems.  It would have been great if it had stayed that way.

  This afternoon, I made a quick hike around the hillside.  At one point, I noticed some broken glass in one of the washout places.  As I picked up glass, more became exposed.  Nigh on a gallon bucket of glass shards was in this one area.  I was a bit leery about being sliced by the shards so only those readily reachable were gathered.  Tomorrow, a rake, shovel and bucket will be put to use once again.  One thing that I have learned...it is smart to watch where you step.  Any one of these shards could have easily sliced right through my leather moccasin and punctured my foot.  Above is the first handful of shards that I retrieved on my walk.  I had to go back with a bucket to get more.

  Tomorrow's cleanup (over a decade after the fact) is in preparation of a special visitor to the Little Bayou House.  I will be fostering a dog while my son, daughter-in-law and grandbabies are away for an extended time.  I would hate to think that PJ might cut his foot while he is in my care.  I will have to keep a close watch where he runs....or maybe get him shoes!  Hmmm?  Now that is a thought!  Nah, a good scan of the lower part of the yard on a daily basis will solve the problem.  

Standing the test of time.

  While excavating the area for the Bog Garden, Son has been uncovering a lot of "treasures" and a lot of "non-treasures" (also known as junk).  When Hurricane Katrina pushed through here years ago, she picked up tons of sand from the beach front miles to our south.  All of that lovely sand was deposited in places like our yard.  This was fine by me as I would much rather have mounds of sand than washed out ruts. In places, the sand was piled up higher than six feet.  Now, years and years later, the sand has leveled to become part of the landscape.  One particularly deep area is where Michael decided the Bog Garden should be so he is digging through not only sand but lots of stuff!

  We were tickled to see just how many plastic yard ornaments were under the sand.  Dozens of three foot tall red and white candy canes were pulled from the area.  These were considered junk and tossed on the trash pile to be hauled to the dump.  Thousands of shards of stained glass were also found and painstakingly collected to be recycled as art pieces.  Stained glass work has always held me spellbound and I can hardly wait to begin creating with these hurricane shards.  Then he found a treasure.....a true treasure.

  A crazy as it may sound, he found a glass canning jar with a zinc lid still intact.  It amazed us that the lid had held tight all of these years underground.  The fun part was that the jar still contained whatever was preserved inside from years ago. Granted the stuff had become a gelatinous, brown liquidy mess but it was still tightly bound inside the jar.  Not being one to waste a perfectly good canning jar (hmmm?), I unsealed the jar to find a substance that was not at all what I expected. I figured that whatever that stuff was, it had to be quite smelly by this time.  It was not.  It smelled highly of blackberry jam!  (No, I did not eat it!)  

  After a bit of scrubbing, the jar and lid came incredibly clean and will soon become a container for buttons or beads in the craft room.  "Waste not, want not."  comes to mind.  I figure if the jar withstood a hurricane of Katrina's strength and then ten years buried in salty sand, it has a story to tell and should be added to the collection of weird and wonderful things housed within the Little Bayou House.

Mysterious Black Gunk

"An up through the ground came a bubblin' crude.

Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea."

~The Beverly Hillbillies~

Paul Henning

I was down near the Bayou edge when a startling sight drew my attention to a mound on the ground. There bubbling out of the white sand was something black and shiny..could it be? I prayed that this was not evidence that oil from the recent spill in the Gulf had reached our Bayou. Tar balls! I was heartsick to say the least. I poked at it with a stick..yep..tar. A black, gooey blob coated the end of the stick. It looked like tar, felt like tar and smelled like tar. Yep..tar. Tar balls! But my goodness! What a huge tar ball this was! As I poked around on the sand, I came to realize

that this thing covered an area about eight feet in diameter. Then a thought..what was a tar ball doing this far up the hill? There has not been any tide high enough to push anything this far on shore and I had not seen any evidence of oil anywhere else. Wait! Maybe I was hasty..maybe this is not bad news! Maybe I struck oil like in the old television show "The Beverly Hillbillies"!! Why else is there black, gooey stuff bubbling out of my ground? Black gold..Texas tea! Woohoo! I am rich! What would I do with my millions?? I poked the goop again. Is crude oil supposed to be this gunky? This stuff is like glue..thick, sticky ..hmmm ..probably not. Rats! I am not a millionaire after all. Sigh.....

I persuaded my son to dig around in the sand to see just what was the source of this viscous serpent that was oozing from my hill! The more he dug, the more we found. This mess was everywhere! Then..crunk! Crunk? Huh? He pulled and pulled. After much heaving on one particular wad of goo embedded sand and grass, he managed to overturn a large chunk. The answer at last! My find turned out to be a buried fifty gallon drum of tar..the stuff used to tar roofs and seal boats. How long this drum had been buried there is a mystery. It had to be quite a while since the metal drum had already rusted through. Another

mystery..and perhaps a clue to the age of the drum..and then again maybe not..is an old brown glass Purex bleach bottle stuck in the middle of all of this tar. (The picture is of an identical bottle.. the one in the tar was so covered that a picture identifying it was impossible.)