A Bridge From Then to Now

The world is a bridge.
Pass over it.
Do not build your dwelling there.
(Inscription on the Great Mosque at Fatehpur-Sikri, India)

Approaching the end of August each year I enter into a time of reflection on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. My family’s experience of this major disaster has become a defining feature of our lives. An indelible line is drawn through our memories: before and after Katrina. Trauma comes in many forms, and nearly everyone experiences sudden, unexpected change sometime in life. I share my version here with you because it is part of who I am, and because I still work to understand what happened then and where I am now.

August 27, 2005 was the last ordinary day of our lives in New Orleans. The city had been our home for thirty-one years, the place where Steve and I gave birth to and raised our two children, where we settled into three homes, made friends, established satisfying careers and fell in love with the city in the bowl beside the river. We had coped with many hurricane threats in those years, sometimes deciding to ride it out at home and other times getting on the road to safety. Along with most New Orleanians, we joked about “the Big One,” and assumed that the next hurricane would be like the previous one, interrupting our routine for two or three days, followed by fixing whatever had been damaged.

Katrina, however, became the “storm of the century.” The devastation it caused in New Orleans came primarily on the second day after the hurricane made landfall, when the storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain put pressure on the entire levee system in New Orleans. One after another, the levees were overtopped or broke apart from the pressure, until 80 percent of the city was underwater.

In May 2004 we moved from our home of seventeen years in New Orleans East to a new home on Bellaire Drive in Lakeview. Our street was the last one in Orleans Parish on the west side of town before you crossed into Jefferson Parish. The border between the two jurisdictions was a canal protected on the Orleans side by a steep grass-covered levee,  which we were assured had been recently strengthened to withstand a Category 3 hurricane. Later, investigative reporters uncovered the fact that inferior building materials had been used in a corrupt contract scheme.  The levee crumbled like stale cake when the storm surge pushed against it. Our house stood about two miles downstream from the breach. There would be no escaping the waters on Bellaire Drive.

As the reality of the flood sank in I found healing power in recording my thoughts and feelings in a journal. Every year I reread the entries and relive the moments, days, weeks, months, years that have accumulated since then. I read it not to weep or wallow in the past or wonder what might have been. I read it to find signposts. A place where we turned, or took some backward steps, or saw an arrow pointing us ahead. A bridge from then to now, a bridge that supports us through the times of remembrance and carries us onward.

Detail of the Crescent City Connection