…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…
— a refugee story
The 272-word bulletin from the National Weather Service, written in all caps and littered with ellipses in place of periods, looked like it was pulled from the comment section of nola dot com. The day before I read it, some hundred or so miles away my from evacuation destination, I stood in the foyer of my parent’s house in Chalmette, a suburb of New Orleans. The nagging feeling like I’d forgotten something gave me pause before walking out the door but a mental inventory of the car told me everything was there.
My family lived in a modest one-story bungalow, nestled at the north end of Jean Lafitte Parkway. It was a major step up from my childhood home on the other side of the woods in Arabi. Intricate wooden molding, hand carved by the previous owner, complemented the vaulted ceilings, making everything look more impressive. The house represented a rebirth, a chance for me to rebuild my life and get a college degree. Though I had only moved back here a little over a year before Katrina, my parents and little brother spent the last four years making this home.
My mom sat on the living room couch, staring at the television. Newscasters in the studio spoke with reporters strategically positioned around the state pointing out vulnerabilities and interviewing homeowners in low-lying areas. She looked caught in a half-remembered dream, bothered and worried like she always did when a hurricane threatened to turn up an unwanted guest.
After all, she knew what they were capable of.
There was Camille in ’69, but she rarely talked about it. If she, or anyone else for that matter, mentioned “the storm” they were almost always referring to Betsy.
On September 9th, 1965, “Billion Dollar” Betsy made landfall. According to my mom, people didn’t evacuate back then. At most, she said, people went to a shelter or boarded up their windows. Her family chose the latter. Reports came through the radio as hundred-something mile an hour winds howled outside. Parts of New Orleans were without power. Trees were downed. Betsy was on a northwesterly path. All was well. When the eye of the storm passed overhead it was hard to argue with that. So they did what anyone else would have done and went to bed. Whatever dreams my mother had that night were paled by the nightmare that woke her. I imagine it’s hard to tell if you’re still dreaming when you’re standing in knee deep water and your brother is yelling for you to follow him next door and hide in the neighbor’s attic. Like a bad acid trip, the terror showed little sign of slowing. She was barely a teenager when she sat helpless in the sweltering heat of that attic while axes raced to cut through the roof against the rising tides threatening to drown them below.
Ten days later, after escaping to a nearby shelter by boat, the waters receded and they were permitted to go back home. Homes and belongings were drenched by the flood waters but not all was lost. Neighborhood men paced the rooftops with their hunting rifles and shotguns to scare looters away from their valuables drying on the lawns below.
Hurricane Betsy nearly wiped out St. Bernard and Plaquemines communities and killed seventy-five. She was the first storm to cross the billion dollar damage mark. After the storm, Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to build a levee system strong enough to protect everyone. And it did for forty years.
We all waited with bated breath for “the one” but none of them ever stacked up to Betsy — not even Camille. Storms with names like Juan, Andrew, and Georges periodically put us in a panic and sent us somewhere out-of-state only to return a few days later and go back to whatever it was before we were inconvenienced. More often than not, my family headed west for Houston. We called these impromptu trips out of town “hurrications.” They meant no school for a few days and a trip to the Galleria, an upscale shopping center that put every mall in Louisiana to shame in the 1990s. But the fun and games wear off eventually and the constant upheaval made it hard not to feel like the townsfolk in “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”
After Ivan, these “hurrications” were getting pretty old.
A third of the New Orleans Metro Area made the pilgrimage out-of-state in search of an occupancy when Ivan was supposed to be “the one” in 2004, a year before Katrina. All the predictive computer models pointed the massive storm right up the mouth of the Mississippi causing nearby parish governments to call for mandatory evacuations.
We left for Houston against my wishes because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I guess. The drive should have been about six-hours with a few pee breaks along the way but ended up being something like twenty. If that wasn’t enough, the images broadcasting into our living rooms the following day added to the mental and physical anguish brought on by the gruesome trek to “safety.” WWLTV’s Carl Arredondo and WDSU’s Margaret Orr were wearing sunglasses and probably smelled of sunscreen. Folks who stayed behind mocked us online with images of their toppled patio furniture and text saying NEVER FORGET: HURRICANE IVAN, 2004.
Ivan took a last minute turn to the east overnight and annihilated Alabama’s beachfront … but back home was all blue skies and barbecue weather. FML.
Which was partly why I wasn’t going back to Houston. After decades of false alarms, I was done. No further than Gonzales, I told them. Why? Because I had previous plans to go there that weekend anyway. So in a weird way, I was sticking to my plans and bringing a few extra pairs of clothes with me just in case.
My mom asked me to take the family dog and I agreed because it was the least I could do. Without a pet, their hotel options would double if not triple. It was hard to argue with logic. I said goodbye and turned to leave. That nagging feeling like I’d forgotten something rushed through my core like a shiver, only this time I knew what it meant.
This was going to be the last time I ever saw my house like this again.
Shelittle, the family dog, rode shotgun as we headed west. Along the way we passed droves of people packing their lives into four-door sedans and pickup trucks. Faces strained to look patient as they lined up at gas stations to get fuel in the hot August weather. My goal was to be there when they opened the contraflow — an evacuation method described only as the once-in-a-lifetime chance to drive west on the eastbound lanes of Interstate 10. This car pool lane out of dodge was the root of all evil during Ivan, which in hindsight was the dress rehearsal for Katrina. Things went smoother this time around and we made it to Gonzales in five hours. My confidence was riding high.
I woke the following morning to find the National Weather Service bulletin in my inbox. Katrina was scheduled to make landfall early Monday morning; so I told myself there was enough time for this to quite literally blow over. She could follow Ivan and fly east for all we knew. Never mind that she upgraded from a Category 3 hurricane to a 5 over the course of the night.
Denial is a helluva drug, if you catch my drift.
Katrina came and went. My friends and I did what any respectful human being would have done during a Category 5 monster … we got piss drunk, played Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, and went outside to see how far the hundred-something mile an hour winds would carry us when we jumped high. It was a charade to mask the questions brewing in the back of my mind.
What was left?
Was everyone okay?
By Tuesday, the footage started to come through: The missing windows of Downtown Hyatt … the Superdome’s tattered roof … people waving for help from their rooftops … the floodwaters rushing through the breached 17th Street Canal levee. Tragic imagery from the home front be damned, I believed everything would be alright in Chalmette. It had to be, right? It was a chronic case of denial that lasted until a friend working with the Wildlife and Fisheries called to break the news to me: It’s not good, man.
It’s not good, man.
It’s not good, man.
I don’t recall the emphasis but those were his words. He said the Canadian Mounties beat them to the scene and established a search and rescue operation a full day before they arrived. The eaves of people’s houses and the second floors of two-story homes … only they remained above the floodwaters.
It’s gone. It’s all gone, he said.
The images on the TV and online continued to focus on New Orleans and its devastated Ninth Ward. The thought of never going home again made it hard to swallow.
Shelittle slept in my arms that night but I only cried.
The wait to go home prolonged after the floodwaters returned a month later. On September 24th, Hurricane Rita flooded the homes of Plaquimines and St. Bernard … again. A few weeks turned into three months and the questions echoed louder in my head: What was left? Was everyone okay? When we were finally permitted to go back, it became apparent these were questions better left unanswered.
Lumber floated in the waters of Eden Isles and pylons became gravestones for the fishing camps they once supported along Highway 11. Shrimping trawlers and Boston Whalers littered the shoulder of Interstate 10 down in Irish Bayou and nothing resembled home when we crossed the Green Bridge into St. Bernard.
The Louisiana National Guard stood next to an eight-or-nine-foot tall crucifix leaning up against a shipping container. They asked for ID. If you weren’t from Da’ Parish, you weren’t getting in. Little good did it do, though. Copper pipe looters ran rampant, eluding the authorities whenever they were caught.
People who knew St. Bernard like the back of their hand —as my childhood friend’s grandfather used to say— couldn’t tell shit from Shinola. Street signs were gone and landmarks were either demolished or covered by a thin layer of dry mud creating the sepia tone filter illusion. So when the police pulled you over and you weren’t where you were supposed to be, it was plausible you took a wrong turn somewhere and were lost.
The whole place looked like an atomic blast wiped us off the map. Birds didn’t chirp, children didn’t play, and neighbors didn’t gossip. With the lacking sounds of suburbia it began to feel more like Fallujah, Iraq than Chalmette, Louisiana.
Dad’s baby blue minivan was on the lawn, parallel to the street and not in the driveway where they left it. The storm surge lifted it up and gently placed it down the same way it lifted houses off their foundations in Arabi and transformed them into homages to Madness’s 1982 smash hit, “Our House.”
But our house wasn’t in the middle of the street. In fact, from the outside things weren’t looking all that bad. The familiar thin layer of mud turned it a pale shade of beige and had a moat of marsh surrounding the perimeter but it was still standing. We had that going for us, which was good.
The x-code spray painted on the facade told us the name of the search and rescue team that tagged it, that there were no bodies or dead pets found inside, nor any personal hazards, and the day they kicked in one of the french doors in front of the house.
Why not go through the front door? I wondered.
To find the answer, I’d have to cross the threshold into a place I used to call home. I glanced down to see my foot sink into a thick layer of slush covering the living room floor when the Darth Vader Action Figure Collector’s Case caught my eye. How in the hell did that get down from the attic? I looked to find there was no ceiling. Without a frame of reference or a familiar object to latch onto, I began to panic. Was this my house? Nothing looked real. A distinct odor permeated the hot, balmy air that we’d forever refer to the “Katrina Smell.” It was sensory overload. I stumbled back outside in a panic. When I ripped off my breathing mask to catch my breath, I looked up and finally noticed the high water mark a few inches below the peak of the roof.
Back in Gonzales, I nabbed a part-time job working for a FEMA supply vendor. It paid a decent wage and helped pay the bills while I took classes at LSU. Plus, the thought of helping people satisfied my quench for morality. With the daily routine of work and Louisiana State’s open enrollment for displaced students I was taking steps toward normalcy or perhaps, dare I say, happiness.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
Katrina didn’t spare Baton Rouge by any means but, when compared to the death and destruction further south, you could say they had minor nuisances and slight inconveniences. Every day on the job with FEMA, coworkers and officials from the Red Stick complained about “these people” causing them to wait in traffic and at the grocery store checkout counter and always saying how badly they wished “they” could go back home.
I wished “I” could.
Everyone was everywhere, meaning we were spread out across the state and the country. Which is a funny thing to think about when just a few months before we’d been hard pressed not to bump into one another on a weekly basis. My brother, who was seventeen at the time, moved in with his girlfriend to be closer to his new high school. Dad went back to work. And from time to time I watched the insurance companies bring my mother to tears. I hated to see her like that but what the hell was I going to do to make it better? Every trip back to Chalmette started to feel more and more pointless. Like a prospective miner showing up late to the Gold Rush, we sifted through the vile-smelling sludge for valuables but always left empty handed.
Happiness was nowhere to be found there. I needed a change.
The day I quit my job working indirectly for FEMA was coincidentally the same day I started receiving FEMA assistance. But that job wasn’t going to last. Assistance or no assistance. Why? I’ll tell you why. Day after day, I listened to the office manager complain about the food she had to throw out after a few days without electricity. On the phone, to anyone who’d listen. It took everything in me not to kill her. It took David Foster Wallace to remind me that “this is water,” that there was no way she could have known about my friend’s mother drowning in her closet or the memories on video tape I’d never see again.
I left and never returned. Not even to pick up my last check.
Katrina took away my sense of home, leaving me with little ground to stand on. After months of sleeping on a couch, clueless of what the future held for me, there weren’t enough cigarettes to smoke and help relieve the stress. The thought of becoming an alcoholic didn’t seem too appealing either.
The day after Christmas, my mom dropped me off at Louis Armstrong International Airport with all my belongings stuffed into a three-piece luggage set. We hugged tighter than ever, a sign of how close we grew together in the aftermath of the storm, then said our goodbyes. I was headed to San Francisco, a suggestion given by a friend. Come out here to California, he said, and decompress. Better to take my chances with an earthquake than another hurricane, I joked.
A few days before I left the chaos behind, like a coward, I drove to St. Bernard one more time. To say goodbye and apologize. Tell her how I was sorry I couldn’t stay in her time of need. My life, my well-being, depended on going to California. There were no National Guards to check my ID this time but Jesus had a message spray painted on a six-by-eight-foot piece of plywood for all that entered.
We will rebuild, it read.
And they did.
On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina changed the lives of many — some for better, others for worse. In the end we all picked up the pieces and laid the foundation for new beginnings. As time passes and wounds heal, we choose to look back to remember our resilience and celebrate the rebirth of a community I once thought to be long lost in the flood waters.
If you enjoyed reading this, please recommend and/or share. It would mean a lot to me, thank you.
