WHEN 81-YEAR-OLD Irene Hanson caught a bus here from coastal Mississippi right before Thanksgiving, she prayed things would look up.

After all, Hurricane Katrina had already put the octogenarian through hell and high water.

She lost the trailer she called home off Highway 90 on the outskirts of Bay St. Louis, Miss. Water and wind wrecked the structure and ruined everything in it, probably killing the puppy she had to leave behind.

Hanson, a dancer when she was younger, fled the trailer for the supposed safety of the larger house of a friend nearby.

But soon enough, rising water forced Hanson and others to flee through a kicked-out window, putting them in surging storm waters.

It nearly killed Hanson.

"I don't swim and the water in one spot got so deep, my head must have been three feet under," she said. "I was thinking: 'This is a hell of a way to die!'"

But the determination that's kept the widowed Hanson optimistic, despite a run of financial difficulties, kicked in.

"I saw light above and pushed up toward it," she said. A quick scream or two brought help.

Eventually, she found her way to a hospital, a three-day stay in a shelter and weeks living with a friend. For 10 days, she traveled north and lived in a Colonial Beach hotel, getting some distance from the devastation and "no vacancy" signs of home.

She eventually went back there to survey the damage, but realized quickly she'd leave for good.

With little more in mind than pleasant thoughts of her youth in Charlottesville, Hanson hopped a bus to Fredericksburg.

When the bus pulled into town just after 6 a.m. the morning of Nov. 19, it was freezing outside, the station was closed and there wasn't a cab in sight.

"I didn't have a coat and was so exhausted from two days on that bus, I was shaking," she said.

Soon enough, however, the desperate, downcast Mississippi "refugee" felt caring and friendship from strangers that warmed her soul.

First, someone waiting at the bus station let her sit in their warm car.