Means and Motivation in Generally Speaking...

As the 10th Anniversary of Katrina approaches, I am bombarded with images, feelings, thoughts and reflections. I chronicled Katrina as she happened, in my original diary. It is still as powerful to look back at today as it was to read in the moment. I lost contact with my mother, and through my diary I was able to ask for help in finding her. Hundreds of people scoured message boards with me to help me get in touch with her. That was....intense.

Watching the world gear up to remember this terrible event, I can so clearly remember how I felt in those long months after the storm that it’s hard to believe it has been a decade.

To begin, we did not know about Katrina before Saturday morning. Nothing. Not a blip, not a sense. And there was something so surreal about the news coverage that we knew that this was the one to leave for. Some things, like fighting with Will about bringing the animals, are shameful to recall. It wasn’t that he wanted to leave them, it was the bright, sharp panic of trying to find a place to go on a limited budget. Most places were not accepting pets. We couldn’t know how bad it would be or how long we would be gone. In the end, after it hit, there was a moment when Will turned to me and thanked me for being a stubborn ass and demanding that we take all the Muses with us.

Thankfully, we got by with a little help from our friends. Marty and Lee opened their doors to all of us, and we watched the storm as most of you did, on television. And oh, how that scared us. You watched it and thought, “Oh My God!” I watched it with my heart torn in half, thinking about the last time I was in that house, if my friends and family were alive and safe, and hoping that none of the bodies floating in the floodwaters were people I knew.

It was almost a month that we were in Tennessee. We arrived there on August 27, 2005. We left for home on September 19, 2005. We arrived home one full day before Rita hit the opposite coast of Louisiana. I remember lying in my bed and seeing the trees whip and hearing the wind, without knowing exactly where the storm was as there was no television at the time. New Orleans was spared in that one, but Rita demolished Cameron and the surrounding parishes.

We came home to an apartment that had flooded, the water had receded, and it had sat in the heat for three long weeks. The entire first floor was a total loss. There were mold blooms on the walls, and after driving into an uncertain future for 12 hours, Will immediately began ripping out carpet, tossing our things on the curb and scrubbing down the walls, because he was afraid of having me, with my asthma, in the mold with no hospitals open and operating. Said things would sit on that curb for another month.

I remember, in those long weeks, many things. I remember our landlord first trying to throw us out so he could fix the place up and then allowing us to stay and almost doubling our rent. We tried to buy a house in 2006, but we weren’t quite ready financially. Devastating at the time, because we didn’t want to be at someone else’s mercy ever again. Seven years post-Katrina, we were able to buy our first house, and the first month we spent here was spent, for lack of a better word, unclenching our teeth. Will and I are very alike in drive, and so, because there wasn’t an option of lying down and letting go, we simply put our heads down and tried to get through this thing, together, day by day by day. I didn’t even realize how tense we were until a week after we moved into our house, I felt something loosen in my chest, in my mind, in my heart. Finally, no one could throw us out in the street if a storm hit. SEVEN YEARS of worrying about that, finally done.

I remember it was mid-October of 2005 before we got the courage to go look at New Orleans. As bad as the pictures on television were, the reality was worse. It SMELLED. It smelled so bad it was unreal. Rot, death, water, oil, and age, a miasma of terrible things melding into the singularly identifiable “Katrinasmell.” Driving through the streets, it was so dirty and dusty that it left an oily sheen on your windows. On the first anniversary, I drove aimlessly through the streets, on the phone with a fellow diarist, describing to her what I was seeing, and what I was smelling. A full year later, the smell was still there. That does something to you, stops your ability to progress.

For months after Katrina, I commuted in my little 200K mile Tercel back and forth to work in Baton Rouge. Sometimes, my co-workers and I would carpool. Sometimes not. We were still commuting in January of 2006, because they could not get electricity to the office. I became obsessed with cars. I sold the Tercel and bought my boss’ son’s 4Runner. I had to have something I could put everything I owned and then some into, in case I had to leave for the next storm. Tercels don’t hold shit. I will never own a car again, as long as I live. It will be an SUV only, just in case. That’s one of my many scars. In 2011, I bought a brand new Kia Sorento, because the 4Runner’s engine was just starting to go out. It was a 1996, with plenty of miles on it. Her name was Christine, and I loved her fiercely for being the first positive post Katrina thing I did for myself, for being a lifeboat against future storms.

We lost Minaux in 2008, to an allergic reaction. We lost Iggy in 2009, when he escaped out of his cage. We lost Angel in 2011 to kidney failure and old age. We lost Piper in 2012 in her sleep. We lost my Uncle Joe in 2012 to suicide. We lost my stepfather in 2013 to a drowning accident. We lost my cousin Courtney in 2014 to complications from spina bifida. Loss, loss, loss, loss. Each one a piercing of the heart and the soul. To have fought so hard in 2005 to be gone in it’s aftermath. Death unsettles me now, far more than it used to.

There have been amazing things, too. I was a Carnival Queen in New Orleans in 2009. In a million years, I didn’t see that one coming in the things to look forward to in post-Katrina New Orleans. Will and I attended the reopenings of many of our most favorite haunts, each one a soothing balm on our tortured souls. For each thing back, so many more lost forever. We adopted Ripley in 2008, and Gracie and Stella in 2012.

Ten years out, looking back, it’s been harder than it needed to be. When you are in the thick of it, you just want someone, anyone, to help you. You look to your government, but they are the ones who failed you in the first place. It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, that greed and myopia, rather than Mother Nature, led to one of the greatest disasters in this City. FAILED levees, not breached. FAILED leadership, not effort. Brownie did NOT do a hell of a job. This is NOT a Chocolate City after all. Most of the politicians in charge during Katrina are now in prison. That says a lot. Are the ones that replaced them any better? Too soon to tell. All I know is that there’s no test run for that question.

Today, 10 years ago, I was blissfully unaware of my future. That’s a luxury I have outgrown. I think about the future all the time. I look at the past and I am proud of how far Will and I have come together. There’s no one on this earth I’d do it again with, save for him. At the end of the day, there is love. And love is what gives me the strength to keep going into that future.

Last updated August 23, 2015