The Catoctin Banner welcomes Christine O’Connor as a new feature writer for the paper!

In the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on Thurmont’s adopted city, life in Waveland, Mississippi for Ellen "Eagle" Finegan and brother Dick Finegan, (siblings of Emmitsburg resident Larry Finegan) were filled with work and some cursory preparations for the strong possibility that the hurricane would hit the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Eagle describes the weather as hot and extremely humid, not unlike typical Mississippi weather in the summer. "But the sky was eerie," she recalls, adding that there was a green tint to the sky and "…clouds tumbling over each other from east to west," in an arcing pattern. "There was an air of anticipation," she continues. "The birds knew it. Birds who don’t normally flock together were spinning around together like they were wondering, where do we go? The pressure made your ears hurt…the water was a weird color…you just knew there was a monster out there."

Larry Finegan, a longtime Catoctin area resident, and other family members watched the storm with more than the casual interest of amateur weather watchers. They wouldn’t let their sister Eagle and brother Dick, both residents of the Waveland area, ignore the looming threat the massive storm posed to the Gulf coast that the satellite images conveyed. And they all remembered that Eagle didn’t handle storms well after being caught on a Manassas battlefield on horseback many years ago during a particularly horrific thunderstorm.

Eagle and Dick, like most Gulf coast residents, considered Hurricane Camille as the benchmark by which so many Gulf storms are compared. But in that case, there was only a moderate storm surge in Waveland, so they were not unduly alarmed. They had no way of knowing that Hurricane Katrina would end up one for the history books, wreaking destruction the scope of which has yet to be determined.

So after a series of phone conversations and emails with Larry and other family members, Dick, a 30 year resident of Waveland, and his sister Eagle, who joined him about five years ago, decided to head to higher ground. And still, neither of them thought they’d be away for an extended period of time. Eagle packed only enough clothing for a few nights, mowed their respective lawns, took Maddie the dog and joined a friend for a 300 mile trek towards Florida. The only additional concession she made in recognizing the potential gravity of the storm was writing contact numbers on the front door of her rented house with an indelible marker.

Still, Eagle didn’t think they’d be gone long, so she left behind her beloved 8 year old pet pig Newman, cameras, innumerable photographs, important papers, her classic 1964 Plymouth Valiant and her most treasured material possessions, her mother’s furniture from Ireland.

And so began the exodus that would eventually lead her and her dog to her sister’s farm in Hartwell, Georgia with Dick and his fiancée and their three dogs following shortly thereafter. Eagle and her dog stayed there for period of time, then moved to northern Frederick County after the news of the devastation in her former home town —now known as "Wasteland" to some, began to sink in.

Larry Finegan’s role didn’t end when his brother and sister got out of harm’s way. He drove down to meet them at his sister’s Georgia farm with a travel trailer to provide temporary housing for them. Larry made a second trip on September 9 when he and another sister from Maryland went to Georgia, picked up Dick and Eagle and headed southwest to Waveland.

"We’d taken a bunch of stuff down," Larry said. "People had called up and asked us to bring supplies...like pet food and for a diabetic family who need special supplies. Then we met some folks from a power company in Alabama. They’d been down on a week’s rotation. They had a whole truckload of water and MRE’s and said, ‘Here guys, you take it down to people who need it’. They offloaded all that stuff onto our trailer and we took them down to the relief center."

The return to Waveland was full of peculiar images, like a boat blown up against the interstate overpass, once thriving neighborhoods "slabbed" (a term that’s become common in an area where structures were swept off their foundations by the storm surge leaving nothing behind but slabs of concrete) and steel girders protruded out from 8 foot deep cavities carved out by the storm surge underneath the railroad tracks.

But it wasn’t until they contacted the Humane Society that the magnitude of Eagle’s personal loss was realized. They informed her that her pet Vietnamese potbelly pig, Newman had perished during the storm.

Newman had been a local celebrity whose picture had been on the front page of a local paper. "There was a woman at work who was very involved with a group called Soldier’s Angels," Eagle said. The woman "…fell in love with Newman’s photo and asked if she could use it to send to the soldiers. Well, it caught on," Eagle said. "Newman was getting emails from Iraq, Afghanistan, Walter Reed. I called him The Big Easy," she smiles, but it quickly fades as she says, "I feel like I let him down," even though intellectually she knows that he was too large to evacuate.

When the Finegans arrived at their homes, the houses seemed apparently intact when viewed from the outside. But inside, they were obviously uninhabitable. Larry compared it to the house’s contents being tossed around as if inside a washer and when done, everything covered in a thick layer of sludge. And outside? "The town, as we knew it, is dead," Larry says of the quiet, undiscovered enclave of under 10,000 people. "The job base is gone. There’s not a lot of hope."

Eagle has little to say about the destruction inside their homes. She keeps coming back to the people of Waveland. "My big fear is for the people who rode the storm out," she says, and talks about a community scattered to the four winds, unwilling or unable to return. "We lost a way of life, a part of the South."

After the relief trip to Waveland, Larry wrote to Thurmont’s Katrina Relief Committee, chaired by Karen Kinnaird, and offered to transport supplies to victim of the storm when they returned again to Waveland to retrieve Eagle’s Valiant. "I pulled up to the old Jubilee store on Thursday morning before we went down…those guys loaded that thing, must have been six feet high—packed, shrink wrapped, strapped; they had all the boxes organized and marked. The people down in Waveland loved it. They said they get people ‘…who dump everything they can think of in a tractor trailer. And here you people from Thurmont have everything organized and labeled…’ Half of the load went to Hancock Middle School and the other went to the city of Waveland."

Larry Finegan credits Karen Kinnaird and the committee for a "first rate" job. "We were very impressed w/the work she did. She made our life easier. And you wouldn’t believe what they got onto that 16 foot trailer. We hauled an incredible load. We know — we had to unload it," he laughs.

Inevitably, the conversation with Larry, his wife Joan, and Eagle turns to whether they will make another trip to Waveland. The word "closure" is something Larry hopes his sister will find, perhaps by visiting the beleaguered area again. "It’s a community that’s gone," Eagle explains. "It’s people who’ve lost their lives, it’s people you might never see again … everyone is different. The faces I remember on August 28 aren’t the same ones I saw when we went back."

Larry says he will return if Eagle and Dick want to go. Dick still owns the property and at some point they’ll have to get a structural engineer in to assess the soundness of his house that was effectually gutted by the flood water. Eagle rented her home, but the landlady saw fit to flout the 90 day waiting period legislated for evacuees to return for their possessions, so her things are gone, scavenged by looters and the remains destined for a landfill.

Yet she speaks mostly of the people who remained in Waveland. "They can still laugh and joke," she says. "But there is an aura of sadness like the smell. You can’t get rid of it." But her voice brightens as she concludes, "The spirit of helping and giving is very much alive."

She has already started a new phase of her life in northern Maryland. She has a job, and has begun the task of restoring her Valiant. Even the dead fish from Waveland found under the front seat has not deterred her, it just took her aback a bit.

Eagle’s dog Maddie has discovered deer, bear, and bobcats’ scents. Eagle says Maddie finds them much more interesting than pelicans and ‘gators, but must adjust to being permanently attached to a leash.

She says it with a smile as the little black dog barks to go outside into the Catoctin night.