Carlyss, La. – MeMe Reider picks out a half-inch-thick white emergency candle, sticks it in the middle of a pink Snowball pastry and slides it toward her son, Chase.
Josh Herman, Chase’s cousin, flicks a lighter and soon the candle is aflame.
Chase leans forward and blows out the candle as his family sings “Happy Birthday.” Then he pushes the Snowball away. Chase doesn’t like Snowballs.
“Yeah, it’s a heck of a 21st birthday,” Chase says, shaking his head back and forth.
“Hey, you’re not in a hospital,” MeMe says. “You’re not going to a funeral.”
“I guess you’re right,” Chase says.
“We’ve got air conditioning,” MeMe continues. “We’re doing pretty well.”
Considering that the full force of Hurricane Rita came through Carlyss, a small town on the marsh’s edge south of Lake Charles, La., only a couple days before, the Reiders and their family members here are doing well.
They have a sizable generator providing power to their house, running their refrigerator, their lights, their air conditioning and their television. They have food and water and gas for their trucks.
And they are already rebuilding and trying to get life back to normal, having started well before National Guardsmen, local officials and insurance agents could get to their area to help them.
The family came in by boat Saturday morning, when the winds were still as high as 60 mph and the water was above the fence posts in the pastures.
“I can’t see a man sitting around and waiting for someone to help them,” says Harold Herman, Chase’s uncle and Josh’s dad. “I wasn’t raised like that.”
In Carlyss and other small towns around Calcasieu Lake on Monday, there are signs of a region already in rebirth after a hurricane that destroyed so much and mucked up much of the rest.
People who could scoot past the roadblocks barring entry to the area lugged generators and supplies to their houses deep in the bayou to start cleaning up.
Harold Herman spends part of the day helping fix a friend’s roof and generator. The rest he dedicates to cleaning up around his own house – which was flooded with more than 3 feet of water – as well as his mother’s house, the Reiders’ house and his store down the road. Chase and MeMe’s home didn’t flood inside, and the entire family has moved in there temporarily.
But while Harold does as much as he can to make home feel like home, the signs are everywhere of how far away normal really is. No bathrooms. No running water. Thick piles of marsh grasses and reeds coating the back and front yards, some of which Harold could clear with the tractor but some of which will have to be moved out by hand.
And there is mud everywhere. It is olive brown, the consistency of runny oatmeal, starting to smell like sewage and impossible to keep off you. Legs, hands, ears, hair. It slides side to side as you step, then stays where it stops until squished again, constantly shifting the topography of the Reiders’ front yard.
The yard had once been lush and green, the trees full and beautiful.
“It will be that pretty again,” MeMe says hopefully.
There is mud in front of the Hermans’ convenience store, Bayou Landing, a couple blocks away. Inside, the water sent heaps of cotton ball-like ceiling insulation tumbling down. A neighbor who lost his house in the storm stops by to ask what he can do to get the store running again.
Out front, two ragged-looking men sit on the curb in the sun, just waiting, begging, for help. Harold sees them and asks if they want work. They say they do; they’ll work for food.
“Stick around,” he says.
The men are Dennis Barnette and Bill Armold, commercial fishermen who rode out the storm in their fishing boat lashed to a tugboat. Winds screamed outside. The boat shook worse than an earthquake for 12 hours, Armold says.
Since then, they have been living on that battered boat, but have little water or food and have received little assistance.
Soon, they are walking down the road toward Chase and Josh’s grandmother’s house – Harold’s mother’s house – to help move out furniture and pull up carpet. There’s mud in there, too, coating ceramic angels and china cups.
Chase, Josh and the men carry furniture and knickknacks out of the house and place them in the shallow gunk of the front porch, sweat mixing with mud as they wipe their brows.
Then they tear out the carpet. It is 90-plus degrees outside. Inside, the air is sour and motionless.
Later, Chase comes back home, beads of sweat pooling on his face and racing toward the tip of his nose.
This is, remember, still Chase’s birthday.
At one point, his mom had planned to take him to New Orleans for his 21st. “So he could buy his first beer on Bourbon Street,” MeMe says.
With those plans canceled by Hurricane Katrina, the family was looking for a different spot when Rita hit. So, instead, MeMe rounded up a cold Dr Pepper for Chase – Chase had been dying for a Dr Pepper.
Josh took him out fishing Monday morning, and the boys speared two halibut. The night before, the boys waited up until midnight, made a batch of sweet tea, toasted the day and collapsed into deep sleep.
And Monday night?
“Well, this is Louisiana, so we probably will drink,” Josh said. “It’s a given.”
One more little bit of normal.
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
