A sixteen-year-old evacuates from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, driving to North Carolina with a friend and her mother. Hurricane Katrina killed over thirteen hundred people; wind and rain arrived first, then levees broke and the city flooded. The father and brothers were trapped in I-10 traffic and later stayed at a Houston motel; cellphones failed and contact was lost for weeks. The house survived but belongings disappeared and family photographs were left behind. Televised images of sunken roofs and submerged businesses made the city feel permanently underwater. After the mother's death, adults insisted life is unfair and that the mother would 'live through' the child; neither statement was understood.
In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina killed more than thirteen hundred people in New Orleans and its surrounding parishes. First came the wind and rain, fast and fierce, and then the levees-which had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers to protect against precisely this kind of storm-broke, and the city filled up like a bathtub. I was sixteen years old.
I watched as Anderson Cooper narrated footage of the sunken roofs of my city. When you look at a flood like that, you forget that water does, eventually, recede. It felt as though New Orleans would be submerged forever. Would anyone ever be able to return, to live there again? The answer seems obvious now, but it was not at the time. It was, possibly, the end.
I had always loved to see New Orleans on television. The city is small. I recognized the places. But after Katrina I didn't want to recognize anything. I didn't want to see the old Italian ice-cream shop in Mid-City, in water up to its windows. I didn't want to see the Circle Food Store, in the Seventh Ward, rising out of the glassy water like a shipwrecked boat being pulled from the ocean. I didn't want to hear about another person's house that had flooded.
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