Smells Like Katrina

I helped Jeanne move into the apartment at 8330 El Mundo Street in Houston at the end of July, 2005. It was a very hot month. We stayed together for two blissful weeks and then, because I thought I had to go back to work, I heavy- heartedly boarded a Greyhound bus bound for the Big Easy.
As it turned out, however, I no longer had a job in New Orleans. The school board had decided that it was against the law for Audubon Montessori to hire its own staff, like us teacher assistants, and so we were all laid off. Whenever a voice in your head tells you that you need to do something, my children, you should at least listen to it. A month before, as we were loading all of Jeanne’s possessions onto that Penske truck, a voice told me that I should have loaded all of mine on it too.
Fast forward to Sunday, August the 28th.
It took me 14 and a half nightmarish hours to flee from the horrid, colossal beast that was Katrina. It was a drive that should have only taken six at most, but with every motor vehicle in the New Orleans metro area choking the I-10 West, it proved to be a slow and grueling exodus. When my dad told me the storm was a category 5 that morning, a guttural, instinctive feeling gripped me: run. Get the hell out and don’t look back.
Traffic crawled at best. Cars broke down. Cars stopped. People and animals got overheated. Tempers flared. Drivers got out of their idle vehicles and stared westward down the I-10 in frustration. And looming over everybody’s head was the constant fear of the needle pointing to E.
My father had insisted that I evacuate the night before. I had thought that it would turn out to be another big scare much like Hurricane Ivan the previous year, and even if it did hit, I would ride it out like we had done in the past. My dad wasn’t leaving- he planned on staying in Chalmette because my grandparents, as always, refused to leave.
At 11 AM that Sunday, I set out in one of our three old cars, the Lincoln Continental, at the request of my father and out of my own animalistic urge to flee. I felt a little bit like baby Kal-El being stuffed into the space capsule before the destruction of Planet Krypton, only not so heroic and without such flashy clothes. I turned around to wave back at my father who was standing in the driveway as I embarked on my journey, and the idea occurred to me that I might never see him again.
I arrived in the great metropolis of Houston at 3:30 AM on Monday the 29th of August. It would still be about another 4 hours before Katrina would wreak her historic havoc upon my native city, and I was finally back in my beloved Jeanne’s arms after the longest car trip of my life.
At this time I had no cell phone. For years I refused to get one because I thought they were a pointless nuisance. Thus, I could not communicate with my father or with Jeanne for the duration of the voyage. They each had heard the horror stories of some evacuees who got stuck on the road and died from the heat. When I finally got to 8330 El Mundo, and knocked on the door of 814, Jeanne regarded me as if I were a ghost.
If nothing else, my attitude toward cellular phones had changed completely.

Most of my family chose to stay. My mom and my step dad, wary of another media-hyped Ivan–level scare, also stayed in Chalmette. They had evacuated at the urge of the local government and media when Ivan was a threat in 2004. For them, as it was for many, the evacuation caused by Ivan proved to be more of a catastrophe that the storm itself. They even had a safe haven with my sister who was living in Baton Rouge, but chose not to go. Evacuating with three dogs and a cat was not an easy thing to do for the second year in a row.
Cowardly and selfish as I felt to leave them behind, they were all adults and they had made their choice. Moreover, they all had vehicles able to get them to safety. This was no time to be a hero.

While I was reunited with Jeanne at last, our joy was diminished in the weeks to come. We watched the news everyday. We saw the aerial photos of an inundated Crescent City. This was horribly, unbelievably bad.
New Orleans had drowned.
People were stranded in their attics, desperately waving down any passing helicopter to come and fly them to salvation. Those who did reach dry land had no water, no food, and no sanitation. There were corpses floating in the water. Mayor Ray Nagin was at his wits end, exploding at the federal government’s slow response time (as was St. Bernard Parish President, Junior Rodriguez, but that wasn’t as thoroughly documented). To save face, Bush the Second flies in on a helicopter, has his photo op hugging a little black child, and waves to the cameras insisting that the United States has enough money to both help the people of New Orleans and keep killing the people of Iraq.
Every cynical teenage thought that I ever harbored against authority was immediately validated.
But life had to go on. As a refugee in America’s fourth largest city, I had to get by. I signed up for food stamps. I got rental assistance from FEMA. I assisted Jeanne in her early days of graduate school at the University of Houston, to help take our minds off of the tragedy.
Most people in Houston said nice things to us; condolences and offers of assistance. May God bless such citizens of Houston, who knew the right things to say or to do. Many a Good Samaritan made himself know during this crisis, like the nurses who put up my father, my uncle, and my grandparents in a hotel near the Astrodome.
Others made snide comments and mean remarks about these poor, wretched souls who arrived en masse via school bus to their Astrodome, getting much needed food and supplies from their supermarkets on the government dollar. To these people, I emphatically say, “f__k you”. Houston never was, by any means, a crime-free utopia with streets of gold before the arrival of the Katrina refugees, and it never will be even years afterward.
And a very special “f__k you” goes out to all of those ignorant evangelicals everywhere who said that Katrina was God’s vengeance exacted upon the people of New Orleans for their wicked ways. No matter which part of New Orleans you live in, there is bound to be a church of some denomination within walking distance. There was piety in this ancient city long before there was the depravity you rail against. It is a city no less devout than any other in America.
I soon found employment at Texas Art Supply in the Montrose area. While this ensured that Jeanne and I could make an honest living, our minds still could not rest without knowing the whereabouts of my family and the situation back at home. It was some time before I learned that my dad’s side of the family was staying at a Super 8 Motel and that I could return his car to him. My mom and my step dad were taken first to Dallas, and then to Tulsa, Oklahoma before renting a car and finding an apartment in West Houston. Each of their stories was full of hardship and misery. I thought about my 14 hours on the road to Houston and felt as if I had gotten off easy.
Katrina killed my hometown of Chalmette. No news coming out of St. Bernard Parish was good news. Not a single house or business was left dry. Most people lost everything, myself included. One of the storage tanks at Murphy Oil Refinery topped over and was punctured, adding more toxic chemicals to the already deadly flood water.
Many people lost their lives. Many more lost their livelihoods. Many pets died, including Chee-Wee, the Chihuahua who was part of my family for over 15 years. No loss of life, no matter how small, needed to happen due to this storm.
Everything I knew, if it hadn’t been destroyed, was irrevocably changed. To this day, Chalmette has still not fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina. I doubt it ever will.