Louisiana man flees Katrina to find love and future in Maine

HARTLAND – This is the love story of Henry and Becky.

It is the story of Internet connections, distance and disaster and a hurricane named Katrina. And it has a happy ending.

I’ll begin with the end: On Friday, Sept. 2, as many here prepared to celebrate the long Labor Day weekend, Henry Thibodaux drove his 1995 Geo Metro into Becky Walker’s driveway in rural Hartland. Nearly giddy with exhaustion, Henry, 36, grabbed Becky, 32, and held on for dear life.

He had just driven two days from Tennessee, where he had fled from Chalmette, La., to take shelter from Hurricane Katrina. He had with him four pairs of shorts, four T-shirts, five sets of underwear, a pair of sandals and his computer. He also had, hidden in the spare tire well of the car, a gleaming diamond to place on Becky’s finger.

This was everything Henry, a native Louisianian, now owned. His home, a one-story brick house, in a city the size of Bangor that borders the Mississippi River, was underwater to its gutters. A large boat in his yard had tipped over and was wedged between Henry’s back door and his neighbor’s. An oil refinery nearby had cracked open, spilling thousands of gallons of oil into Henry’s neighborhood, turning homes, cars and yards black.

Living six miles from New Orleans, Henry thought he was safe from water and might experience a bit of wind or rain damage. “For as long as I can remember, for 30 years, every storm that was supposed to hit New Orleans turned away. They hit Texas or Mississippi or Florida, never Louisiana,” he recalled this weekend. So he picked up his brother and they headed to a hotel in Tennessee to wait out the storm, fully planning to get back to their lives in a few days.

Meanwhile, back in Hartland, and on her job as safety supervisor at Cianbro Corp. in Pittsfield, Becky was watching the news with a frightened heart, and that takes us back to the beginning of the story.

Both in their 30s and never married, both wanting a devoutly Christian relationship and children, the couple found each other early this year on eHarmony, an online dating service. Three weeks after logging on, Becky met Hank. “When I saw how pretty she was and read her background, I had to meet her,” Henry said.

They began talking daily in February. In July, Becky decided to go to Chalmette and meet Henry face to face. “It was a good thing I went when I did, because Chalmette doesn’t exist anymore,” she said. That meeting proved what the couple already knew – they were deeply in love.

Henry, a Christian youth minister who was working for his dad’s construction company, began making plans to move to Maine next January or February. “Then Katrina hit,” he said.

While waiting to ride out the storm in Tennessee, Henry used his computer to monitor news reports out of New Orleans. As he watched helicopter news footage of the damage Wednesday, four days after Katrina came ashore, he saw his neighborhood completely underwater, thick black oil swirling through the streets and yards.

“At that point, I have to say it was a relief. At least I knew, one way or another. You just know that everything is gone. I know it sounds strange, but it didn’t upset me because I knew my family was safe. I would have burned that house to the ground to ensure my family’s safety,” Henry said.

In the devastation, Henry’s father lost his home and two other rental properties. His brother’s house was lost, yet they were all safe and staying with other family members.

“When I started seeing the reports, it was such devastation,” said Becky. “He finally called and said, ‘I lost my house,’ and I cried for him. At the time, I was just feeling his pain and didn’t realize what that meant for us.”

It meant that Becky offered to let Henry live in her house, she would move in with her parents next door, and the couple would begin a new life together. He left the next morning.

But Henry didn’t leave without making one stop, at a jeweler’s. “I asked him, ‘Do you have discounts for hurricane victims moving to Maine?’ and he did,” Henry said with a smile. “I bought the ring.”

Driving from Tennessee to Maine was a long, lonely ride, he said, and as he entered Maine, he couldn’t wait to share his engagement ring news. “I told the lady at the welcome center on the interstate,” he said. “I had to tell someone.”

Two days later, after arriving at Becky’s house, while sitting on the breakwater in Rockland Harbor, he pulled the ring out of his pocket.

The wedding is planned for next June.

“Maine is wonderful,” Henry said Saturday, turning to look at Becky. “It is flat where I come from, and here there are so many hills and mountains. And the sunsets and sunrises are so beautiful. The Louisiana coast is all marsh and swamp. There are no beaches. The coast here is lovely.”

It was describing the beauty of Maine that put Henry’s family in Louisiana at ease with the move. “I was feeling so guilty and struggling with taking him away from his family,” Becky said. “But with all the devastation around them, his family loved hearing his descriptions of Maine.”

Henry is still dealing with the Federal Emergency Management Agency regarding assistance for what he has lost. “Some of it I’m still paying for, and I had a lot of expenses getting up here,” he said.

But Henry said it was the future he knew that he faced with Becky that helped him let go of the past. He has lost all of his possessions, he doesn’t know when he’ll be allowed back into his neighborhood, if ever, and he is thousands of miles from his family.

“But we have each other,” he said, reaching over to hold hands with Becky, his shelter from the storm. “And we choose to live our lives in the future, not the past.”