T-Rouge\r\n\r\nI left her Friday morning at the kennel. Ark was near the house. We could walk there, and sometimes, we did. She had been there so many times for visits: routine, planned and unplanned, major medical and emergency. It was where we got her food for her special diet, and those nasty shots I insisted upon to keep her well long beyond her normal life expectancy. She had major life saving surgeries there under the care of Dr. Rollie and Dr. Beth. She had also been there to spend time at \"camp\" while mommy was away on business or pleasure. This stay would be because I was going away. All was well with T\'s health that day. \r\n\r\nShe liked riding in the car, but I could tell she always felt duped when we arrived at Ark, regardless of how good they were to her. Over the three and half years we lived near Ark, the staff had come to know T-Rouge well. I would call and identify myself as T-Rouge\'s human. I was better known as her human then she as my dog. They took good care of her. \r\n\r\nThe veterinarian, Rollie Norris, had purchased a house along Bayou St. John from Loyola University, where I had been employed, a house that someone had given to Loyola and had been used to house former Archbishop Hannan for a time. But, Rollie bought it from Loyola when we were ready to sell it and increase the school\'s endowment. \r\n\r\nPatty Hegwood, Rollie\'s business manager and part owner of the kennel, was married to one of my former second graders, Jason. But, Jason was more than one of my second graders. His father grew up in the house next door to me on Poland Avenue and had been a life long friend. The relationship with the staff of Ark Animal Hospital was more like family than a business relationship.\r\n\r\nSo, when I left her that Friday morning, I knew she would be in good care until my return. I was spending the weekend out of town, just Friday and Saturday nights, with a return flight on Sunday evening and a T-Rouge pick up on Monday morning, springing her from \"jail,\" before I went to work. I knew she would be fine. We had done this so many times before in so many places in our 11+ years together.\r\n\r\nI met Lucinda Robb, Luci Baines Johnson\'s niece and Lucinda\'s husband, for brunch in Arlington, VA, Sunday morning, August 28. I was planning on flying out of National later that evening. It wasn\'t until she said, \"What are you going to do about that hurricane, Katrina?\" that I realized New Orleans was in dire trouble with a level five storm at its back door. With a mandatory evacuation in process, it was unlikely I could get back to New Orleans Armstrong Airport, where my car was parked. What would happen to T-Rouge?\r\n\r\nThe kennel had a policy that stated they were not responsible for animals in case of a weather emergency requiring an evacuation of the city. It was understood that in a crisis, the animals were to be picked up by their owners and dealt with. There was no one for me to call upon to rescue T-Rouge. What would happen to her? Would she be left behind, alone without food or water? Could she drown? There was no one to get her to safety. I felt helpless.\r\n\r\nShe was afraid of adverse weather. Ten minutes before a thunder storm would strike her behavior would indicate that one was unmistakably on the way. How would she manage through a hurricane without me there to calm her? But, I couldn\'t get back.\r\n\r\nI called the kennel. I got Patty. When I told her my predicament, I was out of town; there were no longer any ingoing flights to New Orleans, only outgoing, and soon all air transportation would be cancelled; I was not within driving distance, and even so, the city was well into contra flow, so there was no getting back into town, Patty had already decided that she was not taking all the dogs with her, but she was taking T-Rouge. Any adjective I could use would be insufficient to describe my relief. I knew she\'d be well off with Patty.\r\n\r\nPatty\'s first plan was to collect the animals and head to safe ground in Austin, TX. I called my friend Pam Vetter, Luci Johnson\'s assistant, and asked if Patty got T to Austin would she keep her until I could get there. Pam had a son, high school aged, with the same color red hair as T. Pam, being the great friend, and Price, being a teenaged boy, were excited about the possibility of providing a safe haven for Katrina displaced T-Rouge, temporarily. After all, they had a big back yard. \r\n\r\nPatty never made it to Austin. Instead, with time running out to get out of harms way, she gathered her charges together, which included her own animals, and waited out the storm in the second floor loft of the Jefferson Feed and Seed Center on Jefferson Highway and Central Avenue. They would be high and dry, if not traumatized by the magnitude of the storm. The building, until mid twentieth century, had housed a movie theatre. It was a solid building. But, the streets in the neighborhood flooded in a hard downpour. \r\n\r\nAs the storm approached the city, all cell and ground phone communication ceased. It wouldn\'t be until days after the storm that I would learn Patty had stayed in the city during the storm. So, when I learned the levees broke, I wasn\'t concerned that the flooding might endanger T\'s life. For all I knew, she was safe in Austin. Instead, fearful of thunderstorms, she had survived the biggest storm of her life, or my life, huddled on the second floor of an old building in the middle of it all.\r\n\r\nIt took days to learn from Pam that T had not arrived in Austin. When cell systems were working intermittently again, I reached Patty to learn of their adventure at Jefferson Feed. The building held strong, even with flooding on the first floor. She and Jason and their canine and feline entourage had managed just fine. And, they had had plenty of food!\r\n\r\nWhen the levees broke and the city forced everyone to evacuate, because the water supplies were contaminated, there was no food, the looting was severe, the electricity was off, gas leaks were causing fires, and parts of the city were still under water, Patty immediately left town, taking T-Rouge to a kennel in Lafayette, LA. It was difficult being without her, but I knew she was ok.\r\n\r\nOnce I located my mother, I rented a car in Knoxville where I was, drove to Baton Rouge, and stayed the night with a cousin, Dian. Her uncle, my cousin, Dewayne from Basile, met me there early the next morning. He insisted I not go into the city alone. It wasn\'t safe. My cousin Jack gave me a Bowie knife to take along, when I refused to take a gun with me. Together, Dewayne and I drove to New Orleans, creeping our way into the city past check points, so that I could make a quick stop at my house and then to the airport to, hopefully, get my car. My mother\'s neighborhood was still under water.\r\n\r\nIt was a strange journey. Thousands of cars making their way into the city had to get in and get out by night fall. There was absolute silence, no birds, no dogs, no airplanes. My house was in a flight path to the airport. Every two-three minutes you heard a plan overhead making its way to a landing. But, not this time. Trees were defoliated. Streets were cluttered with litter and debris. The presence of people was scarce. The only overhead noises were the incessant sounds of helicopters. There had been water in my garage, but not my house. I got what I thought I might need for an extended period of time and left, remembering to get T\'s food dishes, food and medicines.\r\n\r\nWe got a flat tire. Dewayne owns a tire store in Basile, but little good that did us on Airline Highway, headed to the airport parking lot. Driving on a donut, we stumbled onto a tire store about to close. We purchased and changed a tire and then, on we went to the airport.\r\n\r\nThe airport was being used as a triage center. Injured and dead were processed on the concourse that normally ushered travelers of a different sort for much different reasons. The world had gone all wrong. I wasn\'t sure that the National Guard would let me into the garage to get my car. But, they did.\r\n\r\nMy car was on the third floor of the airport parking garage. But, the window on the passenger side of the front seat was broken. Either looters broke into the car and found its contents uninteresting, or the force of the storm broke the window. There was sand in the front seat, the kind of sand we\'d have in the car when T and I would go to the beach in Bay St. Louis and Waveland, a light but noticeable dusting. I drove my car out of the garage past the vacant ticket booth, as Dewayne drove the other car, back to Baton Rouge. \r\n\r\nThat afternoon, I headed to Lafayette to retrieve my Golden Retriever. It had already been a long day. I arrived in Lafayette during rush hour traffic. A small town, rush hour traffic does not usually mean the kind of beltway traffic residents endure in D.C. or L.A. But, because of Katrina, the population swell in other areas increased the amount of traffic on the streets of most of Louisiana\'s small towns. I reached the kennel minutes before closing to retrieve my retriever. \r\n\r\nI don\'t know what was going through her head, though I\'d like to think she was as relieved to see me as I was to be reunited with her. It had been a long, lonely ten days. \r\nBack in the rental car, the sun setting in the West, we headed East, through the Atchafalaya Basin back to Baton Rouge. I was so familiar with this scene, but nothing seemed familiar, nothing felt like home anymore.\r\n\r\nWe spent the night in Baton Rouge. It felt good to have T-Rouge asleep again on the floor next to a bed where I slept, even if it wasn\'t my own. We left in the rental car the next morning, leaving my car at my cousin\'s to be collected on another trip to Louisiana. The broken window would be fixed, and so would the flat tire it now had, later. All cars in and out of New Orleans suffered flat tires. We were off to Birmingham to collect my mother, Vivian, who had landed after Katrina in a hospital there and then on to Knoxville for who knew how long. Just me and T. \r\n\r\nP.S. - T died on August 19, 2007 of cancer of the pituitary and adrenal glands. Stress causes changes in those glands which can lead to the formation of cancerous cells.\r\n\r\n\r\n