Hackberry, La. – Mark Huse wades through shin-deep water in loafers, jumps into his 20-foot-long fishing boat and ably assumes the controls.
The boat spins around, drifting past a dock that Hurricane Rita reclaimed. Waves tickle the underside of benches where sightseers would normally sit to look out over Calcasieu Lake. It’s a reminder that everything is different now along the Texas-Louisiana border.
Huse points the boat toward Hackberry.
It’s a town of not more than 2,000, a fishing village south of Lake Charles where people have always relied on the water and may now have been betrayed by it. Of the people on the boat, Mark and his wife, Temple, have run a fishing-guide service there for years. Ernie and Travis Constance, cousins and family friends, grew up there. It is the only hometown 16-year-old Travis has ever known.
When Hurricane Rita struck the Gulf Coast early Saturday with 120-mph winds and raging rains, it hit towns like Hackberry – small, rural fishing communities in the marshes south of Lake Charles – the hardest. Mark Huse was well aware of that, sweating through the storm at his parents’ house near Lake Charles, about 15 miles to the north.
But Sunday, he was trying to return home to find out how bad the damage really was and how long before home would be home again.
“We heard some say that everything was gone,” Temple Huse says. “And we heard some people say that there was only 8 feet of water. So we don’t know.”
The boat bounces along the waves heading south, past massive freighters and barges and tugboats and drilling rigs in the shipping channel. The water has the rainbow gleam of oil, and the air smells of petroleum.
Along the way, the hurricane’s wrath is evident. The shoreline is smothered in garbage – bottles and tires and the occasional cattle carcass. Trees are twisted like candy canes. Power lines dangle limply.
Mark Huse cranks the boat into Hackberry. The passengers’ necks crane; their eyes open wider. There are houses standing, but how well? There is flooding, but how deep?
“Looks like most of Hackberry is still standing,” Ernie Constance says. “But it’s swimming.”
Huse takes the boat up a canal between rows of houses. He and most everyone else on board splash out of the boat.
The water is the color of bad coffee, knee-high for the most part, concealing the gooey mud beneath. The air is thick and still. It weighs on you, pushing you further into the flood. The experience is like walking through pudding.
The Huses walk into their house through the broken glass of a door. Inside, there is no water, but mud an inch thick evenly coats the floors and everything on them like layers of paint.
Temple begins to cry. Mark tries to find reasons to be optimistic. The couches look OK.
“Not bad,” he says. “Salvageable.”
“God, how are we gonna get all this mud out?” Temple asks.
The hurricane’s winds and water have rearranged furniture in the house, torn off part of the roof and knocked bottles off the shelves.
But yellow sticky notes reminding Mark to call somebody or pay bills remain glued to the kitchen countertop. A stack of Louisiana Game and Fish magazines sits next to the notes.
Outside the house, it is clear that, while some in Hackberry have a damaged home to come back to, others have nothing left. Some homes are obliterated, wood siding having been torn from the frames, leaving only crooked skeletons. Others, trailer homes mostly, are flattened.
Mark says one more time that he thinks the house is fixable, that there is reason for hope, then he steers the boat to his fishing lodge.
“Baby, I don’t see the roof,” Temple says to Mark.
The boat pulls into the slip in front of the lodge. It is still there but has been knocked off the pillars that once elevated it.
Inside, and in the surrounding two buildings that Mark Huse owns, windows are smashed, refrigerators are overturned, walls are gone and siding is tattered. Two-by-fours have shot like arrows through the second floor of one building, one sticking half-inside, half-outside.
“So much for this,” Huse mutters.
“I just finished working on it, and now I’ve got to do it all over again,” he would say later. “Man, it’s just starting to set in. It’s a lot of hard work.”
The group turns to head out of Hackberry and back to Lake Charles, but not before making one last stop to check on boats owned by men with names like Eddy, Freddy and Jimbo. Some boats are cracked in half; others are fine – fitting for a storm that treated neighbors so unequally.
About a half hour later, Huse pulls back into the boat launch in Lake Charles. He says he hopes to rebuild his fishing lodge. But how? When? Only one building was insured.
Temple is trying to hold back tears, a desperate energy gripping her words.
“It’s devastating,” she says. “I don’t think anything could prepare you for what your eyes were going to see.”
She pauses.
“I was thinking that the water has always provided our way of living,” she says, “but it was a demon in this case.”
Another pause, this one longer as she focuses on her suddenly bleak future.
“You just wonder how you even start,” she says. “I was asking Mark, ‘How do you get this mud out of there? I mean, do you Shop-Vac it?”‘
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
