Winston Churchill said, "We are still masters of our fate. We are still captains of our souls."

When I read that quote I thought, "Well yeah. I mean we can do anything we want, no matter what." But the truth is, that's harder than you think. Imagine hearing terrible news. News that completely messes up everything you had planned for, maybe for years. What would you do?

Well, if you're Brandi Kasper, you put on boots and a mask and start cleaning.

Thwarted by Ike, bride threw energy into cleanup

No day for a white wedding, but they get their first dance anyway.

By Helen Anders
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, October 10, 2008

If there's a power equal to that of a hurricane, it has to be the sheer force of bridal inertia.

When Brandi Kasper of Houston learned that Hurricane Ike had trashed Ashton Villa, the historic Galveston home that was to have hosted her Sept. 20 wedding reception, she did what any bride would.

"I pretty much lost it," Kasper says.

That was Sept. 14. By the following Saturday, Kasper, 28, and her fiancé, Joe Naughton, 30, had gotten tetanus shots and were on their way to Ashton Villa to spend what was to have been their wedding day cleaning up the place where they still plan, eventually, to celebrate their marriage.

"The villa had had about 4 feet of water in it," Kasper says. "Inside, there was mud everywhere. The chairs in the ballroom were completely ruined."

Kasper and Naughton joined museum docent Brandon Ragan in removing 110 destroyed chairs, moving valuable paintings, pulling down ruined curtains and cleaning china.

It wasn't what they'd planned to be doing on Sept. 20, but "we were right where we were supposed to be," Kasper says.

Their attitude impressed Ragan. "They worked so hard, and they didn't complain at all," he says. "We got to know each other really well."

Kasper, a marine scientist, says she'd picked Galveston for her marriage to Naughton, a Sugar Land teacher, because she'd attended Texas A&M at Galveston and loved the island. Her wedding was to be at Sacred Heart Church on Broadway Street, with the reception at Ashton Villa. Completed in 1859, the villa was the first brick house in Texas and had weathered the famous Galveston hurricane of 1900. It's one of the island's most popular wedding and reception venues.

As Ike approached, Kasper wasn't worried at first. She knew the island had survived a lot of hurricanes. But as the hurricane neared its Sept. 13 landfall, "I started watching the news about the storm surges, and I got kind of nervous," she says. On Sept. 11, she got a call from the Houston store that had her wedding dress. Come get it, she was told; the store didn't want to be responsible for potential damage.

When the hurricane came ashore and the lights in her Houston home went out, Kasper went to a friend's house to use the computer and watch TV. There, she got a good look at Ike's damage. The day after landfall, she got a call from Ashton Villa. The house had been badly flooded and could not handle any weddings anytime soon. Kasper learned that Sacred Heart Church, too, had been flooded by about a foot of water.

That's when she momentarily melted down.

"There was the crying and the 'What are we supposed to do?' We called our family and friends and asked, 'Are you OK' and told them we were postponing," Kasper says. She says she and Naughton knew many of the invited guests were coping with their own hurricane problems; she wasn't going to regale them with her own angst.

The following Friday, when Kasper and Naughton should have been on their way to a rehearsal dinner, they were trolling the Internet "looking for something to do since we wouldn't be getting married," Kasper says.

They saw a call for volunteers to help with Galveston's cleanup, and suddenly they knew how they'd spend their weekend.

"Driving down," Kasper says, "it was just surreal to see boats on the side of (Interstate) 45 and all the debris."

Ashton Villa's floor "had probably an inch of sludge," she says. "It was gray and gross and slippery, and there was mold on the walls." The pair waded in and set to work.

They befriended Ragan, whose Galveston house nearby had also been badly damaged, and they commiserated.

At one point, Ragan took photos of the couple posed on what was supposed to be their wedding day.

"They were in their galoshes and covered with mud," he recalls. "I took some with their mold masks on and some with the masks off. We were just all feeling very sentimental."

When the couple returned to the villa's ballroom and Ragan prepared to take one last photo there, he asked, "What was your first-dance song going to be?"

It was "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face."

"I just belted it out, a cappella" as the couple danced in the muck, Ragan says. They all cried.

Kasper and Naughton still aren't married. Sacred Heart Church has been cleaned up and is having services again, but the villa is still undergoing repairs. Other Galveston venues are either badly damaged or booked up.

It will be early 2009 before Kasper and Naughton tie the knot, but Kasper is determined to wed at Sacred Heart and celebrate at Ashton Villa because, as she wrote with a muddy hand in the villa's remembrance book on what was supposed to their wedding day, "There isn't any other place we'd rather be."

If that's not inspirational, I don't know what is.

[cori]

Article from the Austin American Statesman