Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006 - (Page 58)

— that filled our weeks? I suppose it comes down to a fairly simple decision: should we rebuild the life we had or start from scratch. The one thing of which we are sure is that we want to return to New Orleans. We want to help our schools reopen, help our city rebuild. Beyond that, though, it’s all a question mark. We know now, in a way we couldn’t have known without losing so many of the things we owned, that possession is an illusion. Everything’s on loan. As for security, we know just a few hours of rain and wind can leave your life in shambles. It will be harder from now on to take things for granted because we know that even a city — imagine, a whole city — can be extinguished in a single summer morning. So we have changed. I don’t think I will ever close a door behind me again without wondering: Last time? We used to live as if our lives drifted on a river that rolled on forever, but now we’ve heard the falls ahead. To us, the roar sounds louder than it did just a few weeks ago. Perhaps that’s why we think it’s finally time to swim against the current. Oct. 7, 2005 We were impatient to get on the road. After five weeks staying with relatives, Marsha and I wanted to get home, though we knew our house in New Orleans was probably uninhabitable. Our insurance company had called our daughter's home in New Jersey to tell us that the two cars we had left behind in our garage when we fled Hurricane Katrina would be declared total losses without an adjusters report required. If an insurance company was willing to pay off a claim without an inspection based simply upon our address, we knew our house had sustained major damage. We had covered over a thousand miles in two days of driving back to New Orleans when we first noticed them in Alabama, doublewide mobile homes on the interstate traveling south with us. There were so many, we lost count as we passed the slower moving trailers, each with a simple sign taped to a rear window: FEMA. They were the first trace of the hurricane we had seen. In the late afternoon, taking I-59 south out of Meridian, Mississippi, we saw a road sign that pointed the way to New Orleans, and I felt the surge of elation coming home always inspires in me. But almost immediately, we also saw evidence of the storm littering both sides of the highway. About 10 percent of the slender pine trees lining the interstate were snapped in two 10 or 12 feet up. On the right, the broken trunks had fallen into the forest; on the left, dead treetops fringed the edge of the highway. Every broken tree had toppled toward the west. The battering wind that had decimated the woods had spun out of the east, the counterclockwise wind of an advancing hurricane. With the light thickening into early evening as we drove farther south, it seemed at first an optical illusion, the bowing toward the falling sun of the trees still standing on 58 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2005-06 Tracking the Beast Backwards Flooding at the St. Bernard housing project, New Orleans. either side of the road. By now perhaps a third of the trees were snapped in half, always falling westward. Then, we passed a steel sign crumpled like a wad of green paper beside the interstate: New Orleans 98. We were less than 100 miles from home. From that point on, we couldn’t read any of the signs along the highway; every one was doubled over backwards on its steel legs from the wind. Now half the pines were down, their needles rusting on the ground. We felt as if we were following the trail left by some terrible beast back to where its rampage had begun. With the twin bridges of I-10 across Lake Pontchartrain both having been smashed by the hurricane, we had to follow I-12 along its northern shore to the 24-mile causeway

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005 Contents Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Louisiana State Museum After Katrina: “It’s time somebody woke us us up.” Missing New Orleans On Perilous Ground The Buildings of Louisiana (Architectural History by Karen Kingsley) Historic New Orleans Collection Louisiana Association of Museums Back to New Orleans Diary of a Displaced Person Jazz Notes (Music History by Bruce Raeburn) Cradle of the Stars The Terrible and the Brave Bookstand (Book Review by Thomas Uskali) Sound Advice (Music Review by Ben Sandmel) Forum (Commentary by James Lee Burke)

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2005-2006

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