by K M Draughn

Created on: May 15, 2009

The sky and Gulf of Mexico met and both were black, the wind blew hard making the trees bend toward the ground. Cars bumper to bumper, lights and wipers on. This is not the way it had looked the day before when tourist were enjoying the beach and sites of the coast, no this day everyone was rushing , scared, getting out of town, like a scene from a horror movie.

I was just a little girl, I had just turned six a couple of weeks before Hurricane Camille came ashore in all of her horrifying glory. We had gone to get my Big Mama, my dad's mom, to bring her back to our house for a visit, the first week of September would mark the first anniversary of my Big Daddies death, and she was going to get away to our house for a while.

My moms aunt had never been to the beach, so we had gone by to pick her up to make the trip with us, we lived in central Louisiana, she lived in the north east corner, in the middle of the Mississippi Delta. When we picked her up and headed out that night, they were saying on WWL New Orleans, the radio station we always listened to when we traveled that there was a hurricane that would be making its way into the Gulf of Mexico in a few days, it could grow to be a large one. My mom got worried, but daddy said that it would probably be at least a week until it would be at the coast, and they are saying it would be headed toward Florida. Daddy had been born and raised in Pass Christian and had been through a lot of storms, so he told us not to worry.

We made it to Big Mamma' s late, and went on to bed, the next morning after a big southern breakfast we all went sight seeing, we drove from one end of the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the other, seeing sights where my daddy had grown up, "his old stomping grounds" he called them. I guess that is the first time I ever remember seeing some of those places, even thought we were there several times a year.

We went grocery shopping for things to cook for Sunday lunch, we would eat lunch at my grandmothers with my aunt and uncle and then leave head back to our house in Louisiana. There seemed to be no preparations for a storm, and I can remember later on my daddy and mom talking about how no one seemed disturbed over the hurricane watches being placed on the coast. Later on that Saturday evening the TV stations began to put out bulletins, and these were very frightening to a six year old, they were saying if you are in the sound of my voice, you are in danger, evacuations should begin now, this storm

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