Hurricane Ike was due to hit the Louisiana coast near Lake Charles on September 12, 2008. I boarded up the windows and delivered my wife Raejean and our dog to my mother’s house on higher ground. Forecasters predicted the storm surge would put River Road under three feet of water. That meant we would get two feet of water under our house, which sits on eight-foot cement pilings on the Calcasieu River near the I-10 bridge. Throughout the night, I watched the water rise onto the road, rip our dock apart, and surge past the predicted two-foot mark under our house to engulf the equipment I had placed on three-foot sawhorses. Then the churning water crept up the stairs until we had seven feet of water in the road and six under the house. At daybreak, I remembered promising my neighbors I would feed their cat Groucho, so, wearing a life jacket, I waded through rushing, neck-deep water with rain driven by 60-mile-per-hour winds stinging my face. When I reached their porch, five raccoons leapt into the water and swam for other shelter.

Ike, the third most destructive hurricane ever to make landfall in the United States, left us with thousands of dollars worth of damage—most of which the insurance companies didn’t cover—and one magnificent gift, a two-ton cypress stump that drifted over our hurricane fence from the swamp that had been clearcut in the 1920s. Still visible were the notches chopped out of the stump where sawyers inserted boards to serve as platforms to stand on while they felled the majestic tree.

With my current publicity photo as proof, I can now say that I am not like other authors, who merely get writer’s block. Instead, I get stumped!