Sep. 8, 2005 – Originally published by CNC, Inc.

New Orleans: The Story in the Wake of the Hurricane

There is a certain mysery to ocean water – its sounds, its great volume, its quality of being both known and ultimately always unknowable at the same time. What appears to be a calm, accessible ocean turns on a dime to a deep, fathomless, uncontainable, and sometimes tragic source of both life and death. By the seashore, a child slips under water when a parent’s back is turned, while a fisherman a few miles away feeds his family and earns a living – both from the same source. People choose to live by the water, and sometimes pay for it with their lives. Such is the story of our Gulf Coast in the wake of a hurricane.

I went to New Orleans when I was twelve, on a family vacation with my parents and my younger sister. My father was recovering from serious surgery and a cancer scare, and had determined that after we saw New Orleans instead of continuing on, we would need to head for home – he was too tired for the trip, after all. So New Orleans was doubly exciting, because soon I would be returning home in the back of our orange Volkswagon camper, where there was zero chance of excitement, just more summer reading, more day-dreaming in the backyard, more sweltering moments of unnameable longing, teetering on the edge of my teenage years. It was the end of my childhood, and I could literally feel it going, each long, standard, passing day.

New Orleans had the feel of person with insomnia to it, as I recall – a city who is productive and dreamy when most have turned in for the night, tired and rag-tag in the morning. Musicians loitered tiredly on streetcorners, divving up the last gig’s pay while in doorways tired, lack-luster club dancers of varying body types and enthusiasm swayed to piped-in music in the late morning air. We sat in a jazz club and had buscuits and juice, and my parents sent each other looks – the looks said, “Should the girls be here?” while we stared, wide-eyed, at New Orleans on a summer morning.

As we walked along Bourbon Street, our attention came to land on an African American man, about fifty years of age, wearing a tattered safari jacket, a gold pocketwatch on a chain, and smelling faintly of booze – and most vividly, I remember that both of his hands was missing a few fingers. As our small family passed by, my mother hurrying us along, the man grabbed me, and began to dance, pulling my arms insistantly and warbling a rusty tune as a saxaphone player, amused, no doubt, began an upbeat yet directionless jazz number. I looked to my parents, one startled, the other exhausted and ill, and then looked back at this stranger, and felt a stirring of being able to be at last in the orbit, however briefly, of someone totally exotic. As I began to dance a little, too, in my Sears and Roebuck shorts set and my new wire-frame glasses, my spirit soared! The man’s hands were rough as he pulled me back and forth, and suddenly he released me, back to my family. “Enjoy New Orleans, gal,” he called after me tiredly, his voice scratchy from cigarettes and being up too many hours in a row. I never forgot New Orleans, and I never forgot him, as he was my entrance into possibilty, of crossing the divide between my conquered world and the world still waiting for me to grow up, already. Maybe dead for years anway, my mind goes back to him in the wake of one of our country’s biggest natural disasters ever – did he make it?

I think of him now, in his underwater city, and all those with him. And in sorrow and faith, I choose to think of many of them as swimmers – those who we will find out in the weeks to come didn’t make it out alive – gliding fully clothed, ushering the children ahead of them, muscles no longer aching, troubles suddenly over, as in a rush of joyous surprise and streaming bubbles, they swim directly towards the light.

To make a donation to the victims of hurricane Katrina, please visit www.redcross.org today