This laptop. The clothes on our backs. Baby pictures, and a handful of books and toys.
That’s what we grabbed the day before Katrina came to town. And we have more than many.
I lived through Hurricane Betsey as a small child. Betsey was as ferocious as Katrina, and many people died. Like now, some drowned in their attics; some were electrocuted; others were struck by whirling debris.
But the world scarcely noticed.
Then-President Lyndon Johnson, like George W. Bush, flew over and declared a national disaster. Life Magazine relegated us to a photograph of a swaying palm tree.
Back then, Betsy was a local catastrophe.
New Orleans had no skyscrapers and only one large hotel, a very grand one called “The Roosevelt.” Later owners changed it to “The Fairmont,” but native New Orleanians never called it that.
I lunched there once with a childhood friend who delightedly squealed when he noticed his fork was monogrammed “R” rather than “F.”
“I’m stealing it,” he whispered conspiratorially as he slipped it into my handbag.
“No, you’re making me steal it!”
I objected.
But we’re native New Orleanians. And the fork was a piece of our history that is always washing away.
When Betsey struck, we had a wonderful local meteorologist, Nash Roberts, who’d transferred his passion for great storms to the entire populace. Every summer my father brought home “Nash Roberts’ Hurricane Tracking Charts,” and we’d track hurricanes across the Atlantic and into the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters.
Usually, they just pelted us with rain as they spun their fury elsewhere. But we respected them.
We knew we lived below sea level, and this carried special responsibilities. We saw evidence of it every day in our cemeteries with the dead buried in tombs above the ground.
Our grandparents told tales of ground-buried bodies rising with floods, spreading deadly disease. And every summer we filled boxes with fresh masking tape to put on windows so they didn’t blow in; flashlights; transistor radios; and new filaments and batteries to keep these going.
We stocked endless jugs of water, filled by hand from the garden hose, and food one could eat straight from the can or box without cooking.
When Betsey hit, we had Nash, we had charts, and we could safely eat and drink for weeks. And more importantly, we had a levee system people were inordinately proud of and willing to pay for. It was a patronage system that worked because the sons and grandsons and nephews who inherited levee jobs would’ve rather died than be the ones who “blew it” and disgraced their families’ names by flooding the city.
Our barrier islands were intact, and our coastline had not yet been ravaged by “Big Oil,” which willy-nilly cut snaky swaths through our marshes to drag drilling platforms and gear out into the Gulf, leaving our coastline porous as a sieve.
Betsey’s refugees?
Some went to a local bomb shelter constructed to withstand nuclear holocaust, but left when it leaked. Families were tight back then. Almost everyone, rich or poor, had someone, somewhere, offering them a helping hand and higher ground.
We evacuated to my father’s downtown office that night. Unrelenting sheets of rain stung us like needles, and howling winds blew out office windows below. Looters smashed storefronts, but this wasn’t more than a handful of alienated folks.
In the morning, a man hurriedly passed us, shamefacedly dragging two store mannequins swaddled in formal wear.
But shoot at us?
Steal our car?
Unthinkable.
As a small child, I’d never seen anything like Betsey. But I was sure I’d see it again. Climatologists long warned New Orleans was due for “the big one.”
Blame Bush?
No. But I’m glad he cut his vacation short. Later, we’ll need to know why the $14 billion needed to repair our porous coastline never came, even as Bush spends over $20 billion a month on the Iraq war.
And could we use more National Guardsmen to contain the lawless?
You betcha.
The war has sucked those away as well.
I saw only two National Guardsmen along the entire stretch of highway from New Orleans to Waco. But blame Bush for the murderous thugs who pull people out of their cars at gunpoint, who shoot at rescue helicopters? Do I know these folks? Did I sit next to them on a bus last week?
Texas welcomes my child and me.
People pull up next to our car, wish us well, and tell us to have courage. Last night, total strangers, seeing our license plate, picked up our dinner check. Yesterday, Texas officials declared Louisiana children can freely enroll in their schools.
Blame Bush?
He’s my neighbor now. So, howdy, neighbor!
And let me know when that $14 billion is on its way. Better late than never.
