I shared the first part of this story yesterday; you can read it here.
The consuming question: What was left?
As soon as we could, we got back on the road to try to find out. We reached the outer edges of Katrina’s swath, still a few hours from home. Massive oaks flipped over like lawn furniture, ancient roots pointing toward the sky. Gas stations and grocery stories tossed like toys. No power—the drowned food was already starting to rot, turning half a million refrigerators into corpses.
So we ate the dry crackers and peanut butter we had stashed, because we couldn’t find anything else to buy.
We drove through tunnels cut out of trees that had fallen across the highways. The freshly exposed wood formed walls to the left and to the right. Already, we saw spray-painted plywood signs nailed to trees: You loot, we shoot!
Our house had not flooded, but had lost swaths of its roof and its fence. Trees had fallen parallel to the house on three sides, but not one had touched the house. Ours was a sobering exception; almost everything else was destroyed by water and by wind and by trees. We walked a mile to the lakefront, picking our way through crackling power lines and the severed limbs of giant pines, but we couldn’t orient ourselves because the homes we used as landmarks had been wiped from their foundations by the storm surge.
We couldn’t stay. But where would we go? Where could we go? The loss quickly mounted from things, precious objects, and material essentials, to... everything. The churches where we prayed and worked out our salvation; the familiar streets of the way home; the people who had been there, and then were never there again. Katrina had erased our community. No one could offer a couch or a pillow because no one had any to offer.
A friend of a friend of a friend connected us with a volunteer host in a city several hours away. We left our injured, lonely house again, and met my parents and brother to caravan.
We felt an urgency to flee, even though we really had nothing to run to. And maybe even to run back to once we left. Neighborhoods? Jobs? Friends?
My parents tried to save the meat in their freezer, which represented hundreds of dollars worth of careful grocery budgeting. They cooked it all at once on a gas flame: burgers and chicken breasts and steaks and boudin sausage. It might have been a feast, the most extravagant feast our family had ever had, if it were not a desperate resuscitation of hope.
We just want to save something.
The delicious, earthy aromas swirled through the house without lights.
On the journey to our refuge, we stopped at a rest area a few hours away in a town that hadn’t been leveled. Local volunteers had made the lobby into a makeshift buffet of homemade red beans and rice laden with smoky sausage, and bowls of fresh salad, and baskets of red apples. “Please, please help yourselves!” they insisted. “Please. It’s the least we can do.”
In Alexandria, our hosts also welcomed us with food. Grits and grillades served in someone’s best china bowls. Crisp and chewy French bread. Hot, rich, chicory-spiked coffee served in teacups.
“It’s a special occasion!” these total strangers enthused as we sat at their dining table, trying to assure us of our welcome by serving us special-occasion food. “We are thrilled to have you here!”
We remained a few days with these hosts, aching for home, then we decided to go. Power or not. At the local grocery, we stocked up on gallons of water. Crackers and peanut butter. Canned green beans. I bought some beautiful oranges to eat on the drive back. The juice seemed so alive when I bit into those oranges, so fresh and so clean.
Our home did not regain power for weeks. A month? I cannot remember now. We went into the house once a day to check, and then returned to the church rectory where we were staying. Our parish, a high point circled by the lake and by rivers, had not flooded. Its buildings regained power before anywhere else. It had running water! (We didn’t drink it, though, because who knew what could be in it as it gurgled and spurted from the squealing pipes.)
Our young priest hosted us there along with other refugees: the priest’s father, a few nuns, parish staffers, and occasional passersby.
With no jobs to report to, no schools to staff, we spent time trying to pitch in and recover our community. We got sunburned standing in lines outside of FEMA relief centers to pick up MREs and bottled water. Soldiers patrolled Target with military rifles and ammo belts as we bought more canned green beans and dry pasta. Sometimes we bought candy, too: sweet, sticky, colorful, non-perishable candy that felt like some kind of defiance against destruction. You can’t have everything!
Every night we took turns cooking dinner from these non-perishable ingredients, or we made fun of how seriously the MRE labels took themselves, speaking in all-caps: BEEF STEW. SPOON. HOT SAUCE. And always, always in those MREs: CRACKERS AND GRAPE JELLY. I'll never, ever eat grape jelly again.
One night, one of the nuns staying together with us had fresh eggs! She made the most spectacular pasta carbonara for dinner. “People give nuns things!” she twinkled mischievously.
One day, I passed a row of fast food restaurants hanging spray-painted signs: RE-OPENING. HIRING.
One day, I went to the grocery (with military tanks staged in the parking lot), walked through the doors, and saw a display of cucumbers! Beyond that, lettuce! I found cottage cheese and blueberries, too, and felt unreasonably giddy.
One day, we checked into our house and saw the ceiling fan slowly spinning overhead and the hall light beaming with electricity. After we gave everything a good cleaning, we filled our fridge with cucumbers and lettuce and cottage cheese and blueberries.
One day, we put meat and frozen vegetables back in the freezer.
Our suffering amounted to mere inconvenience compared to the suffering of those who lived near the broken levees. Those who stood on rooftops wearing everything they now owned. Those whose friends and brothers and sisters floated facedown in the water, or suffocated in the sludge, or drowned in their own attics. They suffered. Those who waited and waited, endlessly waited, for help. Any kind of help. Those who were forced to hide from gunfights on the city bridges and in the city streets. Those who couldn’t find even canned green beans or candy, or even a drink of clean water.
The grief of Katrina sometimes seems as insurmountable as the towering mountains of debris pushed higher and higher as bulldozers razed destroyed neighborhoods.The heart-holes punctured by Katrina are deeper and left more exposed than the holes in the Superdome’s bald roof.
Yet.
One day I found my favorite snowball stand in all the city had reopened. I ordered the largest size offered, embarrassingly called a “Big Dog.” (Wedding cake flavor, of course.) I drove my snowball over to the empty lot where my grandparents’ home had been, two blocks from the 17th Street Canal.
There are now almost comically gigantic pumps at this canal, ready to pump away any future storm surge that should ever threaten the levee again.
There are seafood restaurants open and bustling all through the neighborhood, spilling wafts of salt and cayenne from boiled crawfish into the air.
Grandma and Paw Paw’s lot is now a lush green yard without any trace of the home that we once visited. I can stand on the spot, now soft grass, that used to be a bar where Grandma served us stacks of blueberry pancakes. The spot that used to be a counter where I learned how to drink coffee. The spot that used to be a freezer where Grandma kept gallons of pineapple snowballs to tide her over through the winter while the snowball stands are closed.
I ate my snowball standing on that spot, a memorial. And it was a perfect snowball: ice so fine it felt creamy and so cold it made my skin prickle even on a hot Louisiana-August day.
New Orleans will always be a city whose heart is always a little broken, but we're still cookin.'
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