Running from the Wind, No More Hurricane Parties, and Why People Don't Name Their Kids Katrina, Laura, Rita, or Harvey
Hurricanes suck. PTSD is just an added after-event consolation prize.
So, last Saturday was game day - the game day that many in my world have waited for… College Gameday. It was the last one that Lee Corso was to appear on the dais as a contributor, making his picks and choosing his favorite mascot hat to don for the noted game-of-the-week.
As an alum of a football fan-heavy university, I even hyped myself up by wearing a Louisiana State hoodie to work on Friday, for which I received a lot of faux grief and questions from all the new people I have met as a result of my transitioning role.
“Really, LSU? Who would root for Brian Kelly?” He is not popular at all in Cincinnati, as he left UC for Notre Dame… and his Bearcat boys found out right before they played in a bowl game. Yikes.
“Of all teams? Seriously? Like, did you go there?” I did, bruh. Liked it so much I stayed for two degrees.
“You don’t sound like you’re from there at all…” Well, friend, there’s a reason for that… I mask my accent so folks like you don’t assume I’m ignorant, because I’m smart enough to argue you down and make a grown man cry. And, I can talk football. Try me. Also, GEAUX TIGERS.
Anyway, back to the couch and my coffee, watching Lee Corso and company on Saturday morning. I also had forgotten that they had hired the devil himself, Nick Saban (who turns left on E. Boyd, #iykyk), to be part of the College Gameday dais after his departure from the University of Alabama. Then, in an unexpected turn of events, he (kind of, sort of) redeemed himself: he picked up an LSU football helmet and talked about why it was so special on Saturday.
All of the Tigers’ helmets had a purple rose decal affixed to them in remembrance of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in southeast Louisiana. The images that followed were of the devastation of New Orleans after the city flooded, the heroes that rescued people from their rooftops, and the aftermath that left a city abandoned and wrecked for months as people searched for the dead among the wreckage.
Then, the gentlemen on the dais continued, likely something from Pat McAfee on his way to watch a kid kick a ball in hopes of winning a quarter-of-a-million dollars.
I needed a breath after those images. It wasn’t because I was so impacted by the images themselves, but because I lived on the edges of it for the better part of a year. August and September 2005 were… rough. My family and I have not been the same since then, and it wasn’t like we hadn’t lived through hurricanes before. Shit, we once threw parties when we knew a hurricane was coming to town! In college, I remember going out with my then-girlfriend to a bar called Swamp Mama’s after we learned that classes had been cancelled for the next two days. A tropical storm was going to hit Southeast Louisiana, and Baton Rouge was expected to fall victim to a significant amount of flooding. Instead, we met our friends, Oliver and Kelly, who were tending bar at Swamp Mama’s, going to the upstairs bar while Oliver was trying his hand at making a chocolate martini or a Bloody Mary. On our way out of the bar, slightly tipsy but delighted at the thought of sleeping in, my girlfriend and I danced in the wind and rain, looking at the trees with their slight bend, wondering if the wind would sing us to sleep after we arrived at my apartment.
I was student teaching, in my second semester of graduate school, when we were told that I would be going home for the weekend to wait out the hurricane and to wait for further instructions. My other cohort teachers and I had heard that a monster hurricane was coming towards Southeast Louisiana, but that it was curving toward Mississippi. That was good, right?? We were not as concerned about the rain as we were about losing our wi-fi, as we all had lesson plans to create. I had to teach kids about ancient drama and frontload information for Oedipus Rex the following week. My clinical professor, Dr. Guillory, had already had a come-to-Jesus meeting with me where my severe anxiety was exposed, and she was looking forward to giving me feedback… I needed the time to prepare all I could.
Then I saw the report that Hurricane Katrina could possibly go straight up the mouth of the Mississippi. My apartment was only yards from the levees, right next to LSU’s campus. I decided to go visit my ex-girlfriend, who lived with her parents on the north side of Baton Rouge, and wait out the storm there. It was far enough from the river to give my parents some solace, but close enough that if the storm did take a sharp turn east that I could return to my apartment and keep preparing for my upcoming turn at the front of the classroom. Before I left, my ex-girlfriend’s mom, Mary Ann, called me and advised me, “You can’t take the highways. Take the surface streets. Make sure your phone is charged and drive straight here.”
Mary Ann was always protective of me, but I couldn’t have prepared my eyes for what I witnessed as I approached Interstate 10 while driving on the Acadian Thruway; all of the traffic on both sides of the highway were going west. Contraflow. Gridlocked traffic in contraflow, with the entire city of New Orleans seemingly trying to escape this storm. It was awe-inducing and terrifying, with a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance to see half of the traffic driving in the wrong direction. I drove until I hit Florida Boulevard, turned east, and parked myself at my ex-girlfriend’s house, watching the news and learning that the forecast had become, in a word, dire:
This didn’t read like a hurricane forecast. It read like a tornado’s aftermath. It was Sunday night, the day before Katrina made landfall. As I lay in bed that night, I watched the wind whip the pine tree right outside of the house. The branches never laid still. They held themselves straight out, whistling against the bands that crashed against the house, wave after wave of wind and rain from the cyclone’s power. We were on the “good side” of the storm, if there’s such a thing. The weak side rotation was on the west side of the eyewall, and the shift was just enough to leave Baton Rouge with not much more damage than some uprooted trees. Most buildings were safe. No loss of life in Baton Rouge was noted in the first 24 hours after Katrina made landfall.
I returned to my apartment 48 hours later after I learned that I had power there. The river levees had held and everything was okay around campus, but we were still not allowed to return to campus. I checked my windows, put away my backpack, emptied my overnight bag, and turned the television on to witness a horror that left me in tears. New Orleans was under water. The levees along the banks of Lake Pontchartrain had failed.
Several of my fellow cohort teachers and I tried to communicate, but mobile phone service was spotty at best, and local news advised us to leave our phones for emergencies. I sent an AIM message (thank you, early 2000s) to my childhood best friend, Beth, who lived only a mile up Nicholson Drive, one of the two main thoroughfares that traversed LSU. She was transfixed by the news as well, wondering if we had friends who had died in the aftermath. I drove to her apartment, and in that mile’s drive, I had to pull over no fewer than three times just to let emergency vehicles pass. Ambulances, fire trucks, buses led by state trooper cruisers had been traversing Highway 61 (which Nicholson was part of) back and forth from New Orleans, as it was one of the only ways to actually reach or leave the city.
We weren’t allowed on campus because LSU had turned into a staging area. The largest field hospital ever constructed on U.S. soil was located inside the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, where all 6100 beds were full. The track and field stadium had turned into an impromptu double helipad. The Maddox Field House, the LSU facility closest to my apartment, had become the first of many temporary homeless shelters erected all over Baton Rouge. Mother Nature dropped a nuclear bomb on New Orleans, and Baton Rouge received its aftermath. Baton Rouge wasn’t prepared to handle the immediate strain on its infrastructure, and it still has not recovered since its population literally doubled overnight. Every vacant rental property in Baton Rouge was let by the end of the week, many by families who were friends and were sharing a house until they could return to the city, which, true to the NWS warning, would remain uninhabitable for months.
Some people clearly knew when the hurricane was coming that it could be long enough of a wait… The school where I was assigned to student-teach, McKinley High School, is located in a historically black community just north of LSU’s campus. It also happened to be the only official gifted and talented high school in East Baton Rouge Parish. So, when a gaggle of kids and parents were finally allowed to enroll in school in the weeks that followed, about 100 families with gifted and talented high school students were armed with their IEPs, ready to demand access to the gifted and talented services they left behind at Benjamin Franklin High. Since Louisiana places gifted and talented services under the federally protected umbrella of special education, the district’s hands were tied. Four teachers who had also evacuated New Orleans were immediately hired to McKinley’s staff to teach core courses for those students who joined the school.
I had gained a human in my apartment, too. My cousin, Dustin, had just begun his master’s degree in government at the University of New Orleans. LSU was allowing university students to enroll with tuition transition if they could find places to sleep. We had a rotation going; his classes were at night and mine basically kept me out of my apartment 16 hours a day. We crossed paths only when he was at the apartment at the evenings, after I had student taught, then went to class, then worked, and then finally come back to the apartment to write my papers and sleep. A lot of Johnnie Walker (Dustin) and Stoli and orange juice (me) was consumed in the weeks that followed.
Then, that phone call… See, the nation forgets that Hurricane Katrina was not the end of the storms that season. Three weeks later, in the middle of conference night, I get a phone call from my mother.
“JV (my nickname), I’m sending everyone to you. Where are you?”
“Mom, I’m still at school. It’s conference night. What do you mean by you’re sending everyone to me?”
“When is conference night over?”
“Around 9. Why?
“You need to go home, clean your apartment, and prepare to receive about seven people. I’m sending your grandmother to you. Your aunts are coming, too.”
“Wait, is this all about Rita?”
We had heard that Hurricane Rita was going to be big, but it looked like it was going to hit the Houston area. Apparently, in the last several hours, it took a vicious right hook and was headed for Cameron Parish, the southwestern-most parish in the State of Louisiana. Above Cameron Parish was Calcasieu Parish, where my mom and dad worked in healthcare.
“Wait, wait, wait! What about you? Where the hell are you going?”
“Child, don’t cuss at me!” My mom was irate and clearly upset at this point. “I have to evacuate patients.” She worked at a nursing home in an administrative position, so she had no choice but to join the evacuation. I knew my dad was in the same situation. He was on the Hurricane Team, where he would have to work a mandatory multiple-day shift until either the weather danger passed or all patients at his hospital were evacuated.
“Jesus, Mom. Is it that bad?”
“Uncle Byron is moving his instruments. Dustin just started driving that way to help.”
My Uncle Byron and Dustin are phenomenal musicians. I knew if they were moving their guitars and amps, they were worried.
“Okay. What else do I need to do?”
“Go grocery shopping. Use the credit card. Keep them fed and sheltered. I gotta go. I love you.” Click.
When parent night turned into my hyperventilating into a corner, I was allowed to leave and go grocery shopping. On the credit card, I added another bottle of vodka. Sure enough, Dustin had left to go help Uncle Byron before the mandatory evacuation order was in place, and I had an entire crew of humans show up at my shitty apartment door the next morning: My grandmother (we call her Ma), my godmother Aunt Nette, my Aunt Kara and her future husband, Chad, my cousin Ethan, Chad’s friend, and Kara’s dog Giovanni. Again, I had a small one-bedroom. In a world where I’d never ever let my grandmother sleep on the floor, so there I was, with Giovanni, on a pallet of blankets on the living room floor.
I have witnessed my grandmother cry three times in my lifetime. #2 was when she couldn’t get in touch with my Uncle Byron in the days that followed, as Rita took that right turn and hit Cameron Parish dead-on. Uncle Byron is the director of ambulance services in Cameron Parish, so we knew that he was on standby to aid with whatever services could be deployed in the days that followed. It was days before I could talk to my mom and dad, and I depended on anyone I could find in the Lake Charles area to send me word that they were okay. As soon as Ma learned that Uncle Byron was alive and ready to go back into Cameron Parish to learn what was left of his house, she looked at me, gave me a hug and a kiss, and let me know she had to go home. That meant Aunt Nette and Aunt Kara had to start driving.
To what they were driving, they didn’t know, other than Ma’s house was standing and generally okay. When I did get in touch with my dad, I was strongly warned not to go home to visit for a while.
“Kid, there’s no power. We probably won’t have power for weeks. Right now the estimate is 21 days.”
21 days with no air conditioning in the middle of September is awful. Houston found that out the hard way. In a rush to leave the city when Rita was expected to hit there, contraflow was established so people could leave the city… except when the storm turned, traffic was arrested and reversed. It turned into the worst gridlock the city had ever seen. People died of both carbon monoxide poisoning or heat exhaustion just sitting in traffic.
My Uncle Byron eventually made it back to Cameron Parish, only a couple of days after he called my grandmother to tell him he was okay. The only thing left where his house was standing was the concrete slab it sat upon. The storm surge took out 90% of all standing structures in the parish. Entire towns were leveled. Cameron Parish has not recovered yet since Rita, and has been hit with a few monster storms since.
I haven’t been to a hurricane party since Katrina’s landfall. There’s no solace in days off following a hurricane for me. When Hurricane Ike hit Houston in 2008, I remember a couple of my colleagues thinking I was hypersensitive when I told my students to go buy bread, water, and peanut butter. We were told that we could be out of school for a week or better. Ike decimated downtown Houston. My colleague and friend at Lee High, Beth Barrett, lived nearer to downtown at that point. She and her roommate, Corey, had enjoyed a couple of bottles of wine after the power went out. Anissa and I were only out of power for 12 hours…none of which I slept. The next day around noon, I get a phone call from Beth:
“Hey, do you have power?”
“Yeah. We actually just got it back. Making a gumbo, because that’s what you do during a hurricane, apparently. What’s up?”
“Corey and I are coming over. We’re hungover and desperately need showers. Can we stay the night?”
I fed Beth and Corey plenty of gumbo and potato salad. When we found out that Houston ISD would be closed for a second week, Beth and Corey went on a mini-vacation to Austin. Anissa and I had a home to clean up and an eight-year-old to entertain.
The storms have kept dotting my history with painful memories - some of it is fretting over the future of whatever is coming, some of it is the hectic protection of our home in hopes of keeping it in one piece, and a lot of it is wondering if the people I love would be okay in the aftermath.
When Harvey hit in 2017, my initial worry was the house. Just the house. We were far enough inland that I wasn’t worried about the intensity of the wind speed. Maybe I should have been when I walked outside after initial landfall and noticed the loquat tree outside of Jacob’s bedroom window had cracked the external frame of my neighbor’s AC unit as it collapsed. I did learn how to use a chain saw… The next day, as Harvey sat on the Houston area, I didn’t know that my wife had stayed up all night, watching the water creep up our driveway, stopping only inches before our front door. Most of the houses on our little street in Sugar Land took on water damage, and we were able to sell our home months later under Flood Zone X because we were one of three houses that did not flood during Harvey’s onslaught. Moving to Ohio was something I struggled with until that moment. Then, I was much more on the “let’s go!” side of the fence. I had zero desire to live through another hurricane.
Living through a hurricane from afar is just as terrible, however. In the middle of a goddamn pandemic, Hurricane Laura hit my family, similarly to Rita. My mom had to evacuate with patients again, and my dad was pulled for Hurricane Team A. 2020 had begun shitty. It was evolving into really shitty by the time Laura hit.
My dad is a social butterfly. He is a (semi-retired) nurse at Lake Charles Memorial Hospital, and most of the doctors there are cool with him addressing them by their first name. One of his doctor friends had a setup where they could rotate in an office before their shift began. They had a few margaritas to help them sleep before the storm came in, which may not have been the smartest idea. It wasn’t the alcohol itself; they had plenty of time to sober up before their shift began. It was the timing of the storm itself as it came in contact with the hospital.
Downtown Lake Charles is closest to the waterfront. Their was (operative word) a mid-sized business tower with lots of offices, and the winds knocked out half-the windows on impact. Dad’s hospital is ten floors in the air. When he called me to tell me about his four-day experience, he said, “I felt the building sway. We could feel the entire building moving back and forth. It was enough to keep everyone awake.” The hospital soon lost power, and then lost generators. Three days in, a patient evacuation began. I learned what an “ambulance bus” is: essentially, it’s a semi with room for 18 gurneys and all the life-saving equipment a normal advanced trauma ambulance would have within. Patients were loaded up on the buses and taken to other hospitals that were ready to receive people in desperate need of care. A day later, when all patients were evacuated, Dad was allowed to return home. He, like post-Rita, returned to a house with no electricity. This time, he had learned how to prep: my brothers were helping keep the house running with generators, spending a cool grand on gas to keep freezers from filling with spoiled goods and a window unit to keep a small family cool in their living room.
My mom was not so lucky. She had evacuated and set my grandmother up in a hotel room. Mom also has a dog, who is registered as a service dog, but was not allowed to bring the dog into the hotel room. She was forced to endure the late summer heat in the back of a cargo van. Mom came home to damage at her home - her entire privacy fence was knocked out, and a refrigerator that had been just outside her back door was now toppled over, its contents spilled all over her carport. Her house… in general, was okay. But terrible reminders kept popping up in the weeks that followed. The facility she worked at was uninhabitable, and she had to find another job. She had to make sure the generators were running at my grandmother’s house. Later that winter, the turnip seeds she kept in the freezer outside had clearly found her way to the backyard, and she had rogue turnips keep popping up throughout November and December.
All of this I had to hear about through the phone. I couldn’t go home to help. I couldn’t even go home to visit. I hadn’t been home since February of 2020, only weeks before the world shut down. I had to hear about my mom and dad catching the ‘VID at work, I had to witness my brother go through the remainder of a divorce and custody battle, and I had to see my mom and dad survive another one of these stupid storms. I couldn’t even go home for Christmas that year. My mom took the risk and came to my house for Christmas that year. It was a year before I saw my father again.
The recovery does make the aftermath sweeter when victory strikes again. When the New Orleans Saints returned to the Superdome, it was so emotional for everyone who was a fan, including the life-long Louisianians who had worn paper bags when the Saints were terri-bad. On September 25, 2006, the Saints were back in the Dome. It was the first game in the Dome post-Katrina, and the Saints organization and Benson family knew that the repair of the Superdome meant the true beginning of a rebirth of New Orleans. At the half-time performance, Green Day and U2 played a song that was a spin on “House of the Rising Sun.” Not a dry eye in the house… not a dry eye in Louisiana as we watched and listened…
There was once a house in New Orleans They called the Superdome It's been the ruin to many a poor boy and Lord, I know I'm one I cried to my daddy on the telephone, how long now? Until the clouds unroll and you come home, the line went But the shadows still remain since your descent, your descent New birth, rebirth Living like birds in magnolia trees A child on a rooftop A mother on her knees Her sign reads: "Please, I am an American" Drowning sorrow floods the deepest grief, how long now Until a weather change condemns belief, how long now When the night watchman lets in the thief what's wrong now The saints are coming The saints are coming I say no matter how I try I realize there is no reply The saints are coming The saints are coming...
Hurricanes have caused enough heartbreak in my world for a few lifetimes. I hate that I will experience it again - I know I will, because the climate odds are not in my favor. With every erasure of coastline, memories follow. With every death, a death of language follows. When my family has to struggle to recover, from homelessness, joblessness, trauma, or witnessing the worst damage they will ever know, a death of spirit follows.
When things fall apart, I have to keep hoping that the saints will come. We can survive. New Orleans has rebuilt so much, but the city will never be the same it was before August 28, 2005. Wind and water carve channels that change a landscape, and New Orleans was never exempt. But, like my uncle and cousin, a lot of New Orleanians travel well with their musical instruments. It is difficult to kill the soul of a place. Soul goes with you, undeniable and often unshakeable. It is events like this that often show exactly who a person is and what stuff they are made of.
Well, that’s enough trauma recount for me. Please feel free to leave your comments, like, share, and SUBSCRIBE!!
Until next pearl,
JVB