8-29-05

Today is the four-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina ravaging the Gulf Coast. I thought I'd use this space to recreate that night as I remember it. So crack open an Abita and put your feet up.

If it keeps on rainin', the levee's gonna break.

I couldn't get that damn song out of my head. I paced up and down the house, singing it softly to myself (and anyone within earshot.  I had escaped with some friends and wound up at the childhood home of one of these friends, in Beaumont, Texas. This was not an unfamiliar place; we had fled tropical storms for much of my four years at Tulane and I had come here at least one before. We rushed out the door as if we had just gotten there. In fact, we had. Classes for the semester hadn't even started yet.

Hurricanes are nothing unfamiliar to New Orleans. It seems that about once a year there is some alarming storm bearing down on the city, most of which sits below sea level and is protected by a horribly outdated and overmatched levee system. Everyone knows that a well-placed storm could wipe it off the face of the earth, turning this Southern port into a modern Atlantis. In typical New Orleans fashion, no one seemed to worry. Not that there was nothing to worry about, but there are so many better ways to spend time than worrying.

Us students, though, we're not that hardened. We flee if a newsman whispers "hurricane." Well, most of us do. The locals, like my roommate Clay, don't panic so much. And some of the students try to stay. Most hurricane threats came with mandatory evacuation, but they would skirt the rules and lock themselves in their rooms, surviving on Doritos and Dr. Pepper.

This hurricane threat was different, though. The lines for gas at the local Chevron station went around the block. Everyone who could was getting out. Later stories emerged about the tens of thousands of people left in the city. Very few of them were there by choice. Some had no transportation, some were unfit for travel, and a great many could not afford to. The hurricane struck right before payday and a huge proportion of impoverished New Orleans lives paycheck-to-paycheck. Travel is an expensive luxury.

Besides, there were "catastrophic" storms bearing down on New Orleans all the time.

We stayed up most of the night,  watching, on a television set in Texas, the rain pound New Orleans. Every now and again the camera would show a familiar building, only with the bottom three feet submerged. Or five feet. Or ten feet. The best word to describe that night is "surreal." Not horrifying, although it was that too. Or sad. Those emotions hadn't hit yet. It was simply surreal.

If the levee breaks, we got no place to stay.