“My parents were in Mississippi at their farm. They thought they’d be safer there than in the city. They weren’t answering their phones, and I heard on the radio that their town had a direct hit. It took me forty hours to get to them. I was shaking the whole way.”
Most of the people I know well down here are not from here. They are my classmates, and like me they come from Elsewhere. There are a handful of New Orleans natives at my school, but I know none of them. I’ve ended up, for whatever reason, befriending the Texans, the Californians, the sprinkling of folks from the Carolinas. It’s mostly just who I happened to sit next to on the first day.
“I wasn’t going to go, I was really really sick. But then I saw the red swirl on tv, whoa it was big and coming right at us, and I decided I could make the drive, I’d better make the drive. I only took enough clothes for a couple of days. I didn’t come back for ten months.”
The natives I do know are people I’m slowly, ever so slowly becoming more familiar with. Law school friends from out of town have an instant bond. Natives with their own lives, their established friends, take a little more time and work.
“It was just like a blanket of depression. Everyone was depressed. For years, it’s all they talked about, and I didn’t want them to talk about it anymore, not on the news, no more stories. And then the Super Bowl came, and that’s all over the news, and I could feel the depression lifting. And now this, with the oil, and it’s all back, the depression, I feel it again.”
As my New Orleans friends and I begin, a year after my arrival here, to reach the point in our relationships where we crack through the superficial small talk and actually talk, I am astonished at how often talk turns to Katrina. We are coming up on the five year anniversary of the storm, and driving around most of the city you would never know it had been here. There are pockets of devastation that remain, there are houses even in the renovated areas that have the big X still slashed on them, the spray-painted tic-tac-toe, drawn five years ago during the initial inspection, with information in each of the four sections to tell subsequent inspectors what was found inside.
“They had this beautiful piano. It was a really nice one, in their front room? But their back exterior wall was all windows, looking down onto this lovely pond, way down the hill. I never thought their house, on that hill, that it would flood. Anyway, the storm surge blew out the back wall of windows, and it carried that piano down the street. It was two blocks away. I wonder what it was like, to see it float, just floating down the street like that.”
In the bottom space of the X, they wrote the number of bodies in the house.
“The first Christmas after was so depressing.”
But for the most part, the city infrastructure has recovered. The devastated schools are rebuilt and doing better (they could hardly be doing worse). Crews are doing extensive work on the main roads, and it’s actually progressing quite quickly, for the most part. Home restoration continues, and our church still hosts at least one group a week from out of town, people who come to help re-build, even five years later.
“All our childhood mementos were gone. She kept the photo albums and the scrapbooks on the first floor, and the surge took them all. Our pictures. Our stuff from high school graduation.”
The people have recovered, too, but with scars. The scars are deep, they surprise me. I’m startled by the freshness, and by the desire they all have to tell their story, and more than once, over and over to me, a new person, a new set of ears. I look around our first floor apartment, and think of Jack’s hospital bracelet and little newborn footprints pressed lovingly into a blue scrapbook; of our first and only family portrait in a frame on the piano; of the books in foreign languages from foreign countries that my mother buys for him whenever she goes abroad with my dad’s business trips. Emotional baggage, so much stuff, but my treasures. I’d much sooner lose our piano or couch than the imprint of Jack’s feet on his first day of life.
“The only stuff we saved was what was hanging on the wall, above the flood line. The other day my wife was looking for something and I was like – honey, we lost that in the storm – and she said – no, remember? It was hanging up on the wall. It’s got to be somewhere. I think she’s wrong, but I let her look.”
This weekend, if we don’t have a baby, we will be planning for hurricane evacuation. It’s a good idea to have a plan – have gas cans at the ready, and cash, and car phone chargers. Have extra batteries for everything, containers to carry water, make sure we have non-perishable food for the kids for the drive, some way to manage the cat and dog in the car. We’ll put all of our important papers and our external hard drive in an easy to grab place. We’ll make a list of tasks to do just before we go – pile towels and blankets in the windows that leak, move things away from the exterior walls, cover the computer in plastic. We’ll make a packing list for the boys, and for us – lots of diapers, lots of outfits, packing for a month just in case.
“My brother got stuck in the wrong lane during contra flow, and ended up being routed to Meridian. He couldn’t get to us, and so he was stuck searching for a hotel.”
We’ll have to decide where to go – Baton Rouge, 2 hours to a hotel? Or to our parents’, 10 hours but free and comfortable? It’s a tough choice – if a storm glances by, 10 hours is far to turn around and come right back. If we go to Baton Rouge and a storm destroys our home and livelihood, it could take us days to fight traffic and get to family, mostly because we’d have to wait for hours at every gas station. If, if, if.
“They had three little kids, and they got sent to Houston. Then Rita came, and it hit Houston, so they had to evacuate again. Their cats all died.”
All I know is, with these two tiny boys in our care, we are going to be quick to pull the trigger on evacuating. We’ll figure out how to handle each situation as it arises. Hurricane worries don’t keep me up at night, especially because the storm surge didn’t touch our place in 2005. In terms of broken windows and rain damage, it would be some pretty fancy footwork for something big enough to even make it down the narrow corridor between us and our neighbor. Wind does crazy things, but I’d be impressed if it managed that. No, for me the only big hurricane worry is the logistics of evacuating.
“Three days before the storm, we had a Bible study meeting about Lot’s wife, and how cruel it was for God to turn her to a pillar of salt simply for doing the human thing, for looking back on her city in ruins. A God with no compassion. And then the storm came, and we lost everything, all I could think was – don’t look back. Don’t look back.”
But I’ll take Jack’s birth scrapbook with us. Just in case.