It's so sad it breaks the heart, and it's impossible for me to take my eyes off of it. I had fallen in love with my son's adopted home, New Orleans, and his university, Loyola. It was, what appeared to be the perfect fit. I thought I knew what we were getting into. I'd been watching hurricanes approach the coast of North Carolina ever since his older brother headed up there to school in the fall of 1991. What I didn't understand, until I started researching as Ivan approached last fall, was that New Orleans was different, uniquely vulnerable to The Big One, as it came to be called. Aptly named.
I learned how to watch hurricanes, how to read the NOAA/NHC data and Katrina didn't get my attention until Friday morning, because she approached so innocently, looking very much like no big deal, a failing low, sputtering over the Bahamas mere days before she woke suddenly and roared over southern Florida, tearing it flat up. Friday morning, when she emerged into the Gulf of Mexico in a surprising manner and southwesterly direction, I started paying attention, close attention, and in the course of the morning I saw the computer models, one by one as they were issued, move the forecast track to southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi. Over the course of the day Friday I saw the National Hurricane Center do something I've seen them do so many times before: They revised the forecast track, but only slightly. I appears to me, after years of watching them, that they don't like to make radical changes in their forecast track (the "cone"), even when it's called for. It makes them look, for lack of a better word, wrong. This time, they were likely rattled a bit by Katrina's barreling over them the night before in Miami, too close for comfort and stronger than expected, but it took them almost twenty-four hours to inch that cone over to where I believe they knew by mid-day Friday, it belonged. I called my son in New Orleans at 2:00 on Friday afternoon and said, "Heads up, baby, this one is coming your way and it could be The Big One. Get ready to leave. I'll call you in the morning."
I suppose that the possibility of The Big One contributes to the spirit of New Orleans, providing the last, unspoken line to their fully-lived chant, "Laissez le bontemps roullez!" Because it could all be gone tomorrow! The New Orleans accent is melodic and beautiful. Their celebratory embrace of life, in all of its pain and glory, is honest and expressive, earthy and joyous. They deserve better than this. They deserve a Red Cross distributing food and medicine and dry safe beds in which to sleep. They deserve a ride out of town, whether on land or water, and safe shelter. They deserved the seventy-two hours they needed to evacuate. They could have had it.
May God be with them now.
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