Note: I wrote this essay on the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I hope you will join me in reflecting now 19 years later.
New Orleans expressing herself in food: it’s a constant more dependable than a thousand levees.
Fitting, then, that my Katrina memories are punctuated by food memories, and that the food we ate tells the story of our despair and our hope and our communion.
Early on August 27, a team of volunteers and I lugged sweating gallons of milk and giant flat boxes of donuts into a retreat center where, in a few hours, we would host about a hundred teens preparing for their Confirmation. The day before, I had ordered 35 pizzas to be delivered there, too. As we arranged the milk and donuts on long folding tables, and busied ourselves setting out markers and poster board for small groups, one of the volunteers carried around a small radio that crackled with hurricane news.
Of course, now, it seems so clear: we should have canceled the donuts and the pizza.
But, early that morning, Katrina was still a toss-up. The retreat had required months of planning meetings and reservations and non-refundable down payments and registration fees. Why cancel it just yet, when this storm wasn’t even a sure threat, just to lose all that time and money?
Around 10:00 a.m., things changed. Category 3. Mandatory evacuation. We called off the retreat just as it started. We sent home the teens who had begun to arrive with a bounty of donuts and milk, and stacked their arms with pizza boxes. “Take them!” we joked. “We can’t eat all these by ourselves!”
Donuts and milk and pizza: the capricious luxury of those who could always find and buy fresh, real food later.
On August 28, we left town easily, freely, driving toward a beautiful sunrise over Auburn, Alabama, where one of my brothers, in college, had invited us to visit. Like every other hurricane evacuation I had ever known, our flight from Katrina seemed like a decent trade-off: a few days off of work, probably at the cost of power outage and fallen tree limbs to clean up, but more or less a chance to get away for the weekend.
Before we left, we ran the standard hurricane evacuation drill: Eat up all the fresh food before you go, because the power will probably go out. Salads and yogurt and oranges and cheese and sliced turkey.
But we left our freezer stocked with meat and frozen vegetables, because we’d be back in time to save it.
Usually that’s how it went.
By phone, we discussed and debated with the rest of the family about the pros and cons of staying or leaving. Mom, thrilled by nature, wanted to stay so she could witness the power of the storm, but she and Dad ultimately decided to evacuate for the sake of my elderly grandparents, whom they brought along. Joining their caravan would be another brother and my sister and her family. “We’ll be on the road in a few hours,” they said.
My other grandparents, who lived two blocks from the 17th Street Canal, were undecided. They had never flooded before, not in 40 years of hurricanes and evacuations. Maybe they’d trim back the crepe myrtles, though, just in case the wind was bad, and they’d grab a few more canned things from Dorignac’s to tide them over.
Comforted that we’d soon be together in a spontaneous family reunion, we enjoyed Ceasar salads and soup at a quaint café and passed a lovely afternoon strolling antique shops and the rolling green campus of Auburn University.
As we checked into the hotel and waited for the room to be ready, the lobby TV blared urgent warnings about the coming storm. I remember exactly what the meteorologist’s smooth blonde hair looked like, hairsprayed into frozen swirl, as she gestured frantically at the map: “You will face certain death if you are caught by this storm. You must not stay in the area. You must not be on the road. You need to leave now. Certain death!”
And that was the moment we felt fall upon us something previously unknown and unfeared. The giant Starbucks cup in my hand felt heavy, silly, expensive, wasteful.
My family arrived exhausted after hours and hours of evacuation traffic. We crammed into the hotel, crammed around the TV, crunching on stress-relieving chips and pretzels. Forecast models. Projections. Warnings.
“Be nice to each other!” urged Governor Kathleen Blanco. “Make some peanut butter sandwiches, get the kids in the car, and leave.”
When we finally went to bed that night, I remember the thought: When we wake up, it will over and we will know. And: Peanut butter sandwiches? This is the official plan?
Somehow we slept, although not for long. Again, early in the morning, sipping weak hotel coffee and nibbling near-stale continental breakfast bagels, we watched the news.
The first shot I remember: Canal Street.
Wind-tossed. Windows blown out on some high-rises. Dirty skies and dirtier streets. Fractured palm trees. But no water! No floods! Relief. Nothing we haven't handled a dozen times before. We'll be fine. We'll go back. The power will come back on soon, and everything will just go back.
But no.
No.
A levee broke.
Another levee broke.
No.
Before our eyes.
Rooftops seemed to float. Flames leaped from buildings that were almost totally submerged. How? Smoke. Oily, poisonous water. Debris swirling by. Parts of houses. Cars. Were those people? Those were people’s bodies in the water. An aerial shot of the city. What are we looking at? What are we looking at? The flood drowned landmarks. What are we looking at? What is left? A church steeple. The impenetrable Superdome, holes puncturing its roof. People in the water.
News that the 17th Street Canal had broken.
Grandma and Paw Paw! Had they evacuated? Where were they? Calls wouldn’t go through, but the news video did, and we could see their neighborhood, like the whole world it seemed, swallowed up by the greedy, toxic water.
An aunt managed to get a call through to let us know she had convinced my grandparents to leave just in time. They were now all headed to stay with relatives in Denver. We didn't know it that day, but they would never return to New Orleans. We hadn't seen it yet, but their house and the lifetime it memorialized were already submerged in toxic sludge, and already tossing in the black water were boxes of wedding photos and inherited china and the coffee cups Grandma had set before me so many times as I poured out my heart.
In Auburn, we immediately found a coffee house with internet-connected computers. As we searched for news about the schools where we worked (both flooded, across the city from each other), the barista silently handed us beautiful cappuccinos, and refused our money. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
The consuming question: What is left?
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