T A B L E_T A L K Is New Orleans the place to be for Halloween? Discuss the people, the costumes, the insanity in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Under the moon at Angkor Thom By Karin Muller An idyllic picnic is interrupted by soldiers (10/11/98) Seduced by Kenya By Don George An interview with author Francesca Marciano about Africa's attractions and contradictions (10/09/98) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news (10/09/98) Rules of the Wild By Francesca Marciano The seductive subculture of whites in Kenya -- and the addicting allure of Africa's vastness (10/08/98) Maiden voyage By Susanna Stromberg A 19-year-old finds lust and illusion on a Love Boat cruise to Alaska (10/07/98) Browse the Wanderlust Postmark archives S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		WAITING FOR HURRICANE GEORGES | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - At midmorning, Collette and Steve called again. Here's what they said: "We've decided to ride it out." "Are you sure?" we said. "We have a raised house," they said. "We'll be all right. Just so long as the roof doesn't blow off." They gave me courage. I figured that if they weren't scared of the storm in New Orleans, there was nothing much to fear in Baton Rouge, except for a week-long loss of electricity and massive, widespread property damage, as had happened in 1991 when Hurricane Andrew hit. Even so, we filled up all the jugs we had around the house with water and cleared out our backyard: Our patio furniture came into the dining room; the kids' toys -- their plastic "climbing machine," their trucks, their seesaw, their tools and bicycles and scooters and Frisbees -- went into the shed; the potted plants came into the kitchen. "We don't want to leave any potential missiles lying around," my husband said. By Saturday night, as we waited for my cousins to arrive from New Orleans, even I was beginning to get a tad anxious. Where, after all, were they? They'd called around 4 to say that they were leaving, and already it was 9. It's not supposed to take five hours to get from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. It's supposed to take one and a half if you're me, or, if you're a college student who has not yet grasped the basics of mortality. Outside the wind was picking up and the sky, through the trees, was taking on a weird, pearly shimmer. At last, around 11, my cousins -- their baby in tow -- showed up. "The traffic was pretty bad," they said. On Sunday morning, we turned on the TV to learn that all of Baton Rouge -- from the schools to the government -- would be shut down for two days. After breakfast, we went out to fill up our tanks with gas -- just in case we, too, had to flee. But the four gas stations we went to were out of gas. We drove back home on a quarter of a tank and went out for a walk. The air was warm, wet, somehow unusually dense. The skies were streaked with a greenish-yellowish light. All over the neighborhood, people were beginning to tape up their windows. At one house, the windows were already covered with plywood. When we got home, my husband asked me where we kept the masking tape. We didn't have any. He went back to the store, but the store didn't have any masking tape, either. It had already sold out. We watched the news. We watched the sky. The storm was scheduled to hit before daybreak. That night, we ordered in Indian and watched a video. By the time the movie was over, it was well past our bedtimes. But it didn't really matter: The entire state was shut down. Up and down our street, our neighbors' houses, like ours, were filled with refugees from New Orleans. Their cars, like ours, had been pulled up off the street, for the "higher ground" of our driveways. It was almost midnight. I got in the shower and washed my hair. After all, I figured, I hate having dirty hair, and the Lord in His Glory alone knew when I'd next have the chance to shampoo and condition. Finally -- just before we turned in -- my husband and I filled up our bathtubs. We were, in other words, as prepared as we were going to be for this amazing, enormous, 200-mile-wide melee that even now was beginning to pound the wetlands east of us, sending surges of salty wetness into people's homes, rearranging the arrangement of earth and sky, and proving, once again, that a below-sea-level swamp is not an ideal place to build a city. But I didn't feel prepared. I felt -- in this house full of people -- alone. My husband and I should have known better than to move to a place where they eat alligator. We should have studied the map more closely, or at least consulted an expert in the field of water dynamics, or a geologist, or a psychic, before we'd packed up all our stuff and our three little children and moved to Baton Rouge. Someone, in other words, should have told us that they have hurricanes down here. I fell asleep thinking about which of our treasures I'd try to save, in the advent of flooding: the portraits of my great-great-grandparents that I'd inherited from my grandmother? The beautiful tribal rug that I'd bought on a whim three years ago even though we couldn't afford it? Our wedding album? The children's baby pictures? On Monday morning, we woke to clear blue skies and learned that, though all of Baton Rouge was still closed down, the storm had taken a right turn and had slammed into the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, sparing all but the eastern edges of Louisiana entirely. My husband gratefully went off to work. My cousins went home. My kids began to whine about how bored they were. Then, in mid-morning, our electricity snapped off. I don't know why. There wasn't any hurricane; there wasn't even any wind. Outside, the skies were a brilliant deep blue spotted with a few high clouds. I figured maybe somebody in our neighborhood had sneezed hard. Our house, without air conditioning, began to heat up, because even though it was almost October, it was still, by any civilized measure of weather, disgustingly hot and humid. I was stuck in an un-air-conditioned house in a city where nothing was open with three bored kids and more canned tuna than we could eat in a lifetime. I would have preferred the hurricane. "Fuck," I said. But I was rescued just before noon, when friends called and invited us to join them on a picnic. We headed out to a rural park just below the Mississippi levee, where a stiff breeze was blowing. We ate our sandwiches and potato chips and then the children flew kites. They ran back and forth across the field, their kites trailing behind them, under a dome of Southern sky, on the banks of the Big Muddy. "Look Mommy! Look, look!" they cried. The wind took the kites high into the clear blue skies. SALON | Oct. 13, 1998 Jennifer Moses is a writer in Baton Rouge.