LEE – Gordon Meadors fell asleep at the wheel of his car on a Louisiana interstate highway early one morning last summer. By the time he woke up, his vehicle was off the road, having hit a boat trailer being hauled in front of him.

Fortunately for Meadors, his car’s air bag deployed properly, and he walked away from the high-speed crash with nothing more than a cut lip. No one in the other vehicle suffered serious injury, either.

“I stopped taking things for granted this summer,” he said. “I haven’t taken a day for granted since then.”

That brush with disaster alone was worth a lifetime of lessons. But there was more in store for Meadors – specifically Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the Gulf Coast, including Meadors’ hometown of Slidell, La., a bedroom community of 25,700 located some 30 miles north of New Orleans on the northeast shore of Lake Ponchartrain.

Rohan Folkes wasn’t as directly affected by Katrina, but the hurricane also changed his life in the short term. A native of Houston, Folkes spent last summer in New Orleans preparing to study and play basketball at Xavier University in the city – until damage caused by the Aug. 29 storm forced that campus to close.

More than four months later, both Meadors and Folkes are far away from the hurricane’s aftermath, two of thousands of students who have been relocated to schools and colleges around the country as the entire Gulf Coast continues the laborious process of replacing rubble with new beginnings.

For Meadors’ family, that involves rebuilding their home and their lives. For Meadors and Folkes, that involves rebuilding their athletic and basketball futures through the fledgling postgraduate program at Lee Academy.

“I just think it’s a blessing to be alive,” said Folkes. “If I was in a situation like Gordon’s, I think you could lose everything but still be blessed because you still have your life. I just live each and every day, because every day’s not guaranteed.”

Escaping the deluge

Unlike thousands of others who either didn’t or couldn’t, Meadors and Folkes heeded the warnings that Katrina would be a hurricane unlike any other that has battered the Gulf Coast.

They got out.

“I evacuated real early once I knew the hurricane was coming,” said Folkes. “My mom told me to come back to Houston. I’m glad I did. Some of my friends told me there was damage everywhere.”

Meadors and his family joined the mass exodus from Slidell in the middle of the night on the eve of Katrina hitting land, making their way to a cousin’s home in Atlanta.

The family – Gordon, his parents, and his two grandmothers – stayed in Atlanta for a week and a half before deciding to return to Slidell to see how their lives had been changed by Katrina – which packed sustained winds of 176 miles per hour with gusts exceeding 190, along with a storm surge estimated at 23 feet to 26 feet, according to the National Weather Service.

“Evacuation night, you put everything you wanted to save on top of the bed and hoped it stayed there,” he said. “But nobody expected the water to go over the top of the roof. When we got back, the bed was flipped over and into the closet, and everything you put on the bed was flipped over or gone. The refrigerator was in the living room; the dining set was in the back hall. Everything was displaced.”

The Meadors fared better than many of their neighbors, because while the roof of their house needed to be replaced and the inside was heavily damaged, the exterior of the one-story brick building remained relatively intact.

“A few houses around us were tin and wood, and they didn’t stand a chance,” said Meadors, who with his family then spent the next few weeks at another relative’s home in Baton Rouge, 75 miles to the northwest, before moving back to Slidell. “There was a trailer park not too far from us – no more trailer park, it was all in pieces like paper through a shredder.

“When I got a look at everything, I just thought to myself ‘change is going to come.'”

Picking up the pieces

The aftermath of Katrina meant changed lives, changed plans.

For Meadors and Folkes, their basketball careers seemingly were on hold.

Xavier University was not an immediate option for Folkes – though it is scheduled to reopen Jan. 17 – while Meadors had other priorities, like helping his family regroup.

But from the benevolence of strangers came new opportunity in a faraway place – Lee, Maine, home to a new postgraduate basketball program that was the brainchild of the school’s new headmaster, Bruce Lindberg.

“I was having dinner with my wife at a restaurant in Lincoln,” said Lindberg, “and my cell phone went off and it was a friend of mine. It was a week after Katrina, and he said rather than give money to the Red Cross he wanted to give money to some kids I might know who were affected, so basically he said if we could find six people, he’d pay for six people to go to Lee Academy.”

Lindberg and team coaches Brian McDormand and Ryan Conboy instantly began working their basketball connections in search of student-athletes displaced by Katrina and soon came across the names of Meadors and Folkes.

“Gordon we found out about through the University of Kansas and Southern Methodist University,” said Lindberg. “We had put the word out to colleges that we were going to take in some Katrina victims, and they told us about Gordon.”

Learning about Meadors and actually contacting him were two distinct challenges.

First, he had to be located, and there was no easy access because phone service was tough to come across along the Gulf Coast.

Finally, as the Meadors were leaving Slidell after surveying the damage to their home, the cell phone rang.

“It came out of nowhere,” said Meadors, a 2005 product of St. Augustine High School in New Orleans. “We were on the interstate headed back after seeing our damages. We were headed to our cousin’s house and the phone rang, and for some reason I just felt like it was going to be a good call. My dad answered it, and I could see it on his face because he just started smiling. He looked at me and said, ‘It’s for you.’

“He then told my mom, ‘They just offered our son a scholarship.’

“Mr. Lindberg was on the phone, and when he said Maine, my eyes started popping. I looked at Mom and Dad and said, ‘What do you think about Maine?’ They didn’t know too much about it, but Mr. Lindberg said, ‘Come test us out and see if you like it.’ I just took his word for it.”

Back at his home in Houston, Folkes was being urged by his mother to return to school somewhere by January even if Xavier wasn’t reopened by then. Folkes wanted to go back to school, too, even sooner, to resume his quest for a college basketball future.

In a sense, Lindberg came to Folkes, visiting Houston in early September armed with scholarship money and an offer to help. He visited various church groups, social-service agencies, and AAU programs in the city – which by then had swelled by hundreds of thousands due to an influx of Katrina evacuees.

“Rohan got word of it and called us,” Lindberg said.

The two made connections, and by late September Folkes joined Meadors and the rest of Lee Academy’s first postgraduate team.

“I was just really excited because I knew I had a chance to keep playing basketball, to keep progressing and getting better in basketball, and getting an education and preparing for the SATs and ACTs,” said Folkes.

Northern exposure

When Meadors and Folkes arrived in Lee, they were met by unfamiliar surroundings.

North central Maine isn’t exactly the Bayou.

“It’s different,” said Meadors. “The city is 85 percent African-American, and when I got up here, it’s 99.9 percent Caucasian, so I was thinking to myself, this is different. It was an adjustment period for everybody; you just have to adapt to the changes.”

“It really was a culture shock,” added Folkes, “but it really doesn’t matter to me because everybody’s equal.”

Indeed, the life here generally is quieter and colder – and the snow of late autumn produced a landscape previously only seen on television by these Gulf Coast transplants.

“I was really shocked,” said Folkes, “but I just wanted to get through it. I knew it was going to be really cold, and it was going to be really different from Houston or New Orleans. Down in the South it doesn’t get below zero, so that was going to be the biggest thing for me, the weather.”

Any concerns about matters meteorological or cultural generally have been replaced by a focus on the present, on academics and athletics.

Meadors is a 6-foot-5 forward being recruited by mid- to high-major Division I college programs, among them Kansas, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Ball State, and Florida Atlantic.

“Gordon is a very, very skilled player,” said McDormand. “He’s one of our most skilled players. I think he played a lot inside in high school, but he’s got a nice perimeter game. At this point we’re trying to get him to concentrate a little more on defense and distributing the ball.”

Folkes, a 6-3 forward, hopes to play college basketball back in Texas, perhaps at Prairie View or Houston Baptist.

“Rohan’s a very good athlete,” said McDormand. “He works really hard all the time; he’s just a good kid. He’s a slashing-type player who has great speed up and down the floor. I’m trying to get him some more minutes.”

Days are spent in class, evenings are spent on the court, either in high-intensity practices that strive to mold 17 players from such varied locales as Germany, Lithuania, the Cayman Islands, Canada, and the United States into a cohesive unit, or traveling around the Northeast playing a schedule of some 40 games against prep-school and small-college opponents.

“I love it here, really,” said Folkes. “I love the coaches. I’m getting better each and every day. I look at this as a beginning for me. I think there are more opportunities out there basketball-wise. A couple of colleges are looking at me and I just think this is an opportunity to get better and get to the next level. This is preparing me for college.”

“It’s a phase of maturity you have to go through,” added Meadors. “If you come out of high school and aren’t mature enough, a postgrad program is the best thing for you. You go through it, and see how much you grow up.”

It’s fairly certain Meadors’ maturation process has been accelerated even more from events off the court since his family’s world changed amid Katrina’s wrath.

And while both he and Folkes have been somewhat insulated from the hurricane’s aftermath since coming to Lee Academy, Meadors is acutely aware of what is going on back in Slidell, where his parents, Gordon Sr. and Marla, are rebuilding the home that has been in the family for the past 45 years.

“They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he said. “With the evacuation and the house down and out, you can’t do anything but come back stronger. You’ve just got to start from scratch and build it back up again.”