Silence Falls On New Orleans
[This is what I posted on another Sunday afternoon at 12:52 PM nearly one year ago today. We evacuated late, having prepared to ride it out. By the time we were on I-10 heading East, it had already begun to rain. We still have the videos we rented in preparation to wait out Katrina, because the store has not reopened today.]
This morning we woke up to sun shining through the slats of the blinds. The palms and magnolias on my street are swaying with the strengthening breeze. The heat bakes the slate roof tiles on the house next door. I look out over roofs that have been there for a hundred years. The cars are parked on the neutral ground. The streets are ominously empty.
We meant to ride it out, but...
Mandatory evacuation of Orleans Parish. It's a Category 5 storm with winds of 175 miles per hour. The officials are saying there's no longer a question that the levees will be overcome by the water. It's so strange, really. It just seems like a pretty Sunday. Last year they said Ivan was going to be The One, and it wasn't. They said the city would full up like a giant fish bowl. They said this was the price of living in the past.
I don't know. I know I don't want to leave, because, no matter how I want to deny it, there is a very real possibility that it won't be here when I get back. I suppose at a moment like t
his what you feel is admiration and wonder: at the persistence of the people who settled here, who braved malaria and ungodly heat, who watched the river swallow their homes and then improbably built again in a swamp, at the women of two hundred years ago who did it all in floor length skirts. At least that's what I think about. Goodbye to my green streetcars. Goodbye to the sweet still air that smells like flowers. Goodbye to my newly redone little garret upstairs that I was going to write in. Goodbye to the grand old ladies of St. Charles Avenue, with their iron lace and graceful tall shuttered windows and delicate porches, to whom my heart belongs. If this is your end, I am glad I won't see it. Stubborn old city. It's funny, somehow I see it making it... It's very quite outside now. I've taken the pictures down from the walls. We're evacuating north to Nashville.
Goodbye, city. Good luck.
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