By David Johnson of the Lewiston Tribune
WHITE BIRD — As curious as it may sound, Danny and Susan Polston say Hurricane Katrina did them a favor. The mammoth storm forced them out of New Orleans and, in a roundabout way, introduced them to Idaho.
“I love it,” Susan says of their temporary home in a motel in
White Bird. “I open the window in the morning, there’s no water, and I let the air in and watch the sun rise over the mountains.”
The last motel window the Polstons peered out of was about
five minutes from downtown New Orleans at Shoney’s Inn. And all they
saw was water, looters, destruction and a future nowhere in sight.
“I’ve been through a hurricane before,” says Danny, 35. “But this was like a war zone, especially at night.”
In retrospect, say the Polstons, they should have heeded early evacuation orders.
Their son, 4-year-old Josiah, agrees. “They are kind of scary,”
he says of hurricanes. “They aren’t scary when they’re little. But
they’re real scary when they’re big.”
Danny recalls the water that came in the wake of the winds and
forced him, Susan, Josiah and their two pit bulls, Asia and Achilles,
to the second floor of the motel.
“All our family, before the storm, kept telling us was to go to the Superdome, go to the Superdome,” Susan says.
But Danny refused. He says he had an inclination that bad
things were brewing at the home of the New Orleans Saints football team that had been turned into an evacuation center. So the Polston’s opted to stay at the motel where many other people remained as the storm bore down on them.
“The water got about four or five feet deep,” Susan, 28,
recalls. Danny was able to wade through the deluge and move the couple’s old GMC pickup truck to high enough ground and keep it from
being rendered useless.
“We had just moved into that place,” Danny says of their stay
at the inn. “We didn’t want to live right in New Orleans because the
crime was bad.” They had moved from Maine about six months earlier and Danny was working as an electrician in the shipyards.
After the hurricane, his job was gone. So he and Susan decided to leave and were able to get under way about four days later. They
drove in the pickup to Danny’s parent’s home in Denison, Texas. “They
put us up in an apartment house,” says Denny. That’s when he began
making phone calls, hoping to find work.
“In a weird sort of way, the hurricane helped us get out of
there,” says Danny, confiding that while in New Orleans he and Susan
had made some bad financial decisions and now are suddenly presented
with an opportunity to make a new start.
He recalls phoning one of his
old employers, with headquarters
in South Dakota, and was told two jobs were available — one in Nevada
and the other in Idaho. He and Susan chose the latter, borrowed a
family Durango and hit the road.
“They sent us to Post Falls,”
Danny recalls. “And they said,
‘Oh no, you’re supposed to go to Grangeville.’” Despite the detour, the
Polstons say they had already fallen in love with Idaho as soon as they
entered the mountains. And the infatuation only grew as they made their
way to Grangeville.
Danny’s now working as an
electrician during construction of
the new Bennett Forest Industries mill at Grangeville. “I’m going to do
this to get our foot in the door,” he says of the job that’s supposed
to run for a few more months.
White Bird, about 16 miles from Grangeville, has turned into something akin to a high-and-dry nirvana, say the Polstons. “It’s hard to believe places like this exist,” says Danny. “The people are so friendly. And I’m not even going to talk about how beautiful it is. It should be kept a secret.”
Compared to flood waters, the parched hillsides that surround White Bird this time of year are a feast for the eyes, say the Polstons. They hope to either rent or buy a home. Josiah is eager to start preschool. And Susan says it’s just good to be away from Mother Nature’s wrath.
But not quite.
“My sister lives 30 minutes from the projected eye of Hurricane
Rita,” says Danny, “midway between Houston and Galveston. I told her to evacuate.”
