What people just don't understand anymore

Fifty years ago, Hurricane Audrey wiped out Cameron Parish, La., killing between 400 and 600 people. The survivors rebuilt.

Less than two years ago, Hurricane Rita wiped out Cameron Parish again. Here's how Charlie and Macilda Theriot -- ages 95 and 91, survivors of both hurricanes -- responded:

Charlie Theriot epitomizes the standard-issue Cameron Parish way of life: Live off the land, dodge the hurricanes, pass the torch.

Born north of the Mermentau River in 1912, he became a trapper and farmer like his daddy before him, raising cotton in the rich soil of the river plain and catching mink and muskrat in the marshes. Also in 1912, his future father-in-law and brother-in-law built, with wooden pegs, the sturdy two-story farm house in nearby Grand Chenier where Charlie and his bride, Macilda, eventually would rear their family.

When Hurricane Audrey took aim at Cameron Parish 45 years later, lots of grateful neighbors joined the Theriots in that sturdy house to ride out the storm.

"We had 26 people in the house for Audrey," Theriot recalled one recent afternoon. "People from five and six miles away came to that house."

When the water came in, everyone inside moved upstairs.

"There was a family across the road from us, and he brought his wife and son to the house," said daughter Lidian Richard, who was 11 at the time. "But he went back to his house to open the cow-pen gate. He said he didn't want his cattle to be trapped if the water came up -- and it came up so fast that he drowned. He never made it back."

Memories like that tend not to fade away in this place.

"I remember after the storm," Richard was quick to add, "some of the men left our house and went and rescued some people that were up in the trees, holding on to branches."

Survivors came to respect all the storms that would follow in ensuing years.

The hurricane of 1918 had blown the roof off Theriot's boyhood home, but Audrey was the one everybody remembered. By the time he reached his 90s, Theriot figured one galvanizing event like that was enough for him, his family and his community in his lifetime. Hurricane Rita had other ideas.

The Theriots evacuated for Rita like everyone else, and they spent about 2 1/2 months with a grandson and his family outside Lafayette before they got back home.

There was no house to go back to. But it was still home.

After a family friend made temporary arrangements for them up in Grand Lake, it didn't take long for Charlie, now 95, and Macilda, 91, to decide on a long-term plan.

"I had $34,000 worth of dirt brought in to raise up the property," he explained in a manner that suggested the decision was so obvious it needed no explanation. "We bought a double-wide trailer, and we're going back."

That, after all, is the Cameron Parish way.

THE "CAMERON PARISH WAY" is a sign of contradiction to modern-day combox warriors who say people like Charlie and Macilda Theriot deserve what they get for living where (fill in the blank here).

I think maybe the degree to which we cannot understand the "Cameron Parish way" more reflects on what is wrong with us as Americans today and not upon any shortcomings in the southwestern corner of Louisiana.

Or in the below-sea-level neighborhoods of New Orleans.

Or in the earthquake-prone cities of California.

Or in Tornado Alley across the Great Plains.

I think maybe our real problem is that we've put way too much stock in status, self and stuff, and not so much in who we really are, where we really are. Not to mention to Whom we really belong.

NO, THE PROBLEM is not that some (pick your collective epithet), live in places we think they oughtn't. The problem is that we can't understand why they do anymore.