Randy “Wop” Rousseau

Being in the bayous before the alligators — there’s a lot of alligators in the water now that they didn’t have back then.

Probably playing football in the yard with the two other guys that lived there that were my age. That’s about it. There was just three of us and we played football in the yard and rode dirt bikes and stuff like that. We could ride dirt bikes in the yard, go crawling across the little bayou and go into the woods It was pretty cool.

You had room. You didn’t have any borders, you didn’t have any limits, you could go out and ride bikes and whatever. You could go through a neighbor’s yard. We had acres of land. We just had a lot of room.

There weren’t any rules or restrictions. You pretty much knew when you had to be home, you knew what you had to do, you knew when you did wrong. It was pretty good. We had good friends, had good neighbors, family all around, and we didn’t get in a lot of trouble because there was not really nothing to get into any trouble about.

We had been evacuated in 2003 — actually Christmas Day of 2003 — for two months. We were told to leave, not knowing when we’d go back, if we’d go back- and one thing that bothers me particularly about that episode was that it was Christmas day and I had a lot of family at my house because I had a big house and everybody came over there. we had brunch, and the whole day’s events. In 2011 we were out permanently, but that was another incident with Texas Brine- so two completely separate incidents.