Lake Charles to the rest of us: Don’t you forget about me

Published October 20, 2020

There’s a lot going on right now. A deadly pandemic. The most important election of my lifetime. Wildfires. A fragile economy. Major change on the way to the Supreme Court. And bad news just keeps coming. We even have to worry about murder hornets now. Daily life as we know it has been upended as never before.

Nowhere does the latter ring more true in the U.S. than my hometown. Lake Charles, Louisiana, still reeling from a gut punch by Hurricane Laura, took a throat punch about six weeks later from Hurricane Delta. The early October storm ripped off roofs that had been repaired or replaced after the late August storm. People returned to the safety of their preferred evacuation spot, sharing looks of incredulity with those who welcomed them. Can you believe we are doing this again?

The things that you and I take for granted, many in Lake Charles and surrounding towns are still without. Beyond their immediate needs being met, what residents of Southwest Louisiana would treasure more than anything is evidence that they have not been forgotten.

The New York Times piece published today tells part of that story. I hear daily updates from friends who have their own details, which are piling up like the debris strewn about the city. After Laura, I wrote about how most people in my hometown are more likely to offer their help, even to strangers, than to ask anyone for help. But that’s exactly what they need right now: help.

Charitable organizations said that donations have been a small fraction of what they took in after Hurricane Rita hit the region in 2005, and that they have not been able to attract enough volunteers to clear the mountains of debris crowding streets and to clean the muck out of homes flooded by Delta. “Our story has just gotten very quickly put aside, and I really think the devastation is so huge we should remain on the front page,” said Denise Durel, the president and chief executive of the United Way of Southwest Louisiana. “The magnitude of our destruction is so huge we cannot come back as a community on our own. We cannot restore our homes on our own. We need the help of the American public, if we can get it.” The circumstances have prodded a tender nerve for this part of the Gulf Coast, which has long harbored a sensitivity about being overlooked as a workaday stretch identifiable to outsiders by oil refineries, casinos and the interstate connecting Houston and New Orleans.

As the story explains: that sense of being ignored had taken hold even before then. Some trace it as far back as the Louisiana Purchase, when the would-be state was incorporated into the United States except for the parcel including Lake Charles that was officially declared a “no man’s land,” drawing renegades and escaped slaves who sought a place where their captors were unlikely to chase them. “It’s always been a land of refugees and outcasts,” said Adley Cormier, a longtime resident who wrote a book called “Lost Lake Charles.”

That sense of being ignored includes hard feelings on an intrastate level, fueled by decade upon decade of belief that money allocated by the state legislature for Southwest Louisiana was mostly an afterthought, scraps left after New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport got their fill. That sense of being ignored formed a major part of the 2016 book “Strangers in Their Own Land,” which the author wrote after spending five years in and around Lake Charles.

That sense of being ignored is like the unrelenting presence of mosquitos that even now requires help from above to try to ease.

 

In case it isn’t clear, the region needs help — from the state, from the federal government, and from you and me. As Denise Durel, president and CEO of the United Way of Southwest Louisiana, told The New York Times:

Our story has just gotten very quickly put aside, and I really think the devastation is so huge we should remain on the front page. The magnitude of our destruction is so huge we cannot come back as a community on our own. We cannot restore our homes on our own. We need the help of the American public, if we can get it.”

Links to places that can turn your donations into tangible help are in the post-Laura story I linked to earlier in this piece. Please check them out and give if you can, and share links to the sites and to the New York Times story with your friends. You can also stay current via KPLC-TV, the Community Foundation of Southwest Louisiana and the United Way of Southwest Louisiana.

Enterprise Boulevard is a north-south thoroughfare in Lake Charles that I traveled every day for 12 years of school and many more times on the way to work or fun or the kind of food you can’t find anywhere else (how do you think I got to Miller’s Cafe?). There is a stretch of Enterprise Boulevard where a natural canopy of trees cast lovely shade and created a sense of place and a cozy feeling that you could only fully appreciate after Hurricane Rita tore away much of it in 2005. Indeed, Lake Charles lost a lot of sky after Rita, and then again this hurricane season (which technically isn’t over, by the way).

Don’t let them lose hope. Even if you can’t give money or material help, please find a way to let them know you are thinking about them. Find a Lake Charles or Cameron or Bell City or Jennings or Lake Arthur or DeRidder or other Southwest Louisiana person on social media and share a good thought or words of comfort. Maybe ask how you can help. I know they’d appreciate it, and I would too.