Easton woman braved Katrina’s blow in Miss.

GULFPORT, Miss. – Colleen Crockett was bringing her dog, Cocoa, some ice water in the backyard of her damaged home when the Easton native spotted an unmistakable sign of the utter displacement caused by Hurricane Katrina.

“I found seashells in the backyard,” she said Wednesday, still marveling at the 15 miles that one small, white shell traveled to reach her house in this seaside city.

The worst natural disaster that Crockett, who grew up in the small town that borders Presque Isle, had ever witnessed was the ice storm in 1998. It was nothing compared to Katrina, which snapped trees right before her eyes, she said.

“You put your hand to the window and it was just vibrating,” said Crockett, who moved to Gulfport in July to be with her boyfriend, Louis McZorn.

The couple weathered the storm in the barracks at the Air National Guard Combat Readiness Training Center, where McZorn works as a security constable and where a security forces team from the Maine Air National Guard is now deployed.

The couple – holed up with Louis’ daughter, Cyrena, her cat, Timone, and Cocoa – counted the trees as they were ripped from the ground and broken just outside the barracks window, Crockett said. There were at least a dozen.

“Louis, there goes another one,” Crockett recalled telling her boyfriend.

Upon returning home two days later, the couple, who met on the Internet, found the damage was far less than that in other areas of the city.

“It caved in the ceiling in four of the rooms,” she said, sitting in the air-conditioned cab of her boyfriend’s truck at the base’s gate. “Right now, we’ve got a lot of mildew.”

Her vehicle was buried under a fallen carport and the back patio was torn away, she said.

“We pretty much littered the neighborhood in shingles,” Crockett said.

She and McZorn held an impromptu cookout to use up meat that otherwise would have gone bad, treating neighbors to a feast as they worked to salvage their homes and property, she said.

“We cooked everything,” she said. “Hot dogs, hamburgers, kielbasa, chicken, even a duck.”

Despite the destruction, she never was frightened as Katrina ripped through the city, shredding entire apartment complexes in its path, Crockett said.

“I really wasn’t scared,” she said. “I just felt safe.”

In a way, it wasn’t so different from the ice storm, she said.

Just as in 1998, the Easton woman stocked up on water and supplies and banded together with neighbors to pick up the pieces after the storm ended, she said.

The small, white seashell she found in her backyard now sits on the front porch, Crockett said, and she plans to write Katrina on it and keep the shell with her other knickknacks as a memento of the monster hurricane she survived.

Bangor Daily News reporter Jackie Farwell is on assignment with the Maine Air National Guard in Mississippi.