In Battered Parish, Officials Bear the Brunt of Neighbors' Anguish

They convened a meeting here the other night in just about the only building still intact. They recited the Lord's Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the elected officials of Cameron Parish tried again to govern in the protracted wake of chaos. Six part-time members of the Cameron Parish Police Jury, a sort of county legislature, sat in a semi-circle in the dank Cameron Courthouse, where a calendar in the deserted basement is paused at September. One member is a farmer, another a carpenter. A third maintains portable toilets. Three wore baseball caps; all wore that look of forever-lost sleep.

Just outside the courthouse, flatness and emptiness: stores gone, subdivisions gone, people gone. Inside, a brief talk about taxes provided a nostalgic whiff of the comfortably mundane — until the discussion turned again to removing more storm debris, demolishing more buildings and trying to recover from the time-stopping September visit of Hurricane Rita.