In just over a week, the Gulf Coast will experience the five year anniversary of Katrina. CNN is already running specials.
That was a hard sentence to write. You can’t say celebrate (and that is the default, isn’t it?), because there’s no celebration to this. You can’t say survive (although I gave it quite a bit of consideration), because surviving the hurricane was so much more than surviving the anniversary. So what do you say?
Well, they will experience it, no matter what else happens.
Although I do not (and have never) lived on the Gulf Coast, Katrina affected my life personally. It altered the shape of my known self. I feel compelled to write about it, what I saw, what I felt. I feel compelled to share it with as many people as I can—we cannot afford to forget what happened, like we did with the Flood of 1927.
I was not paying close attention when hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, and then throughout the subsequent flooding, at least at first. This was due to the fact that we were living through our own little drama at home. I was heading into my last year of graduate school, which was fortunate, since I was on break when the huge storm hit our neighborhood. The first day, we couldn’t get out (until all the men with chainsaws in the neighborhood cut up the fallen trees). Three houses down from us, there was a giant hole in the sidewalk where lightening had struck. The power was out for days—nearly a week, despite their best efforts to get it up and running again.
We spent our days cooking copious amounts of de-thawing food outside, trying to clean up as much of the mess as possible, and trying, desperately to keep the kids busy and cool while we tried to keep ourselves from going stir crazy at night.
The kids were cranky and hot; I was cranky too. I had to clean out the freezer and refrigerator (YUCK) and I was tired of sleeping on a mattress downstairs in the basement to evade the heat. Finding things like candles, batteries and ice in the stores made up a significant part of our days.
When we found out this was an annual event in the neighborhood (power out, fallen trees, flooding down the hill from us) we went out of our way to be better prepared for the next time. There WERE next times.
So it was about day three (after the levee breaches) before the coffee pot and the TV came back to us. I had heard some on the radio by this point, but nothing could prepare you for the images on the television.
I suddenly realized that I really had absolutely nothing to complain about. I was glued to the TV.
The image that struck me the most-- the one that I watched over and over again—was a woman, who looked as if she were about my age, holding a small child (perhaps about a year old). He lay limply in her arms, only clad in a dirty diaper. It was obvious that he was severely dehydrated. He may have even had heat stroke. He looked as if he was near unconsciousness. She sat there, on camera, her hair pulled back and her tank top dirty, begging for someone to come and save her son from dying.
Do you remember that? I will remember it until the day I die. It makes me tear up to just write it down here.
I was so angry with her! That’s the thing that strikes me the most now. I was so damn angry with her. How dare she beg someone else to save her son? How dare she sit there, doing nothing! I would have done anything—hiked anywhere, swam anywhere, to get my sons out of that mess.
I was angry with her. I thought I was angry with her. I realized later I was angry at myself—at all of us, in fact. For not paying attention to the problem before this happened.
I soon had the chance to speak with people there; people who had went through it. I spoke with them greedily—trying to decide who was to blame, why it had to happen, how it could ever be fixed. I learned that sometimes you can do all that you can do and it still isn’t enough.
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