The Mississippi on her Knees Chapter Five
By fleurdelivre
- 541 reads
Katrina was not our first hurricane. And as we understood it, Katrina was not even our hurricane.
In our tenure in Lafayette, we had two storms: Andrew when I was five and Lili when I was fifteen. Andrew fell at night. My parents put me, my brother, and sister to bed in their room because it had the smallest window. We slept until Mom woke us up to watch the ground undulate as a dead tree in our backyard struggled to wiggle its roots free. When we got up the next morning, our house still had electricity and we watched the special news reports from the local news affiliate. We ate the emergency stock of spaghettio’s even though my mom could have fixed anything in our fridge.
Ten years later, there was a discussion before Lili. Should we stay or should we go? Dad never would have left, but he wanted my mom, my sister, and I to evacuate. We didn’t. I think we might have done it if Dad would have agreed to come along, but the idea of splitting up, leaving Dad without any surety that we would be able to communicate with him was too much for our mom to bear. We sat in the living room playing cards by candlelight until Dad suddenly ordered us to relocate to the bathtub. He worried about tornadoes. We worried about him pacing between the picture windows.
Hurricanes happen. Yet, in Lafayette, my family felt invulnerable. Maybe the door rattled in the deadbolt lock when the winds got wild. Maybe a sycamore branch landed on the windshield of Grace’s 1987 Volvo parked in the open driveway. Maybe we ate canned soups and picked up shingles for a few days.
But that Sunday in August, Katrina felt different. Looking at the Doppler forecasts on the weather channel, we realized how silly it was to think that Katrina could belong only to the place where the eye was passing. It was swallowing an ocean. Who was to say what that kind of force could or couldn’t do on land?
Even 150 miles West of New Orleans, people were at least discussing evacuation. My family didn’t. We knew we couldn’t with my dad being so ill, beginning what were to be his last weeks.
All across the state, the coastal parishes were watching and waiting. My brother and I prepared for weather. We threw our outside clutter in our attic lest it become missiles. We tied our barbecue pit to our fence, Will giving me a physics lesson in the process. Grace thought these were entirely unnecessary precautions. She asked Will, “what exactly are you worried about?”
He said, “I’m worried that this storm is so big that we’re going to get damage and all the attention and help is going to go to New Orleans. And we’ll be all alone with Dad.”
Gas prices were jumping in anticipation of the shortage that would come from the offshore oil rigs going inactive during the storm, so we went out to fill up Will and Grace’s vehicles. We waited for pumps to clear at the station and that’s when we knew that we were not alone in our loosely-bridled trepidation. Outside of the microcosm of our domestic tragedy, it became apparent: we were not the only citizens just barely keeping a tenuous hold on reason.
Will suggested that we visit the supermarket across the street. As the doors parted and the A.C. hit our bodies, Will took off like a shot, rounding a corner with his back to us. I asked what he was looking for when I caught up, thinking this was some kind of purposeful errand. “Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure there was still food on the shelves.”
There was still food in the supermarket, but there was no bread. Only empty shelves buttressed by hamburger buns and bagels.
We returned home and sat watching news in the living room until the early morning hours. We were bracing ourselves. Choosing to believe that together we would survive whatever unknowns were hurtling towards us. I drew strength from sharing the air with my siblings. From just knowing that, physically and emotionally, we were sitting in the same place, dealing with triplicate troubles.
I don’t know which specter was spookier—storm or death—but I think I sensed that night that the two words would soon represent the same thing.
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I slept through Katrina’s landfall. At 6 AM on August 29, 2005 I was asleep in my bed in Lafayette. I got up that afternoon and turned to the television, looking to hear about Tulane or Butler Hall. I think the first thing I saw of what was happening in New Orleans was on CNN. It was aerial footage of a fire somewhere. The Metairie marina? The two story Target on Clearview? There was smoke pouring out of somewhere.
And then my mom, ever the arbiter of bad news that summer, told me that the levees had breached.
I watched the city fill up with water. Like everyone else in the country, I was a spectator to the tragedy. And, honestly, I drank it in. I watched it nonstop. I flipped between channels: CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC.
We started hearing rumors of carjackings on I-10. That some contingent of criminals transplanted to our town had robbed Lafayette Shooters. And I believed this stuff I was hearing. Someone held up a gun store? How likely is that? But the images of unimaginable suffering on the television made almost anything seem inside the realm of possibility, I guess. How likely was it that the roof of the Superdome would blow off? And yet, that had happened.
And though I watched the endless feedback loop of neglect on television, our dad didn’t want to know anything about it. He was starting to rely heavily on the morphine to the point where it was starting to cause him to hallucinate.
As absorbed as I was in the pain of watching New Orleans drown, it was almost totally eclipsed the next day, when my dad came back from the last Dr.’s appointment where they told him and my mom that there was nothing else to try. It was time for hospice to get involved.
The church music minister, Mr. Lee, was called. And he came over with his wife, Ms. Jan. Dad was in bed in his room and the rest of us sat in the living room. Mom cried. Will made a pot of coffee. We waited for the senior pastor to get there. The television was on news reports for a while, until Mr. Lee switched it off, saying that we didn’t need to see anymore. There was enough tragedy happening in our own house to keep us occupied.
They asked me what I was going to do about school. It was cancelled. Tulane would re-open in the Fall. Freshmen were being welcomed at universities and colleges across the country. We were encouraged to attend a host institution for the duration of the semester.
I would not be doing that. I knew that then. There was no action to be taken, no form to fill out, no decision to make. I would sit it out. The way I saw it, Katrina was not so bad. It was just a sign showing me what happens when you try to make your life fit your image of it instead of letting it pull you into where you’re supposed to be.
Coffee was had by others. When the visit was over, my brother said, “Everyone kept telling me how great my coffee was. So, it was either the best pot they’d ever had or the worst.” Mr. Lee and Ms. Jan went back to see my dad one at a time, to talk to him. When Ms. Jan got back to the living room, she just said, “I told him, ‘you know that we’re going to take care of your family, right?’”
And I was so touched and simultaneously a little horrified by that statement. And I cried because it seemed like the only appropriate way to respond.
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