Fleeing New Orleans a month after moving in
The slow tsunami called Katrina arrived in our yard in New Orleans about noon Monday. She crept up around the circle of bricks that supported the statue of St. Francis in our garden. She wet the bottom of the new wood fence I'd just finished nailing to keep the dogs in. She drowned the rats that lived in the slab and the elephant plants that, even submerged, waved gently like fan coral. By 2 o'clock, she was running across the kitchen floor. By 3, she was licking up the legs of our bed. By evening, she had covered my desk and filled the drawers and begun to soak the files gathered for my new book that I'd stacked head-high in the closet. I know this because of a photograph published online Tuesday by the New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune. It showed a rescuer with a flood victim coming up what looked like a boat ramp. That was no ramp. It was a street two blocks from our house. Ahead, as far as the eye could see, was water. The trees arched over it like a placid lakeside. The only clues to the flood were the rooftops just showing on either side. A risky move I knew then that our house was full of water. I knew precisely how much, eight feet, because our Lakeview neighborhood, six blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, was built on ground eight feet below sea level. We moved to New Orleans from Montgomery, Ala., a month ago, a risky move for a number of reasons. My partner, Trish O'Kane, had taken a teaching job at Loyola University, but it was a one-year appointment. I didn't have a job waiting. But I'd spent most of my life living light and seeking adventures. For 13 years, I wrote the Denver Post's "Rocky Mountain Ranger" articles. Ten years ago, at age 50, I felt security becoming a cage, so I bought a sailboat, sold or gave away most of my possessions, and moved aboard. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks I sailed the boat, called Ranger, to Portugal and into the Mediterranean. New Orleans, I knew, was a city that lived on borrowed time behind a dike. We'd launched our kayaks into the "outfall canal" that carried pumped rainwater up and over concrete barriers and out to the lake. We'd paddled to the shore that looked like the Caribbean, with palm trees and crab shacks. We'd toasted our good fortune, even while knowing we lived with the unimaginable. What to pack, to leave? When Katrina started to blow up, I got edgy. I'd gone through hurricanes and written a book about Hurricane Mitch, which killed thousands in Central America. I knew how wrong forecasters were. I knew we'd leave and go back to Montgomery. But packing was horrid. We walked around lifting things to higher spots, the implication painful. We'd just hung the last of our pictures. Would three feet of water be OK? What about six feet? We put a few things in the attic, packed for three days, and left with the dogs. At midnight, as we reached Montgomery, we would have lived in the house just 30 days. Katrina was past when the levee breached, likely caused by the pressure coming from the storm's western half, where winds blew southward, pushing water back into the canals. Soon water was running down Robert E. Lee Boulevard and the half-block down General Haig Street to our yard. It didn't gush. It just began rising. Now, in my mind's eye, I can see the house. I open the door and walk inside. Past my grandmother's player piano, which she left for me with a note in her Bible, and 100 paper music rolls. They are not yet mush. I glance at the Frank Howell painting of a Navajo woman in a dress of seashells. She represents one of my lives, my homestead in the Black Hills. My office, my nest, is filled floor to ceiling with stuff: my Marlboro cowboy hat; a Tibetan mask; a deerskin papoose; framed pictures of Yellowstone National Park, where I wrote my first book; a wind-twisted piece of lodgepole pine that I'd carried around to remind me how gnarled a man can get. Behind my desk hung my framed, five-foot-wide transatlantic chart with its coffee stains and photos of that trip in my sailboat. And books, including my own, none of them big sellers, but a small stack of bound words to show for 40 years of writing and traveling. All of it worthless and priceless. When I crossed the Atlantic, I was prepared to lose my boat, knowing I had a life raft and insurance. But I am not yet at peace about this loss, in part because of the loss of icons that defined me, in part because FEMA has a 30-day waiting period for flood insurance and I signed the papers on Aug. 19. I feel, at 61, like my life is under water, sunk like the Titanic. There's a part of me that wants to hold the house in my mind as I left it, and not go back and open the door to what we'll find. But we will. We'll find St. Francis, covered with muck, still missing his head in a garden of seaweed. I'd like to find Trish's bright yellow kayak, which I'd tied to her pickup with its Impeach Bush bumper-sticker. Or better, find that someone had used it to save his or her life. We'll clean and salvage and move on. Already, I can see Ranger in Spain and feel the breeze of a new journey on my face. September 2005 |
