My Katrina

Making lists

Dear friends and family,

It’s day three of trying to settle into life here in Houston… for the second time. I managed to get some work done, as well as doing the usual rounds on the phone to utility companies, doctors, airlines. I had to change my flight plans for my November trip to Australia so I can fly out of Houston instead of New Orleans, and try to ensure Lillie gets a refund for the trip she now cannot make.

United has been incredibly inflexible with our friends Katy, Kerry and Andrew who also can no longer make the trip to Australia. They were all refused refunds and given stellar options like “you must fly on a trip of equal value and book it by December 2005”. Completely undoable, of course, for people trying to recover from Katrina and desperately needed at work. Lillie and I have fared better with United presumably because I’ve flown so many times with them and have Premier frequent flyer status. Still, they earn a place on my nascent Companies Who Screw Evacuees List.

That list, thankfully, is far shorter than the Companies Who Have Gone Out of Their Way to Make Life Easier for Refugees List. On the latter list are companies such as our Internet Service Providers (Cox and Earthlink), our phone company (BellSouth), our credit card companies, our power company Entergy and a bunch of others. Lillie’s firm is there, for making sure everyone is being paid and can have a job. Verizon Wireless, from whom we bought our pre-paid cellular phones after we evacuated to Baton Rouge, gets the crown. The company gave each of us $800 worth of phone credit. That was a huge gift when communications and cell phones were so vital to our sanity and our livelihood.

Another company joining United on the List of Shame is the Comfort Suites in El Dorado, Arkansas, with whom we booked a room during our Rita evacuation and who said “you pay up even if you cancel the room”.

Imagine what it’s like: a Cat 5 hurricane bearing down upon you, the roads clogged, absolutely no rooms available within Texas and Louisiana, and you’re trying to book something while you’re on the road so you have somewhere, anywhere, to go. You have no idea whether you’ll even make it to Arkansas (given the traffic, I reckon it would have taken us well over 30 hours). And then you get these helpful souls on the phone who say “You can only have the room for tonight” (that is, the night before Rita is due to hit, so we’d have to find another hotel for the actual night its due to come onshore) and “You pay whether you make it here or not”. We did manage to book another hotel for the following few nights even further north in Arkansas (or rather, Laurie did it for us by proxy, as by that time we were truly melting on the Texas highway), and that hotel said “Just ring and cancel if you need to; no charge; others are sure to need the room”. Most hotels seem to fall into the latter category, thank goodness. In the long run, of course, we ended up in Baton Rouge and didn’t need either room. The charge for the Comfort Suite’s room appeared on my credit card a few days later.

I was so pissed off by Comfort Suite’s attitude, I fired off an email to their parent company, Choice Hotels International. Several days later, I received a snail mail reply which confirmed that the “no cancellation even in times of emergency” approach is company policy for the entire Choice Hotels group. (In fact, the reply from them was so bad I’ve written a second time to let them know they’ve earned a place on the Screw the Evacuees List.) So, if you’re ever travelling in the US and need a place to stay, I recommend you give Comfort Suites and the other hotels owned by Choice Hotels a miss.

Of course, this is all very minor stuff in comparison to what many black New Orleans families are encountering. The news last night tracked a number of families who were told by Dallas companies that no apartments were available for rent. The white news reporters then went in and were immediately offered apartments in the same buildings. It is, of course, what so many African Americans experience all their lives, but it has to be unspeakably unbearable to be slapped in the face in this way when you’ve lost everything in Katrina and you’re supposedly the object of national sympathy.

Recent news: Our friend Judith, one of our few New Orleans friends now in Houston, found out last weekend that her house is a complete wreck, too. She had thought she’d fared okay because the flooding wasn’t very high in her area of Uptown and it seemed like only the duct work and other stuff under her two-storey house would need replacing. But after Rita passed, she managed to sweet talk a National Guardsman into letting her into New Orleans and going to her house. She discovered that Katrina had severely damaged the roof, the ceilings had then caved in, and the house itself was on a slant. Very little is recoverable.

On the other hand, our friend Ginger fared a lot better. She’s been back into New Orleans a few times, a couple in an official capacity and then once recently just with her husband, Joe. She’s Chief Judge of the US District Court in New Orleans (it’s a Federal court) and has been working since Katrina to get her courts up and running in Baton Rouge, hence the official trips back to New Orleans. Ginger was one of the women in my wonderful, long-running book group. Judith was in the group, too, along with an amazing bunch of women.

I thought you might like to hear some of Ginger’s account of reentering her neighbourhood. The comments in [square brackets] are mine:

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It was a beautiful day, not as hot as it has been.  Joe packed his pistol which made me a little nervous - but less nervous than going without.  The few times we have been to the house over the past several weeks, we had a law enforcement officer with us who went in first, gun drawn.   That was basically the only way the U.S. Marshal Service would “permit” us to go to homes up to now.

In any event, we took I-10 which looked like normal traffic for the first time... not all emergency vehicles, utility trucks, police cars, etc. like the previous times.  Since Jefferson Parish is now open [the parish immediately to New Orleans’ west], there is a lot of just regular traffic. Hurricane Rita created a big puddle at a big dip in the road just inside the Orleans Parish line, so the traffic was diverted.  We ended up on Bonnabel Avenue which is in Jefferson Parish.  Life looked pleasantly normal there... folks driving around, fixing houses and even mowing a lawn. We passed a P.J. Coffee House and folks were inside sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. [PJ’s is owned by Phyllis Jordan, mother of our good friend James Arey, who last I heard had evacuated to Washington, D.C.]

We got to the police checkpoint at the 17th Street Canal -- that is the infamous canal that had the breach that flooded all of Lakeview.  It is also the parish line between Jefferson and Orleans. For those of you who got our earlier emails, it's also where we had to walk the first time because the road was too flooded to drive.

Anyway, there was a police officer there checking all the cars. He let us through (I showed him we lived nearby).  When we got to our house, I saw that the window of our front door was broken in. My first reaction, needless to say, was “uh oh”, but then I saw there was additional writing on the side of the house.  The last time we came there was writing on the glass itself.  So I figure we had gotten a visit from the National Guard. They have been busting into homes both to find survivors/bodies and to get people to obey the mandatory evacuation brought on by Hurricane Rita. Our guess was right. Cowboy Joe went in first with his pistol but we quickly saw that nothing was disturbed.

Our living quarters were still fine. As before, a bit surreal to see everything look so normal within our four walls… and also again a blessing when I know so many have lost their homes and their jobs. I was also struck by how much I want to “give away” when we get back... we don't need it and other people do. I want to empty the closets of most of the clothes, the kitchen of most of the pots and pans and just give it to someone who could use it. One effect of all this is a strong desire to live life with less stuff. Live simpler. [Here, here!]

We gathered up a few things to bring back and then did inventory downstairs. [Joe and Ginger have tenants living in the downstairs apartments.]  I was happy to see that the two downstairs apartments which were wet and slimy to walk in 10 days ago now have dry floors.  The mildew line also appeared to have stopped about 2-3 feet from the ceiling, which seems about where it was 10 days ago. I rescued a few more items for the tenants to bring back to Baton Rouge.

Signs of life... we saw Tim and Mignon's cat scamper by. [Mignon was in the book group, too.]  They're our downstairs tenants in the back who also have a Mississippi home, which survived the hurricanes.  This particular cat is an outdoor cat and he looked healthy. Our side tenant, Chad, has been coming by to leave cat food out in general. Also, when I was in Tim & Mignon's apartment, I noticed their big fish tank in the corner…several little fish were swimming around looking quite healthy also.   In their bedroom, alongside the mildewed clothes in the closet was a battery operated clock, with the correct time and untouched by water or mold. 

Down the street I saw one of our neighbors and visited with her. She is a lovely woman who lives with her mother. They are white and are welcoming neighbors in our predominantly black community…they have Halloween parties for the neighborhood kids and do other things like that to make our block more of a community. I was very happy to hear they only had a few inches of water and she's enthusiastic about the clean-up. We probably won't have electricity in our area for several more weeks though. But since the weather is cooling down, that may not be such a hardship. 

Our property still looks so strange. It's almost mesmerizing because it's so different. We walk out of the back bedroom which looks exactly like it did when Kathy [Ginger’s sister and our dear, beloved friend who now lives in New York] left from her visit a month ago, and then to this odd landscape. Just about all that was green is now the color and texture of wheat, or just plain brown. It's not an ugly color, by any means, just unfamiliar…like a Middle Eastern landscape instead of our usual tropical lush green.  There are signs of green coming back though so it will be worthwhile to see what makes it back and what doesn't. But it is striking to look at one side and see the fence collapsed, and broken tree limbs... then across the way and see the broken trunk of the wisteria tree (I think I mentioned in a prior email that we have no idea where the tree went because it is not in the yard). The pool still looks like black ink and the evergreen tree that fell across it has a nice pine aroma. Across the front of the property are large broken limbs which bent the iron of our fence in all different directions. About the only thing that is unchanged is our patio in the back corner and the dead pecan tree in the back yard which we had long been worrying about falling... it's standing tall and unconcerned. There has got to be a message in that somewhere. 

When we left and went around the corner, we visited with another neighbor who was cleaning debris from his sister's house. He works at East Jefferson Hospital which gives him a pass to get around. He's a black fellow, very chatty and warm. As is typical New Orleans, he has multiple siblings all over town so we heard the good and bad about each of their situations.   

We then drove out to Canal Street and up into Lakeview. For those who don't know, Lakeview is a neighborhood that ordinarily doesn't flood but did so because of the breach in the 17th Street Canal. This was our first venture there because it was under water until sometime last week. Again, a scene similar to our neighborhood - while the main road was clear of debris, every street you looked down seemed blocked by a fallen tree somewhere down the road. The foliage was mostly brown. If you looked at the houses in a cursory way, they looked pretty normal... but a closer look and you could see a brown line, like some giant toddler had come along with a brown crayon, and had just drawn a line along every house, every sign, every fence, wavering slightly, but consistent. That was the waterline and it was about 10 feet above the base of the houses. St. Dominic's Church, where I got married, had the brown crayon running across the pillars, the sides and doors of the church and even across the chest of the statute of St. Dominic out front... a good 10 feet above the pavement. It is hard to imagine everything there covered in water. Knowing what our apartments downstairs looked like with just 3 feet of water, I knew all these homes, their first floor for sure was ruined. Many of the homes in that area are only one-story houses to begin with.

There was little traffic out there...utility trucks, police cars. Occasionally you saw homeowners and workers starting to clear out. We drove over to the corner of Harrison Avenue and Fleur de Lis [one block from our house.] Tony Angelo's Restaurant looked normal but mainly because it is brown already so you couldn't see the water line. There is a locally owned gasoline station at that corner and two of the workers were there... an older man and I think his son, who run it. [That has to be C Ray and Wayne, our wonderful service station guys.] I take my Ford there to get serviced so I got out and we all hugged. They're starting to fix up their place and I told them as soon as it was opened, we would be there with our cars. While we were there, one of the animal rescue vans came along... they were going door to door and looking down nooks and crannies for animals. Other than law enforcement, each time we have gone the other prevailing presence has been animal rescue people. 

The recurring theme that everyone verbalizes is “lucky to be alive” and the awareness that there are others worse off. For us it has been a huge inconvenience (emphasis on nothing worse than inconvenience) and a sizable loss of future revenue (the rental units below plus Joe owned rental property in Lakeview which was not insured). But I have my job and we have a place to live and we have options. Today I was talking to a lawyer - an experienced criminal defense lawyer who has got a great sense of humor and is a great guy. He  did okay personally but was so upset about so many others he knows who are in tough situations.  He started crying, which is very unlike him, but I wouldn't let him hang up until we talked some more. So many stories like that. So many people laid off and homeless.  We have a number of homeless on the court staff but they don't dwell on it - and say how lucky they are to have a job and their families intact. I guess the only way is up.

All for now... I love this city.  It is coming back.

Ginger
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And that’s all from me for today.

Lots of love to you all,

Rose

Loupgarou lives

Dear friends and family,

Well, we’re back in Houston in our current home. We drove back yesterday, starting fairly early, and made the trip in five hours, so it was smooth sailing. Evidently those coming back from Dallas, Austin and other points west had a harder time, and today the traffic is bumper to bumper from every direction. With the temperatures still making records, I’m so glad we got back smoothly.

Our drive back to Houston took us through some of the areas hit hard by Rita. We drove along I10, which is a little in from the coast, so we didn’t go through the worst-affected sections of Cameron Parish. But it was bad all through Lake Charles and Beaumont, with thousands of trees down or snapped, all the road signs and massive advertisements torn up and chucked around, and house after house after house badly damaged. Some hotels were completely destroyed. They’d just opened the Lake Charles bridge, which had been hit by a barge, so we didn’t have to make the detour people made a day earlier. From about 50 kilometres before Lake Charles almost to Houston no-one was allowed to exit without a special reason or permit, and all the exits were patrolled by National Guardsmen. We knew this was happening, so we made sure we filled up with petrol in Lafayette.

We arrived home to a city that was barely dented by Rita. I still think our decision to evacuate was the right one, but this illustrates just one of the reasons why evacuating is so problematic. If you evacuate early to avoid traffic mayhem, you could spend the whole of hurricane season evacuating ahead of storms which peter out or end up going somewhere completely different. And you’re likely to lose your job or at least severely irritate your employer in the process. If you wait long enough to see whether the storm is really going to be a danger, you either end up in nightmarish traffic or, worse, you don’t get out in time. People along the Gulf Coast have been playing this probabilities game for decades

Today back in Houston was about as normal a day as we’ve had since Katrina hit. (Or as my colleague and friend Margaret Maggio says in her thick southern accent, “We need to appear normal even though we no normal.”) Lillie went to the office and I stayed home and worked. Well, worked a bit. It’s very hard to focus on it, and there are still so many phone calls to make and bits and pieces to attend to, work gets done in the interstices.

I’ve been hoping for a full week where we can establish some sort of routine, but I don’t think we’ll get that for some time. We learned tonight that Mayor Nagin is allowing access to all parts of the city except the lower Ninth Ward from 5th October. That means we’ll be allowed in from dawn to dusk to check on our house and try to get a few things out. We’re hopeful we can salvage some stuff from our second floor, provided the stairway is safe. So we’re now in full swing trying to organise this. We’ve booked plane tickets to New Orleans (a couple of airlines are now flying there) for the end of next week; we’re trying to enlist the aid of the contractor who did such a wonderful job on our late lamented front porch to rustle up some trucks and some hired hands; we’re lining up tetanus shots and face masks and coveralls, gloves and boots; we’re chasing up temporary beds in Laplace, not far from New Orleans; and we're making a prioritised list of the things we hope to retrieve.

We’re both really keen to return and deeply dreading it.

Lillie’s sister, Laurie, whose single-storey house not far from us in Lakeview was completely inundated, managed to get in there today, forcing open the door. She didn’t really have any hope of recovering anything, which was lucky because there wasn’t anything to salvage. Except…when they got into the house they found, still alive, her kitten Loupgarou. After a whole month, in a house which has been underwater for at least three weeks.

It broke my heart to think of the poor little thing surviving alone in those conditions for all that time. Laurie’s other cat, old Evangeline (named after a Louisiana parish) died. It’s mind boggling to think how Loupgarou managed. (The name, by the way, is Cajun for werewolf and is pronounced loo-ga-roo). She must have managed to stay afloat, maybe on floating furniture. Laurie left a lot of dry cat food there, too, so some of that must have floated up, too.

We’re so happy for Laurie, who has lost so much and is besotted with Loupgarou.

Love,

Rose

After Rita

Dear friends and family,

We’re through with Rita safely. No more tornado warnings and a couple of nights of fairly decent sleep, and I feel about as close to okay as I have in a long time. We were lucky in East Baton Rouge because we didn’t even lose power. All of West Baton Rouge did. We received about 9 inches of rain, but didn’t get any flooding this side of the city.

It’s the poor little towns like Cameron, Creole, Port Arthur, Sulphur, Lake Charles and Holly Beach that bore the brunt and have been left in bad shape. Beaumont in Texas, a much bigger place, got roughed up badly as well. Cameron and Holly Beach are almost completely wiped out. In Cameron and Creole, the sole usable building is the courthouse, which was also the solitary survivor when Hurricane Audrey flattened the town back in 1957.

In New Orleans, the 17th Street Canal held but the Industrial Canal didn’t, pouring up to 10 feet of water back into eastern sections of the city. And water piled up in some areas of the West Bank (which happens to be on the southern side of the Mississippi) inundating areas which Katrina had left almost untouched. Still, Mayor Nagin seems hell bent on rushing people back into the city. What a pile of mistakes they’re going to make doing so.

The self-congratulatory back-patting continues from the Texas, FEMA and White House officials, who appear to regard the evacuation of Galveston and Houston as a huge success. Their collective cluelessness is chilling. Had Rita stayed on her original course straight towards the big Texan cities, the woeful nature of the evacuation would have been exposed to all. As it was, more people died in the evacuation than in the hurricane itself (at least 28 evacuating, compared to 9 deaths attributed directly to the storm).

Many of Lillie’s colleagues remained behind in Houston, having tried to evacuate and then realising, after a mile or two, that it was an impossible task. Some 15,000 people ended up in Houston shelters after having run out of petrol on the highways. Many of those people had gone only a few miles, but used up a full tank of petrol in the process because it took them so many hours to get that far.

Clearly, it’s no easy thing to evacuate 3 million people on the roads. In fact, it may not even be possible given the timetable laid down by most hurricanes. But it is possible to predict the gridlock and to ensure motorists aren’t stranded without fuel, water, medical help or guidance.

The real danger of this botched evacuation is that next time tens of thousands of people won’t evacuate because they can’t bear to face the same nightmare. And next time, the hurricane may not change course.

While we were trying to get the hell out of Houston we surfed the airwaves in order to distract ourselves from the demoralising press of traffic. The most diverting and certainly the most surreal station we found was one which featured a seemingly interminable call-in featuring a UFO “expert”, who at one point expounded in all seriousness for a good 20 minutes about a “one legged snorkel monster”, a being evidently documented through the ages (if you know where to dig up the right sources). He also educated us about a 2nd century particle accelerator. It was extraordinarily eerie to be sitting on the elevated 610 loop roadway, jammed in by traffic on all sides, at 3.30am with this on the radio.

Still, it was not all that much more surreal than listening to another station where city officials were bemoaning the fact that the evacuating Houstonites had failed to mimic the computer models they’d used for disaster planning purposes. Evidently, had we all abided by the models, the evacuation would have been a very smooth-run affair. Instead, people insisted on getting out as soon as they could rather than waiting for their “turn”. Pesky humans.

A couple of images in particular from the past month have stayed with me. One was a TV shot of nursing home residents being loaded into buses on camp stretchers five deep and four across during the Rita evacuation. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in those buses for 15-20 hours or more.

The other is this photo from this week’s Time. It’s of a woman who has just been evacuated by helicopter from New Orleans during the post-Katrina flooding. Her anguish – even though she has just been rescued – feels like a fitting summary of the disaster.

Love,

Rose

Gruelling

Dear friends and family,

It’s come to the point where it feels like I must be making all this stuff up. I think Lillie and I have reached a place far beyond “overwhelmed”.”  Unreal is the closest word for it.

We’ve spent today in Baton Rouge, awaiting the arrival of Rita. Well before the storm made landfall (in fact, as I write this at 9.08pm, it has yet to make landfall) we were feeling her effects. Because the storm’s track has moved steadily eastward, much to our chagrin, Baton Rouge is now in an unfortunate location. We’re unlikely to get really high winds (gusts up to 80mph are predicted) and we may not even get flooding rain, but we’re in the tornado alley which develops in the front right quadrant of hurricanes.

Around 10am today we had a house meeting about tornado preparedness. The safest room here is an inside bathroom with no windows, so we’ve designated that our tornado shelter. We stocked it with torches, water, a wind-up radio, pillows, bedspreads and our shoes (in case the house got demolished and we had to exit through rubble) and then set up a roster to monitor the TV/radio. When a tornado approaches, they interrupt broadcasts with a blaring klaxon and flashing screen and then announce when you can expect a tornado in your area. Not long after we’d made our preparations, we got the first tornado warning. We had a good 15 minutes to make sure everyone was ready to get into the shelter. Charlie stood at the door looking out to the east, where they’d predicted the tornado to come from. Helen continued to make salmon loaf while keeping an ear out (approaching tornadoes sound like very loud oncoming trains), while Lillie and I made sure the shelter was all set up. Fortunately, no tornado eventuated. However, the stress on top of our existing stress was fairly hard to take. We’ve set up a tornado watch for the night, just in case, too.

Today, though, was entirely mild in comparison to yesterday when we evacuated from Houston. That was nothing short of brutal.

We got up at 1.30am and completed the preparations we’d begun the day before. We packed most things in our car; those things we left we shoved into our big walk-in closets and closed the doors. By the time we’d done that and showered, it was 2.45am and we hit the road, hoping that the traffic wouldn’t be too bad at that hour.

Oh my, how naïve! We had a free run onto the 610 loop (the giant ring road which circles Houston) and then immediately hit traffic which was almost at a dead standstill. We’d decided to go east to Baton Rouge, even though the authorities were saying “Do not go east. Louisiana is incapable of taking any refugees.”  But we had decided it was a better option, with the current Cat 5 storm track heading straight for Galveston and Houston.

So we needed to jump onto the I10 freeway, but were suffering the dangerous handicap of trying to evacuate without local knowledge. If anything’s designed to ratchet up your stress level, it’s trying to evacuate from an unknown city. This is compounded by Houston’s almost permanent road construction and the city’s habit of removing all useful road signage during that construction. So, the I10 exit was not marked at all. All the locals know this; we didn’t. We passed it by and it wasn’t until I saw the number on the next two exits, 12 then 13, that I realised we’d missed our exit 11. Going that extra mile to exit 13 probably cost us almost 1 ½ hours. When we realised our mistake, we jumped off the 610, got directions from some helpful people at a petrol station (already out of petrol), and headed in the other direction.

Once on I10, we had a period of 10 minutes travelling 60mph, and then ground to a near-standstill once more.

From then on, we proceeded at a snail’s pace for much of the trip. The first 8 hours had added stress because they announced on the radio that those heading east on I10 would be forced north at Beaumont and not allowed to turn east towards Louisiana. Not knowing local roads, we had no idea whether there were other possible routes and we were amazed that there were no information signs whatsoever on any of the Texas roads (every town in Louisiana had a hurricane update and road info sign). When we finally got to Beaumont, they’d started allowing people to turn east, much to our relief.

It took us 10 hours to reach the Louisiana border, 100 miles from Houston. We had hoped it would take us 8 hours to do the trip all the way from Houston to Baton Rouge, usually a 4 ½ hour run if you go straight through.

By the time we got to Lake Charles, about 40 miles into Louisiana, the temperature had reached its predicted record high of around 101F. In the car, it was well over that because we had to keep the air conditioning turned off to conserve fuel. We kept the windows open to catch a small breeze.

It was a hard job driving, because we were both completely exhausted even before having to evacuate, but the really hellish job was being the passenger, because that was the side of the car where the sun was beating down. While Lillie was driving, I fell asleep just past the Louisiana border. I was asleep for maybe 20 minutes, and when I woke up I realised I was seriously overheated. We had plenty of water with us, but we hadn’t been drinking too much because we didn’t want to have to stop to go to the loo. I started drinking more, but by this time even the ice water remaining in our insulated bottles was warm, and the rest of our water was hot. I was so hot I think I was on the verge of heat stroke, and poor Lillie was scared I was going to lose consciousness. At this point the traffic was moving sometimes no more than 10 car lengths in an hour, sometimes as much as 5 miles per hour. The breeze was almost negligible and I had to get cooler, so we closed my window and jammed a pillow case in it to give me some shade.

There was no help to be had. All the others in this miserable procession were in the same boat, and we hadn’t seen a single police car or state trooper patrolling the route on the whole trip (we finally saw one about 20 miles before we reached Baton Rouge). Fortunately, we came across an off ramp at a little place called Iowa and found a petrol station which not only had fuel, it also had cold drinks. No cold water -- that was all sold out, and the sugary drinks available were undrinkable. But I bought a whole pile of them while Lillie stayed in the queue for petrol, and we rolled the cold bottles on our foreheads and cooled ourselves down that way. We could also get into the shade and go to the loo. The place was a madhouse, with hundreds of people pouring into it. The people behind the cash registers did a wonderful job and kept undercharging people who didn’t have enough money for what they needed. Most of the evacuees were amazing, too, being cooperative and helpful, despite almost all being very physically distressed. Even people who had come from Lake Charles, about 10 miles away, were already dehydrated and dispirited, as it had taken them about 3 hours to cover that distance. Despite that, people had a camaraderie and compassion for one another. In the line to the loos, the women were passing along a huge roll of toilet paper, because it was the only one in the place, and so they were making sure everyone got some before they entered the loos.

After we got petrol at Iowa, we closed the windows and turned on the air conditioning. That was a huge relief. And then, about another 5 miles on, the road suddenly cleared as a whole pile of people took one of the exits to the north. We then got to drive at around 70mph for almost half an hour, before hitting gridlock at the next town, Lafayette. After Lafayette, there was more bumper to bumper stuff, then a really good run through the Atchafalaya Basin until we hit the outskirts of Baton Rouge, where things once again slowed to a 5mph crawl.

We reached Maryann and Charlie’s place at a little before 8pm, welcomed with showers and a gin and tonic and food and embraces. Seventeen hours for the trip.

It’s hard to describe how desperate the trip was. Our extreme exhaustion when we started out made us both concerned about having to evacuate at all. Once we realised how gruelling the trip was going to be, it was a matter of grinding it out, staying focused while driving, trying to keep the driver awake when it was our turn to be passenger. For a lot of the time early on we listened to the radio so we’d know what Rita was doing. But when it became clear that the storm, travelling at 9mph, was going a lot faster than we were most of the time, it became too hard to listen. Those short minutes when we got to travel at 60 or 50 or even 25mph were wondrous, and each time I could feel my body chemistry shifting, as the adrenaline-fuelled urge to flight was given momentary satisfaction.

Of course, now that we’re safe in Baton Rouge (well, not safe, given the tornado situation, but certainly much more comfortable), we realise that once again we were two of the fortunate ones. Those who went west or north from Houston, to places like Dallas or Austin or (as we had originally planned) Wichita Falls, were on the roads for far longer. One of my workmates, Carolyn, rang us and said her grandson took 32 hours to do the usually 4-hour trip from Houston to Austin. At one point, he waited in a line for petrol for three hours, and when he was 20 cars from the front, the service station ran out of fuel. Late this afternoon, there were still people sitting on the roads out of Houston, most of them having run out of petrol and unable to move, with Rita looming ever closer. Some of Lillie’s colleagues are still in Houston, having got no further than a few miles in several hours and deciding leaving town was a lost cause.

The night before we left, the officials of Houston and Texas had been on TV saying “You won’t get a repeat of New Orleans” and “We are the best prepared place in the country for this type of disaster”.  From my perspective, New Orleans’ pathetic excuse for an evacuation plan was infinitely superior to Houston’s. When the traffic chaos manifested, the Houston officials started saying how they were surprised, and that they were prepared for a Cat 3 storm and the evacuation of maybe 500,000 people. I assume that means that for a bigger storm they just expected people to suffer through it. They had no comprehensive contraflow plans (turning inbound lanes of traffic outbound so people evacuating could use both sides of the road) and couldn’t even tell people where contraflow would be available. In New Orleans, everyone had been given contraflow maps before the start of hurricane season.

More unforgivable in my book was the way people were just dumped onto the evacuation routes. There were no mobile refuelling tankers, no emergency water stops or port-a-loos or food places. And this, despite the recent lessons of Katrina, despite the area suffering record highs for the past two weeks, despite government at all levels saying “We’re ready for Rita”.

I don’t know what sort of damage the storm will do when it hits tonight or early morning, but there have already been hundreds of thousands of victims of this disaster, those who were tortured on the roads out of Houston. Every person I’ve talked to who evacuated, including our friend Judith who drove 13 hours by herself into Louisiana, has a tone of intense suffering in their voices. I think people will look at the pictures on TV and think, “It must have been horrible being in that gridlock”, but I’m sure for most people who endured it, it was way beyond horrible.

What’s really remarkable is the patience and generosity and friendliness of almost everyone on the road, with a very few exceptions. Humans really are remarkable.

The final irony, of course, is that while we were on the road the storm took a more easterly track. We may well have been better off staying in Houston, now on the “good” side of the storm, than being in Baton Rouge. Still, the decision was the best one we could make given the information at the time.

I better finish this off. We’ve just heard a couple of transformers explode in the distance, so the power not last for much longer. We’re getting lots of rain and some solid gusty wind. I’m so tired, I’ll probably sleep through anything that comes.

Lots of love,

Rose

Deja vu all over again

Dear family and friends,

I can hardly believe I’m writing these words: I’m preparing to evacuate Houston and head back to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Hurricane Rita is currently a really nasty looking Category 5 storm, aiming pretty much towards the coast immediately to the south of Houston/Galveston. Who knows where it will eventually make landfall and at what strength, but it’s clearly not sensible to stick around to find out.

I spent from 6am to midday this morning, on the phone non-stop except for 15 minutes in the shower. When we woke up and realised Rita was not going to do any of the things we hoped for, I immediately tried to book a hotel somewhere in northern or western Texas. I couldn’t find anything within a 7-hour drive of Houston (and we’re talking 7 hours when the traffic is normal). Using Google Maps and a Texas Hotel Reservation site, I tried to track down rooms in tiny little Podunk towns as well as places like Dallas, but there wasn’t a thing to be had. I eventually snared two of the last rooms in Wichita Falls, near the Oklahoma border about 7 ½ hours drive from here (I was figuring maybe 20 hours in the evacuation traffic).

Then the latest projected path for Rita came through and it looked like the storm was going to miss Louisiana and run right up the centre of Texas. So we decided to head back to Baton Rouge instead. Depending on landfall, we may still get some very rough weather over there, because we’ll be on the stronger eastern side of the storm, but it looks like we should be far enough away to be okay. On the other hand, locals have told us that storms which hit around Galveston have a tendency to fling off tornadoes all the way up through Dallas and Wichita Falls, so we figured those places are not great destinations. Also, with Galveston already under mandatory evacuation and eastern Houston also, the roads to the west and north are going to be horrendous. We’re hoping that because all accommodation in Louisiana is already occupied by Katrina evacuees, we may have a better time heading northeast.

We’re thinking of taking off either late tonight or maybe around 3am-4am tomorrow morning to miss the worst of the traffic, although in a city of 5.2 million, I think it might be a round-the-clock nightmare. Especially so because Katrina has given everyone a good shake up, and it looks like many, many people will evacuate. At least we’ll be heading back to stay with wonderful, supportive people, which is what we need right now. Pity those poor people who are being moved to their third, fourth or fifth shelter.

I’ve spent all afternoon packing hurricane supplies and some of our new possessions and placing everything else into the walk-in closets hoping that will protect stuff if the winds get bad here. Thank goodness for that renter’s insurance we bought!

Life is more than interesting.

Love,

Rose

Disaster Number 1603

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

Leaving Louisiana

Dear friends and family,

I’m writing this from our temporary abode in Houston, staying with Marcia and Kirk Blackard (friends of friends of Sister Helen Prejean), while we get our apartment ready for habitation.

We left Louisiana on Wednesday morning. I think it was probably one of the toughest days of my life.

I was up around 4am or so and got a bit of writing done before Lillie woke and we packed the car. The boot was filled and most of the back seat (we still have hurricane provisions such as canned food and water with us).

Saying goodbye to Maryann and Charlie, who have been our lovingly flexible hosts, and to my workmate, Maureen, was hard. I think, up to that point, I’d been able to feel this was still an evacuation, not an exile. Leaving Louisiana, though, made me feel that this is my new life.

It’s about four-and-a-half hours to Houston from Baton Rouge. We managed to be fairly upbeat for the first part of the trip, trying to appreciate what was new. Just west of Baton Rouge is a fabulous swamp called the Atchafalaya Basin, and I’d never been through it before. The road goes straight through the swamp, as is the way with Louisianan roads. Eighteen miles of elevated roadway, essentially a bridge, surrounded by trees growing out of the water. And yes, I know how to pronounce Atchafalaya (ah-CHAFF-ah-LIE-ah – the French spelling of an Indian name)… and Tchoupitoulas (CHOP-ah-TOOL-us) and Natchitoches (NAK-ee-tish), which shows how long I’ve lived in these parts.

We stopped for lunch in Lake Charles, right before the Texas border and ate shrimp poboys, a traditional sandwich on French bread. I think we both realised we’re moving away from the New Orleans cooking zone.

Traffic became increasingly heavy once into Texas, and from Beaumont to Houston – a city known as one of the US’s great traffic nightmares – it really thickened. At the same time as the traffic was getting congested, we went through a series of phone calls from Lillie’s bosses saying “We’re hoping to get back into offices in or near New Orleans within a few months, so don’t sign a 6-month lease”. That was a little late to tell us, as we had to sign our 7 months lease (the absolute minimum the apartment complex would give) that day or have nowhere to live. And, as Lillie repeatedly said to them, they may have offices to move into somewhere in New Orleans, but we’ll have nowhere at all to live.

Many of Lillie’s colleagues were fortunate to live Uptown or in other areas where there was minimal damage, so they’re already into return mode. The New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, has been talking up the return of business to the area. That seems a tad hasty to me. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency has said the level of lead found in the floodwaters was 56 times the amount considered safe in drinking water, the level of bacteria was 19 times the acceptable level, and that they have not been able to determine yet whether the city is safe to inhabit. The EPA says the toxic mud and the mold which is now covering many buildings in New Orleans – even those which had little water damage – may well become even more dangerous when it dries out and becomes airborne. And, of course, the levees are still the same old levees. How can anyone return and rebuild amidst the same disastrous levee system? Add to that that we still have 45 days of hurricane season to get through this year. It seems to me people are already making some poor decisions on how to manage the rebuilding.

The latest talk about St Bernard Parish, by the way, is that it should not be rebuilt because it is impossible to enclose within the full levee system. All the houses will go and some officials are suggesting it should be used as a flood control pool, with former residents being relocated.

Anyway, getting conflicting information from Lillie’s work as we were driving into the thick of the Houston traffic ratcheted up our stress level. By the time we got to our apartment on the west side of Houston, we were both wrung out. Then we had to go through almost an hour and a half of orientation and lease signing with a young woman who was very friendly and horrifically chirpy, when all we wanted to do was curl up and cry. By this stage, it was a huge effort to stay functioning. I don’t think I’ve ever had to grind out each second in such a way. Staring at our empty apartment, which is clean and light and looks onto a courtyard of trees, made the death of our own home more real.

By the time we got to Marcia and Kirk’s, about 15 minutes from our apartment, we had zero energy. Fortunately, Marcia walked out of her front door, wrapped us in her arms and said “You two are beyond exhausted.” The simple acknowledgement was a huge relief.

We all sat down to dinner and talked a lot about the past few weeks. Marcia and Kirk were overseas when Katrina hit and are still catching up with all that happened, but the moment they returned home they wanted to help.

Lillie and I headed to bed early. It’s really hard to feel so down when your partner is in the same state. I was quite proud of how well we’d treated one another all day when our nerves were stretched thin and blood pressure palpably simmering. Lillie’s sister, Laurie, rang just before we went to bed and that call was a huge gift. It’s clear we’ll need to have lots of phone contact with people to get through this.

It’s now Friday morning as I write this, and since we arrived on Wednesday we’ve had a day of shopping to furnish our new house. Marcia went way beyond the call of duty yesterday and chauffeured us around Houston in her big 4-wheel drive, taking us to furniture, appliance and office stores and a supermarket, then over to our place to ferry stuff into the apartment. This was an all-day affair. Had Lillie and I had to do this on our own, I’m not sure we could have coped. Intimidating would be a very mild description of Houston traffic, and so much work is being done on highway I10 and the 610 loop (a 38-mile ring road which circles the entire inner metro area of Houston) we would have become hopelessly lost. Marcia took care of all that, with patience and warmth, and let us focus on trying to outfit a whole apartment in one day.

Trying to figure out what to do about furnishing the apartment had been another stress. We couldn’t figure out whether to rent furniture, buy cheap stuff we could leave behind when we leave Houston, buy cheap stuff and take it with us… The back-and-forth phone calls with Lillie’s work had made it even less clear what would be best.

We finally decided to buy mostly cheap stuff, while spending enough on a mattress, two easy chairs and my desk chair to give us comfort for work and rest. We’ll then dragoon Lillie’s nephew Stephen to come help us drive it back in a van when we have to leave Houston (in 3 months? 6 months? a year?). The key thing about getting the furniture is that we didn’t want to drag out the process, as our stress levels were already topping out.

So we descended on an outrageously over-the-top budget furniture warehouse, run by a fellow called Mattress Mack who has been hugely supportive of New Orleans refugees, and in the space of 45 minutes had bought the furniture for our bedroom, living room and office (still looking for a comfortable desk chair…). It’s so bizarre to make these decisions, which usually take days or weeks, in the space of minutes.

Houston is full of refugees. At Mattress Mack’s they’ve doubled their already huge salesforce in the past two weeks and furnished 5000 apartments in the last five days. At the Mediterranean restaurant where Marcia took us to dinner (Kirk was visiting a prison where he runs a program) they were offering 15% discount to people from Louisiana.

We have more shopping ahead today: food and work clothes for Lillie. Tomorrow we get the Internet connection activated in our apartment, the furniture delivered and we’ll probably move in on Sunday.

I've attached a photo of our neighbourhood from an aerial survey of New Orleans done by MSNBC. (If you want to look at the site, you'll need to use Internet Explorer as it doesn't work properly in Firefox.)

Ours is the centre house in the bottom of the picture. To our left is Jane and Al’s, to the right Suzanne and Babs’ (Babs also lost her business, the day care centre on the corner of our street); the top row of houses from left to right are the Lorio’s, the Breaneus and Nancy’s directly across from ours. The two trees between Nancy’s place and ours used to be on Nancy’s side of the street. About 30-40 foot high Japanese hawthorns. The north wind from the hurricane has blown them down over the power lines and into the street, and the power poles are down, too.

It’s not a comfort to see photos like this, but in some ways it’s a relief. It helps us all let go of things.

Love,

Rose

Staggering

Dear friends and family,

The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that 160,000 homes in New Orleans are damaged “beyond repair”. A truly staggering figure. When you read a statistic like that and you are intensely familiar with the grief involved in just one of those 160,000, the misery maths is overwhelming.

The Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area, which stretches from St Bernard on the east to Jefferson Parish in the west, has a population of around 1.3 million. I guess that works out to around 600,000 houses or so. So almost one quarter of the city’s homes will be demolished. I’m still trying to imagine that.

It’s already been stated that almost every single one of the 27, 600 houses in St Bernard will be bulldozed. I think our area of Lakeview will likely lose most of its houses. I worry that the rebuilding will be done in haste rather than taste and we’ll end up with the double-storey brick monstrosities so favoured in Metairie, the suburb just to our west. In St Bernard, a much poorer district, who knows what will be erected.

What do you do with the rubbish left over after you bulldoze 160,000 houses and their contents, all imbued with toxic waters? Where do you put it?

I’m worried they’ll do what they did after Hurricane Betsy: dump all of it in a landfill, cover it with topsoil and then build a neighbourhood for the poor. The Betsy waste, along with decades of earlier garbage, lies underneath the Agriculture Street Landfill Community in eastern New Orleans, a community which is 97% African American.

I get anxious when I see residents rushing to return to New Orleans. I’d much rather things were done slowly, carefully and equitably than in a hasty, desperate charge. Still, even with the pressure to return and rebuild, they say many of us won’t have housing in New Orleans until 2010.

Well, Lillie and I will be getting into our temporary Houston home today. It’s a six-hour drive from here and we want to leave early to avoid traffic out of Baton Rouge and the traffic nightmare which is Houston.

Because our apartment is unfurnished and we have almost nothing, we’re going to stay with some people nearby while we set things up. Originally, Helen Prejean contacted some friends in Houston, Karen and Guy Clifton, to have us stay with them. But they are already housing their third set of refugees and the latest lot are yet to move into their new place. So Karen arranged for us to stay with friends of hers, Marcia and Kirk Blackard, who were out of the country when Katrina hit and who are very keen to help in any way possible. So I’m glad we can oblige them!

We've also heard that the owners and many of the staff from the wonderful Fairgrinds coffeehouse (www.fairgrinds.com) have ended up in Houston and they've organised regular weekly gatherings for refugees and friends at the Orange Show (www.orangeshow.org) there. Fairgrinds was a real community hub in the Faubourg St. John ('Faubourg' means neighbourhood) where Helen lived and our Death Penalty Discourse Center offices were located. As well as great, fair trade coffee and friendly staff, it had meeting rooms, noticeboards, free wireless Internet, water bowls and treats for doggie visitors (outside), fair trade coffee and local artwork.

People here in Baton Rouge, in Houston and all over the place are being exceedingly generous and supportive. Everyone from my friends and family to my online community of fellow activists at Omidyar.net, work colleagues, friends of friends of friends, shopkeepers and even credit card companies. People working in the rushed, overstretched Baton Rouge stores are particularly gentle with the droves of New Orleanians.

One amusing contrast between the refugees and their Baton Rouge hosts was noticeable the weekend immediately after Katrina. New Orleans has a very laissez-faire attitude (“Laissez les bon temps roulez” is an unofficial city motto) while Baton Rouge is firmly entrenched in the Bible Belt culture that crosses the South. The weekend following Katrina bemused refugees looking for a little liquid solace stood gazing at signs in supermarkets stating things like “No hard liquor sales on the weekend”, “No wine sales on Sundays” and “Beer sold only between hours of 12pm and 2pm on Sundays”. It made it particularly easy to spot fellow refugees. There were many mumblings of “You’d think they’d make an exception this weekend.”

So, Houston today. I’m not sure when I’ll write again. My hosts have an Internet connection available, so it may be tonight. Then again, I was up before 4am this morning, so I may just collapse on arrival. Everyone’s sleeping habits are awry.

Much love,

Rose

Another tough day

[Note: I’ve changed the names of the friends mentioned in this email, to preserve their privacy and because I’m living in such a terribly homophobic culture. I know many of you are sharing these emails with friends, too, so I wanted to make sure you could continue to do so.]

Dear family and friends,

No email last night. I was too tired, after waking at 4am and then having a very tough day.

After getting up so early, I managed to get a fair section of my article on using technology in times of disaster written for the Herald. Helen and Maureen and Maryann had gone off to mass, while Lillie was up north in Tallulah visiting her sister Jane, who has been lent a house there for a short time.

I’d thought all my friends were okay since Katrina, but we hadn’t been able to contact our friend Martin. Martin’s a friend from New Orleans who moved to Mississippi almost two years ago after his partner, Gerald, died from cancer. I had assumed Martin was okay because he lives in a trailer just north of Pass Christian in Mississippi and because of his vulnerable position he has always packed up and evacuated early when a hurricane approaches. I assumed he’d done so this time.

But we hadn’t heard from him and his contact details were one of the things I lost in our own evacuation. So I asked around other friends and although no-one had heard from him, one person had a phone number. He’d tried several times and got no answer at all.

So I tried the phone number and got the same result, but looking at the number one of the digits didn’t seem to match my recollection of his number. So I started substituting digits and although I didn’t get an answer, one of those numbers clicked in my memory so I sent a text message.

About an hour later I got a call from Martin. He was in dire straits. He hadn’t evacuated, and as soon as he said so I recalled that last time he evacuated it had been a nightmare because he has numerous dogs and two cats and two rabbits and he took them all with him, but then could not get accommodation because of the animals. So he spent a couple of nights beside the road in his little pickup with the animals before returning to his trailer. This time, he just couldn’t face evacuation and by the time he knew he should have gone, it was too late.

So he was in the direct path of the storm with the eyewall going over him. One of the dreadful things about hurricanes is that the right front quadrant of the storm spawns tornadoes. So, on top of 120 mph sustained winds in Katrina there was terrible danger from 200-300 mph tornadoes. Two tornadoes went straight through the land where Martin had his trailer. There’s also a metal barn on the property, so when he realised the storm was getting really intense, he ferried his dogs and other animals into the barn, grabbed the jar containing Gerald’s ashes, drove his pickup into the barn, closed the door and weathered the storm in there. He said that 45 minutes after he got into the barn, the tornadoes had passed through and his trailer wasn’t demolished, it was completely blown away. He found it later about 14 country blocks distant wrapped around a tree.

Martin has had a really hard time since Gerald died. He used to own a business and live in one of New Orleans’ characterful old neighbourhoods. After Gerald died, he was left in bad financial straits and, being gay, received no benefits or assistance. He sold his house, bought the trailer and moved to Mississippi. He is himself not well, is on a disability benefit and unable to work, so his world has become increasingly narrower over the past two years.

When he rang, he was suicidal. Not only had he lost almost everything he possessed but he’d also seen a person’s body hanging in a tree as well as numerous dead animals in the trees after the storm had passed.

I talked with him for a long time, gave him some contact numbers for support organisations (he rang while I was researching my article on how the Internet helps in times of disaster and I had the National Suicide Prevention Service’s web page open in front of me when his call came in) and said I’d get some cash to him as soon as I could get to the bank. When he hung up, he sounded a little calmer.

Helen and Maureen arrived home from mass shortly after and as soon as I told Helen, she said let’s pack up the car and take him some supplies. So that’s what we did. We collected water, juice and canned food for him (most of it the supplies Lillie and I brought with us from New Orleans), pooled together our cash, and then grabbed a bunch of other stuff from the house: clothes from Charlie, a hurricane lamp Lillie and I had evacuated with, batteries, blankets and towels. We put together an ice chest and a pot of Maryann’s gumbo and French bread so he could have some real food. I texted him that we were coming and to hold on. Finally got a call back from him and we agreed to meet just past the Louisiana/Mississippi border on I10 (Interstate Route 10).

The trip over took about 90 minutes. The roads are open all the way through to Mississippi, but not heading south from I10 to New Orleans. The further east we got, the worse the devastation. Whole swathes of large trees were snapped in two. Pine trees were simply bowled over by the dozen. Massive power and lighting towers were lying beside the road.

We met Martin at a truck parking stop about 10 miles across the border. I think just the knowledge we were coming had calmed him. We transferred all the stuff over into his truck. It was boiling hot and no shade, so we followed him down the road looking for a place where we could sit and talk out of the sun. At one point, we turned off I10 southwards, and then suddenly realised we were on the road to Waveland, a town totally obliterated by Katrina’s storm surge. There were a bunch of service stations just near the turnoff and they were crumpled flat. At first I thought the concrete on their driveways had been ripped up, but then realised it was mud all over the ground. The storm surge had carried it inland five miles to this point.

We got back on I10 and eventually stopped at a closed rest area, walked around the barricades and sat down amidst the rubble in a shelter. Martin couldn’t stay long because there’s a 5pm curfew in his county, so he had to get back home before then.

It was heartbreaking to be with someone who already had so very little before Katrina came, and then lost it all. And he was so upset about our house. He kept saying “You and Lillie. Your poor beautiful house. I’ve lost so little in comparison.” It’s awful seeing someone in so much need who feels his loss is less because it’s not the same in monetary terms. And his devotion to his animals makes him more vulnerable, as does his being gay. All his medical needs were being met in New Orleans, which doesn’t share Mississippi’s general homophobia. So he’s now without a doctor and a clinic.

We left him in a more hopeful mood. We’re working to organise some good connections for him in Baton Rouge, so he can plug into a community, and we’ll get an alternative source for his medications. And Helen is getting her fundraising connections on the boil trying to get the money for a replacement trailer (FEMA told him they’d give him $1000 for the loss of his trailer!).

When we got back to Baton Rouge, Helen started putting out feelers to people who can hopefully offer him help. That’s one of her many, many strengths. If something needs doing, she gets it done.

I phoned Martin again today (Monday) because it is the second anniversary of Gerald’s death and I wanted to make sure he didn’t feel completely alone. Helen was going to phone him, too, and we’d organised another friend to call him. He sounded much better. He said that because of us today was not hard, and that going through all the boxes of things we’d delivered to him had made the previous evening like Christmas. He’d been so pleased to meet Helen and Maureen and the gumbo had been his first decent food since Katrina.

Today I’ve been doing work for the Death Penalty Discourse Center, trying to get their new email and Internet arrangements working adequately before I leave on Wednesday. Helen has left on another speaking tour, and so I may not see her for a long time. Maureen and I took her to the airport this morning and it wasn’t until I hugged her goodbye that I realised this was the first of many partings from people who are normally in my everyday circle. It is so hard to be moving away from friends and family at a time we most need them.

Thanks for all your emails and phone calls and support. I know it’s hard to get through to me on the phone; hopefully that will be a little easier when we get to Houston. And I love to hear how you’re doing, even if I don’t reply to emails promptly.

Love,

Rose

Two weeks after evacuation

Dear family and friends,

Just a quickie tonight, so I can get to bed earlyish.

There was a wonderful story in today’s Baton Rouge Advocate about a woman whose 49-day-old child, Calli, died in New Orleans Children’s Hospital from a congenital heart condition before Katrina hit. The hurricane caused the child’s burial to be delayed until this Wednesday. Her mother had been unable to face going through Calli’s things, but when she heard about women in one of the shelters needing nappies and wipes, she made herself go through all the things and then gathered up the nappies and some clothes and took them to the shelter.

There are so many small braveries going on, and so many more, small and large, which occurred in New Orleans just after Katrina. I think for every image and report of violence we heard so much about there were probably several dozen instances of courage and heroism. All those people who waved the helicopters or boats away from their roofs saying “Someone down that way needs you more”. Those so-called looters who went and grabbed food and water out of stores to feed people stranded outside the Convention Center. Singer Charmaine Neville, a member of a famous New Orleans singing family, who rounded up a group of her stranded neighbours, smashed into a store and got them food so “no-one else but me would be accused of looting” and then broke into a city bus, loaded it up with her neighbours, and taught herself to drive the bus as she delivered them out of the city.

Lillie is up in Tallulah tonight, visiting her sister Jane. Helen Prejean has returned from her latest speaking tour. She raised a lot of money for the Death Penalty Discourse Center to help us get reestablished. She talked to public defenders in Florida, and students and parishioners and a diverse bunch of people in several states. She sold a lot of copies of her latest book, The Death of Innocents; those funds are one of the main ways we get money to fund our anti-death-penalty work. I have no idea how she keeps up her schedule, especially at time like this. She manages to channel her energy so well into her work.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that yesterday Lillie and I received our first snail mail addressed to our new (very temporary) abode. We both received beautiful cards from our friends Maura and Allen in New Hampshire. Mine has the most magnificent photo of an hibiscus I’ve ever seen with a Maya Angelou quote: “I can be change by what happens to me. I refuse to be reduced by it.”

Maura and Allen offered us a huge gift: they said that, when we are allowed to return to our house, they would like to fly down from New Hampshire and accompany us.

The thought of returning home fills me with dread. And I feel particularly for people like Laurie, one of Lillie’s sisters, who will return to a house containing dead pets.

The mail, by the way, is in as bad a state as the phone system. We receive newly posted mail, but nothing that was in the mailstream at the time of the hurricane. The post office has ceased delivery to a bunch of zip code areas including ours and a statement on its site says it is still trying to figure out how on earth to deal with this old mail (not quite in those words).  We keep on thinking of things that are stuck somewhere in that mail (or perhaps mouldering in the New Orleans Post Office). A t-shirt I’d ordered; some CDs; an order of bread from sendbread.com (which I fervently hope they do not manage to deliver to us after all this time).

The picture below gave me a smile today (click it to see it full size).

Love,

Rose