Dear friends and
family,
It’s been a long few days. I don’t
think there’s been a minute of waking time that I haven’t been busy doing something and thinking of the next 10
things I have to get done.
We’ve moved into our new
apartment, thanks to a Herculean effort from
Marcia and Kirk. I think if we hadn’t had their help and support, we’d
still be facing at least a week more’s work to get organised enough to make the
move. We’ve bought everything needed to start out again – amazing how time
consuming it is to do grocery shopping when you don’t have a single thing in the
house. Stores in Houston have been very supportive, with many of them giving us
15% - 25% discount when we display our New Orleans’ driver’s licence. One woman
at a check-out counter in a store which wasn’t offering a discount said “We
should give you one,” and found a way to make us
"qualify" for some free computer paper.
We moved into the apartment on
Sunday. I had to finish writing an article that day, so I got up around 4.30am –
close to my typical waking time these days – to get it done before we made the
final move. Writing is grinding work in these circumstances.
On Monday, Lillie returned to
work. Her firm is currently operating out of a conference room in the offices of
one of their clients. There are about 15 of them all crammed in there, talking
on phones and trying to resurrect their files in what must be close to bedlam.
Randy, one of the partners, made a trip back to New Orleans and climbed the 32
flights of stairs in Place St Charles up to their offices to retrieve some files
and laptop computers. Fortunately Bonnie, their office manager, had taken their
server backup with her when she evacuated. They’ve just signed a 3-month lease
on office space a lot closer to us here in Houston and they’ll move to those
premises in two weeks, so Lillie won't have to
add a 40-minute drive to her long days.
The firm has around 35 employees.
Most of those are not here in Houston, but everyone is getting paid. To do that,
all the lawyers will have to work long hours and take no vacation for the forseeable future, so that means Lillie will
be unable to come with me to Australia in November. She and our friends Katy,
Kerry and Andrew had all planned to come to celebrate my 50th birthday. Now,
none of them can make it.
We’ve also just heard that one of
Lillie’s workmates, Bernice, lost her brother in the hurricane. He stayed at
home because he couldn’t evacuate with his dog, and he and the dog died.
Bernice’s son is also terminally ill (not Katrina related) and so she’s really
suffering. Bernice has been with the company for 40 years.
I’m still not working too much.
Mostly that’s because I haven’t had a moment to spare, but my heart and mind are
certainly not in it anyway. I’m fortunate not only because I can work anywhere
there’s an Internet connection, but also because my editors and Helen Prejean
have all given me a lot of flexibility. They’ve gone out of their way to make it
easy for me. I’m not getting much writing income, but Helen is paying me
throughout this time.
There’s so much to do it astounds
me. Just to keep our lives going. We’ve had to contact phone companies (local
and long distance), power companies, banks, credit card companies, change our
address with dozens of sites online. Everything takes so long because of the
jammed phone networks, and then we run into typical everyday irritations for
which I no longer have much patience. For
instance, we had high-speed Internet connected in our new apartment because I
need it for my work and we both need it to connect with our far-flung friends
and family. But the technician screwed up the installation and so I spent two
hours on the phone trying to get it fixed. Two hours, including having the phone
line dropped twice when I thought I was finally making headway.
Then, just before I wrote this, I
discovered that FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) appeared to have
lost my application for emergency assistance. It took me around an hour to fill
in the application, so I thought I’d have to go through that again. But after
going in circles with their abysmally designed Web site (which works only in
Internet Explorer and no other browser), I finally found that they do have me
registered but they’d failed to email me a crucial piece of information I needed
to retrieve my registration. You’ve no doubt all heard the complaints about
FEMA’s handling of the disaster; well, add their Web site to the list of
failings. When I finally managed to
retrieve my application (status “pending”) I discovered that we’re all classified as part of Disaster Number 1603.
FEMA’s fond of numbers.
It’s all small stuff, but it feels
hard when your emotional and physical resources have leached away.
The hardest thing is the loss of
community. It’s awful being away from all those we love. We do, however, have
one friend in Houston. Judith was in the book club I’ve been involved with for
the past four years. She evacuated to Chicago where her mother lives. She drove
all the way, thank goodness, because it means she still has her car. (Current
estimates are that Katrina totalled over 220,000 cars in New Orleans alone.)
Judith, who’s in her fifties, went back to university a couple of years ago to
do a law degree at Loyola in New Orleans. She had just started her third and
final year when Katrina struck. Luckily, Loyola has moved its senior law classes
to the University of Houston and so Judith is now a fellow Houstonite (I can’t
bring myself to say “Texan”).
So, the first night in our
apartment we invited Judith over for dinner. She lives by herself, which must be
excruciatingly difficult at a time like this. It was wonderful to see her. And
fascinating watching how differently we do things as refugees. We ate much later
than usual, because eating seems so unimportant in comparison to catching up
with one another. And then, at one point, all three of us ended up on phone
calls, Lillie in the office talking to her aunt in Louisiana; me in the bedroom
talking to my sister, Kathi, in Australia; and Judith in the living room on her
mobile talking to her mum in Chicago (difficult, because her mum has early
dementia and can’t remember that Judith is okay and the hurricane didn’t get
her). Anyway, each of us was on the phone for about half an hour, then we all
got off and returned to sitting and talking. No apologies given for being on the
phone, and none expected. That’s because we all recognise at such a deep level
that contact with family and friends is the most important thing, so when a call
comes, you take it. The social graces have
morphed to suit our condition.
Two other big bits of news. One is
Rita. We cannot believe that this new hurricane has apparently decided to take a
beeline for Houston. When I first saw the projected path I cried. Of course,
it’s too early to tell yet where it will make landfall, but at the moment
Galveston and Houston are right in the centre of the cone of possible landfalls.
Fortunately Houston is a little inland and, unlike New Orleans, doesn’t sit in a
basin. Galveston, which is on an island at the mouth of Galveston Bay, is
particularly vulnerable and evacuations have already been ordered. Galveston has
the dubious distinction of having experienced one of the worst hurricanes in the
country’s history. In 1900, a major hurricane almost completely destroyed the
city. (There’s an extraordinary account of this in Isaac’s Storm by Eric
Larson.) Not unsurprisingly, African Americans suffered disproportionately in
that storm, too, and many were rounded up after the storm and forced to work
recovering some of the 6000 - 8000 bodies. It’s hard to imagine what it must
have been like to have a storm like that descend upon a population that had
no forewarning.
Anyway, we've been well and truly informed that Rita’s
coming. She’s already packing 110mph winds and is about to cross over that nasty
stretch of 90 degree (F) water in the Gulf upon which hurricanes thrive. If we
have to we’ll evacuate again, maybe back to Louisiana if the track heads south
of us here. We took out a renter’s insurance policy to cover the stuff we’ve
just bought to get ourselves set up again;
we did it online and asked for immediate coverage, which we thought they’d deny
(they often won’t write insurance when a hurricane is looming), but the policy
has already come through.
The other news is that we heard
from our neighbours, Jane and Al. Jane has been in Georgia and she was returning
to Louisiana to meet up with Al in a little town called Thibodeaux. They drove
over the Causeway across Lake Ponchartrain into Metairie (the suburb west of New Orleans), and then decided to see
how close they could get to our neighbourhood. To their surprise there was no
water in our area (the pumping has been way ahead of schedule) and the police
said they could enter. They had a very short time to get into our neighbourhood
before the curfew, and so they ran along the streets. A bloke in a pickup (ute)
“took pity on the old geezers”, as Jane puts it, and gave them a lift to our street. Jane said
there was no way you could get through
without a truck, as all the roads are blocked by trees and power poles and
lines, and they spent as much time on the footpaths and neutral grounds (median
strips) as they did on the road. On Veterans Boulevard and Fleur de Lis, they
saw many huge boats – large cabin cruisers and fishing boats – on the neutral
grounds. To get an idea of how extraordinary this is, our street is about 20
blocks from the lakefront, Veterans runs parallel to it another 6 blocks from
the lake, and Fleur de Lis runs perpendicular to both.
When they got to our street, it was
blocked in many places by large trees. A huge live oak had fallen and crashed
through one house. But the good news is that the floodwaters had not reached
Jane and Al’s second storey, which makes it likely that it’s the same inside our
house. Jane said even her clothing upstairs seemed okay, because the mold hadn’t
spread. They only had a few minutes there before curfew, so they didn’t get to
check whether our roof was intact, but my poor old truck was sitting there in
the driveway looking nicely washed.
Jane’s bottom floor was almost
unrecognisable. Much of the furniture had migrated two rooms away; large heavy
cabinets were on top of kitchen counters; the floor was covered in a foot of mud
and debris, including almost every item from their cupboards,
smashed.
Each of the houses in the street
had at least one smashed window, where rescue crews had broken their way in to
check for survivors or bodies. They marked each house with codes in red paint to
show they’d been checked. From the codes,
it appears that our neighbours Phil, Helen and Nancy from across the
street must have been there during the
hurricane. Jane and Al believe the codes mean they were rescued.
Jane said one of the most striking
things was the complete absence of colour, even in the trees. She said it was as
if a stage crew for a horror movie had gone through with thousands of litres of
grey paint and covered every single millimetre. So, our lovely live oak is
standing, but it’s no longer green, and we
still don’t know whether it will survive.
Of course, we’d like to get back in
as soon as possible to see whether we can save anything from our second floor.
But Rita is going to intervene. They’re now not letting anyone back in to
Orleans Parish and, if Rita stays on the east side of its projected track, New
Orleans could get some nasty weather once
more. We’re hoping Rita doesn’t wreck whatever Katrina left
untouched.
Love,
Rose
Comments