I was going to post something else today; something about birthdays and ice cream demons, but all of that was put on hold because of Barry- which the children kept thinking was “berry” , so I let them run with it. Instead of writing this blog or my Other Things, I was updating our supplies and getting the house ready for a few days without power. For Berry.
I wasn’t comfortable with the river being as high as its been with a storm coming, but a category 1 hurricane isn’t in itself concerning and it wasn’t even aimed directly at us, so I was fine with my normal storm routine. At least I was until the US Army Corps of Engineers started assuring us that the levees would be fine- then holy fuck did my blood run cold. I had to have some long conversations with my Katrina PTSD before deciding to stay…but was still really uncomfortable about it.
Now that the storm has moved on, barely grazing us with rain, I thought I’d share some of the things that ran around my head as the seasonally-present warm, wet doom loomed away out there in the Gulf.
First of all, I don’t think you can live here and not learn how to track a storm along with your most trusted, level headed meteorologist because you learn pretty quickly that the national media seem as though they are just so hungry to see the next Katrina, like they’re fucking starving to see New Orleans drown again, weighed down by it’s own hubris.
The headlines for Barry ranged from alarmist to absurd. People were not fleeing in droves, Christ- even the elderly were just calmly waiting for the rain to get over with. Jumping online for storm news reminded me that it’s not just the media that want to see us underwater, it’s a disturbing number of random people who say this place is a worthless, filthy toilet town and cannot wait to say good riddance to it. You know, to us.
Then there are all of the comments on how stupid anyone is to live here, as though we are doing so on a whim, like we all came down for Mardi Gras one year and forgot to leave, like we just drunkenly stumble down our days hoping to find a second line to be absorbed into so we can hide away from the grim light of responsibilities out there in the real world.
Like this isn’t home to anyone.
People have lives here, real lives that go beyond what people see when they come down for whatever spring break/bachelor party/convention that devolved into a debaucherous jaunt down Bourbon Street that they forever associate with the whole city. We have jobs. Our kids go to school here. Many have mortgages and generations of family all living within blocks of each other. There is so much about these of ours lives that are non-transferable.
It’s like those saying these things imagine people can close their lives up somewhere and just reopen them anywhere else and not lose their place. For most of us living paycheck to paycheck types, relocating to new city without jobs or homes waiting for us as we rebuild our lives from scratch is just is not a viable option.
But it isn’t only not having the means to leave that makes people want to stay. Where do you go when there’s no place like home? And there is no place like New Orleans. I’ve had people from all over the world tell me this. This place sings a song to some people that others are completely deaf to because it’s not for everybody. It’s a ridiculous, magical, and dangerous place built on loose land and old ghosts and has been with infused with 300 years of music, sorrow, whimsy, and sheer fucking poetry. It is beautiful. It is corrupt. And it is ephemeral.
This is what I think of now when a storm is coming and I’m up mopping my floors at 3am like a lunatic because if the worst happens-I’ll be damned if my house isn’t clean as it floats down the street. It’s not that I’m just getting ready for the storm at hand, but for the idea that one day, not far enough away, I may have to leave this city, my home- my children’s home. Barry wasn’t the storm that made that decision for me, but as the city streets are now seeing unpredictable flooding more and more often from massive rains, I can’t help but believe that storm is going to come.
So spontaneous sobbing is now part of my regular storm prep…. and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Yet I’ll still be here, seriously evaluating every storm the same way I’ve done for 20+ years and if I ever think that my family is in real danger, we go. No matter the cost.
That being said, the flood precautions I’ll be taking in our daily lives have jumped up a notch as of this week.
