GRAND CHENIER - On the Wednesday before Hurricane Rita hit, T-Mae Booth sold soft drinks and chips from Booth's Grocery Store on La. 82 while keeping an eye on The Weather Channel. Hurricane Rita was heading toward the Texas coast, but the 1957 Hurricane Audrey survivor wasn't taking any chances.
She and many of her neighbors were boarding up their homes and leaving this coastal community that evening.
On Friday, after Category 3 Rita turned north and east, pushing a powerful 20-foot wall of water over lower Cameron and Vermilion parishes, T-Mae was back where her store and home once stood, sitting in a folding chair alongside the highway, watching her children pick through the pile of rubble that a week ago was her livelihood and her home.
"Those steps were where the door to the store was," she pointed out. "That slab was the walk-in cooler" where customers helped themselves to soft drinks. "You can still see my bedspread through the door."
The impact of Hurricane Rita on T-Mae and thousands like her in southwest Louisiana has been devastating. The storm surge washed away homes and businesses, ruined schools and government buildings, and destroyed ways for people to make a living. At least one death in Louisiana is a confirmed result of Rita. Zeb Johnson, deputy coroner of Calcasieu Parish, said a Westlake man fell into a pond and drowned.
The effect of Rita on T-Mae was deep, even a week after the storm hit. T-Mae is like a mother to the residents of Grand Chenier. Residents, some whose grandparents grew up with T-Mae, stop by to say hello. Hunters and fishermen know the store and its owner. They depend on T-Mae for those last-minute items they forgot to pack.
Even the Rev. Vincent Vadakkadath, pastor of St. Eugene Catholic Church, who is visiting his ailing father in India, called 77-year-old T-Mae, asking her to search for a computer containing his sermons and to advise him of the damage to the church.
T-Mae, with tears in her eyes, watched in silence for a moment Friday. A throw was wrapped around her as protection against the morning chill and the vicious mosquitoes seeking blood, while her children salvaged a jar of pickled okra, an antique toy lion and a grandson's 4-H club trophy.
"I had seen pictures, but it's not the same. It's worse," T-Mae said, reaching under her glasses to capture another tear.
The house next door, where T-Mae grew up, lost its porch and leans precariously forward as if bowing to the strength of the Gulf of Mexico, which, this time, dealt a potentially fatal blow to the aged structure. Built in the 1930s, the house had been a safe haven in 1957 during Hurricane Audrey, keeping T-Mae's mother, daughter and neighbors safe despite the waves of water that washed over it.
"It never even fell off its blocks," she said a week before Rita slammed the family home that she rents out as a hunting camp.
A fractured disk in her back kept T-Mae from exploring the remnants of her store and attached apartment Friday. Her children and their spouses were her eyes and salvagers.
"Hey, T-Mae, I wonder if some of those people who left you their keys need them?" daughter Dona Adams asked.
Camp owners in the neighborhood, where everybody knows everybody else, would leave their keys with T-Mae in case they forgot them or lost them, daughter-in-law Michaeil Booth said.
T-Mae always had a spare set.
But along this stretch of marsh, few homes and camps survived Rita's wrath. The hurricane either turned them into tangled messes or lifted them off their foundations and set them back in the marsh.
L.J. Adams, T-Mae's son-in-law, found an unbroken bottle of beer in the rubble of the store.
"Hang on to it. We'll use it to christen T-Mae's new store," Michaeil said.
T-Mae lost everything except the three sets of clothes she packed when she evacuated and a few items - dishes, pots, scissors - salvaged from the rubble. But, she vowed to start again.
"I'm going to reopen a little store. That's the first thing I'm going to do," she said. "Someone is going to loan us a little camper with a generator. I'm going to set that up and build something small. I have to have something to do. Nothing is going to get me down."
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