Katrina a lesson in roughing it

I like to say my parents' knack for primitive camping and outdoor adventuring saved them during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

It takes a certain kind of mind to tie the family sailboat to its trailer and several oak trees in the front yard rather than boarding up the windows or evacuating. It's the same thinking that says the water wouldn't get that high after all, or the evacuation routes are all packed anyway, or my favorite: "If I'm going to lose $1,000 per minute, I want a front-row seat."

Of course, this came from my father, the man who's been confronted by policemen as he windsurfed in tropical storms and who brought his family to the beach in the rain because of the prime winds.

So when my sister relayed the message to me that our crazy parents fled the flooding house and swam to the safety of our sailboat, our three house-trained rabbits in tow, I wasn't all that surprised. What got me was that they had requested we keep their whereabouts a secret from my worry-wart grandmother.

"Mom, do you realize people will die this morning in the storm surge? Dad, do you know the cell phone will lose its signal, and we really won't know it's over?"

Now, with the second anniversary of Katrina on Wednesday, I talk about these matters lightly. But the morning Katrina hit, I was not laughing about my parents' decisions.

Having been a freshman in college for only a week, I was scared sick for three days, waiting for the call from my parents while I commiserated with other "coasties" and watched old high school friends dig through the ruins on TV.

Things were better that weekend when I finally made it home to see my house, or more aptly Camp Nero, for myself. My parents were in relatively high spirits for people who had watched the water rise over the roof of their house, which then collapsed. They welcomed my sister and me and two other friends with open arms.

While many survivors waited on generators or fresh ice, my parents went to work in our house, removing bloated drywall and muck from family keepsakes and making careful piles in the wreckage.

Mom salvaged the edible remains from the refrigerator, and

Dad had even managed to locate some Coronas, never mind the stocked mini fridge that had washed up, its contents intact.

I was thoroughly impressed, thinking I probably would have sat and cried for days or wandered to the nearest Red Cross station to be a rescue worker's problem.

My parents persisted, never fleeing as so many others did. They must have lived out of our sailboat for a month or two before getting a FEMA trailer.

People were always asking how they were, but I harbored no doubts that they were fine. This was the couple who got a kick out of roughing it in the Canadian Shield for more than a week with probably one change of clothes, not much food and a few tarps for shelter.

Now that our house is mostly rebuilt, our lawn green once again and our sailboat back in the water, my parents are slowly getting over Katrina. They even chanced a trip back home to Winnipeg, Canada, at the height of hurricane season in July.

The one thing they've learned, though, is that it's really not worth the chance of becoming one of the missing. They won't rebuild a second time, they've said. They will evacuate if there's a next time.

Willow Nero is a junior journalism major at the University of Mississippi. Her parents, Redwood Nero and Shawn Prychitko, have lived for 17 years in Bay St. Louis, Miss., a town that was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina and shares a school district with Waveland, which was ground zero