You can read the first couple pages of my new story here. Not that I expect everyone will want to, but there it is! Only, if you do read the excerpt, please let me know if you hate it, or maybe only partially hate it... or you know, whatever.
I'm on Day 2 of attempting to enforce a Serious Writing Schedule. In a way, Hurricane Katrina has been good because it deprived me of my lazy fallback job and forced me to think about what I really want. I am 24 years old. I am not saying I think I ought to be published yet, but I ought to at least be trying. I ought to at least be doing something besides saying I want to write that elusive "someday".
Hence, here I am with my coffee, 3,150 words into the science fiction short story I started this summer. I've got the speakers set up and I'm listening to internet radio. I find the station that is most suiting my needs currently is Whisperings: Solo Piano Radio. This is actually like an athlete warming up; it's like practice. I have decided that this year I really am going to do National Novel Writing Month. You start on November 1, and have until the end of the month to get to 50,000 words. The point isn't to produce something publishable, it's really more about forcing yourself to actually work... which is my problem. So like any marathon, in the weeks leading up to it, the athlete needs to practice. Thus, I am paying strict attention to diet (coffee, chai), and keeping strictly on schedule (write starting at 9:00 AM and continue to write all day with hopefully minimal blogging, forum-reading, and Spider Solitaire-playing breaks).
My goal for this week is in fact to decrease my ratio of actual words written to Spider games played. I feel this will lead to an increase in productivity in the weeks to come. It's important to have goals.
We returned last night from the strange ghost town that is New Orleans. It's hard to understand what I mean unless you've seen it. The streetlights are dark. Abandoned cars are parked everywhere. We saw a total of two other people after we entered the city, and one was a National Guardsman leaning on a van with an assault rifle. Yet there were all kinds of spooky noises in my neighborhood... unsecured windows creaked, doors slammed by themselves, and several times we thought we heard approaching cars only to realize it was just the wind.
We left Friday at 6:30 AM from Boston, flew to Newark, then to Memphis, only to find out our flight to New Orleans had been cancelled due to Hurricane Rita. 
We were offered a flight the next day that took off at 9:30 dependent upon the weather... but that would have left us sitting in Memphis for nearly 24 hours. There were tropical storm conditions by then, and I was worrying about my stuff being exposed to the rain. We decided to say "screw it" and rented a car. I don't know, I guess we have both just been exhausted by the last few weeks, and at some point it feels so good to finally have a choice-- to be able to take matters into your own hands. After we made the choice, even driving into New Orleans in the middle of Hurricane Rita seemed simple.
The next morning we got in the car, determined to bust through into Orleans Parish somehow. We had been told it was difficult to get through the checkpoints even with a medical ID, due to the shutdown of the city for Rita. The houses we saw driving through Metairie on I-10 had massive wind damage. 
The National Guardsman at the River Road checkpoint listened to Mike tell our story for about five minutes, then said no one was allowed in except the police, the army, and the FBI. So we turned around to figure out what to do. I said, "Make a right. I don't care if I have to hike. We're going into the city." We drove down Claiborne up to the checkpoint, pulled out our IDs, started to tell our story, and the guy interrupted us-- "Have a nice day," he said.
To sum up Operation Salvage:
Almost all of my books were still dry! Honestly, I started to cry when I saw them. I knew they were important to me, but I hadn't realized how much. The windows were all blown out in my room and the water puddle on the floor stopped within 6 inches of my photo albums. Everything in my closet was smelly, moldy, and soaked. Amazingly, some of my posters and pictures were OK. Only the biggest one that the others were all underneath was totally destroyed, though a lot of glass was broken. 
One of my jackets was so covered in mold I could hardly touch it, and some of my shoes actually had mold growing on the heels. I bagged the clothes, and on Sunday we did laundry from 7:00 AM until midnight at a laundromat in Raceland and several people's houses. I had to throw out some things that were too stained to save, but after several washings, the rest was decontaminated. It was a HUGELY GROSS PROCESS. I don't recommend it to anyone-- but then, I do, because I probably saved thousands of dollars by trying to clean everything I could. Unfortunately, with a lot of my work blouses and nicer clothes, it's like, "Will I be able to wear this again? Yes. Will I be able to wear it to work? No." There were many things with visible stains that I liked too much to throw out.
Some of our electronic stuff was stolen, including a computer, DVD player, VCR (my parents' old one from like 1992-- are looters really that stupid? 
I think if you stole a frying pan from the kitchen it would be worth more than that VCR), IPod, my roommate's passport, camera, and... get this... all our videos and DVDs were still there except the porn! I suppose it could have been worse, but I can't help but feel pissed off about it. People are in a bad enough situation without stupid thugs on the loose.
My car was smashed in several places by slates that flew off the roof. One shattered the back window and landed in the backseat. The windshield and one window were broken as well. Poor car. Someone also tried to steal it 
by breaking the plastic covering off the steering column and pulling out all the wires... little did they know that my car is broken such that I am the only person who knows how to make it start! HAHA! Loot that, fuckers! I got in, and amid the broken glass and hanging wires and 2 inches of water in the bottom, it started right up. I love you, Brad. (Brad is my car.) I hope you know that even if you are so broken I can't afford to fix you, I love you for being a good quirky little car. Sigh... :-(
The house was pretty much a mess. The water damage from the missing roof went down through all three floors. Ceilings in five rooms had fallen down. Many windows were entirely gone, frames and all. There were maggots crawling on the fridge. The smell of damp and mold was everywhere, made even worse by the humidity. I don't think I'll be living there again. But it was worth going. It was hours of hard, sweaty, smelly work, but I managed to save a lot. And that was our trip to New Orleans.
And the Award for Most Appropriately Used Star Wars Quote of the Weekend goes to:
Me (after Mike opened up his sealed refrigerator to clean out the rancid food that had been sitting inside for a month): "I thought they smelled bad... (gasp) on the outside! Ugh!"
Today I would like to salute the Mascot of our salvage trip to New Orleans: Leopold, the amazing mutant betta fish. 
Why have we officially declared Leopold our mascot? Because he is a SURVIVOR! He survived Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Leopold is my roommate Marissa's fish. We left him in the walk-in closet upstairs, the only room in the house that has no windows and has never had water damage, as a safety measure on August 28th. Unfortunately, this time the roof blew off and the ceiling collapsed in the closet, leaving many of our clothes too moldy to recover. Imagine our surprise when we arrived on September 24th to find the fish ALIVE under the wreckage and swimming happily around the small chunks of drywall and wisps of fiberglass that were submerged in his fishbowl! No food for a month? Heh! The amazing mutant betta fish scoffs at starvation! Dirty water? Ha! He eats drywall for lunch! He laughs in the face of the looters that stole our electronics! He knows what it means to be a survivor of New Orleans.
We salute you, Leopold. You may well be from outer space, and not a real fish at all. But nevertheless we salute you.
The outer bands of Hurricane Rita are just beginning to reach New Orleans. I have a plane ticket for 7:00 AM tomorrow. It's raining on my car with no windows, my closet with no ceiling, and my room with a compromised roof. If I just accept that all my clothes are already ruined, and everything else that was in the walk-in closet, that's fine. I've already pictured it wet and moldy so often it keeps me awake at night. I'm willing to write that off.
But there's a hole in the roof. The ceiling in the two surrounding rooms is already gone. And in my room, hundreds of books sit on three bookshelves. And it's raining, possibly even a tropical storm downpour. If I lose my books too... well, I can't think about that.
They WILL let me into the city. I don't care if they changed their minds about allowing people back into Uptown. Never underestimate a pissed off English major.
Now it's a race.
I thought I would post this because it echoes how I feel about living in New Orleans, or how I felt. I don't know which tense I am supposed to use. This poem is by Charles Bukowski and it's called Young In New Orleans. When I first read it, I remember thinking, "Yes... that's it. That's it exactly."
Yes, the moment you've all been waiting for: I have an address. Well, technically, I have two addresses-- the empty apartment in Boston where I currently am sitting on the carpet, and the house with no roof in New Orleans where all my belongings are. But if you'd like to reach me, the address the U.S. Postal Service will like best is:
2031 Commonwealth Avenue, #15
Brighton, MA 02135
It is a very exciting day. Today we got the internet. Tomorrow we may get a chair! Oh the possibilities...
To St. Lawrence and its alumni: You guys remain the best people I know, and I think will ever meet. I don't know if many people know this, but St. Lawrence was something I almost missed. I applied early decision to another school, and when it didn't work out I found myself at SLU. I think I am not exaggerating when I say that it was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I almost missed it... But I didn't. I'm really not joking when I say on my website that I've got the St. Lawrence logo tattooed on me. Got it my senior year. I bleed scarlet and brown anyway, but you can't see that...
I just want to say thank you for all the fellow Larries who've offered to help in the last couple weeks-- even the ones I don't know. I've heard from people from the Class of '65 on up. I want to say thank you to the amazing ladies of Epsilon Kappa chapter.
I still miss it so much, you know. The clock tower, walking up Park Street at 3 AM under the orange glow of the streetlights, the silence when it snows. You can tell from my website, I suppose. And St. Lawrence seeps through in most of the short stories I have posted there. I would, like, sleep curled up in a drawer in the Tick Tock kitchen if only St. Lawrence would let me come back and go there for another four years... unfortunately, I think everyone else would start looking a bit young.
I raise a Blue to my Larries. You guys are my original crew.
- My clothes.
- All the pictures that were on my walls, which I took down and put in the walk-in closet because that was the only place the roof was safe last time.
- My car, which had all the windows broken, and is now in the street instead of in the driveway and will probably be stolen.
Mike is trying to get a friend in to save things, but I don't know if it will be possible. I can't afford it, but I will fly down if I have to.
I don't know what to do.
Cried a lot, then had a drink, or three. Then I woke up at 5:00 AM after a dream in which Bry and I were on top of a building and there was a tidal wave coming and we were about to wash away. Stared at the ceiling some. Didn't sleep.
Somebody tell me what to do. I cannot let it go, if there's a chance I can save it.
...COULD THERE PLEASE NOT BE A HOLE IN THE ROOF OF THE HOUSE I KEEP TRYING TO LIVE IN?
Sometimes it's nice to stop and do an inventory of your life. Therefore, I, Sarah, displaced resident of Uptown New Orleans, left my house in a hurry on the afternoon of August 28, 2005 with:
- 1 IBM laptop computer
- 6 diaries, primarily from my St. Lawrence years
- 3 notebooks of my writing
- 3 books (out of a few hundred... just three)
- 4 bras
- 9 pairs of underwear
- 1 bikini (??? in case I had to swim through floodwaters in brand new white J Crew suit??)
- 1 bag assorted toiletries
- 1 travel jewelry box with some necklaces and earrings
- 1 small makeup bag
- 1 purse and wallet
- 7 tank tops
- 4 skirts
- 4 pairs of shorts
- 6 t-shirts
- 1 pair of jeans
- 2 pairs of capri pants
- 3 belts
- 1 cell phone
- 2 Nalgene bottles
- 1 large Maglite
- 1 small CD case with CDs
- 1 pair flip flops
- 1 pair sneakers
- 1 Gregory backpacking pack, stuffed with most of the above
I hope my photo albums are safe. I hope my books are safe. I hope my car is safe.
In that order.
I saw this picture this morning on the Times Picayune's site, and it made me want to help. So even though I am myself a hurricane victim, I donated money. I know that lots of people died as a result of the disaster, and I know hundreds of thousands are homeless and need medical attention. But... they have the federal government, and family, and many strangers willing to help. I saw the National Guardsman carrying this poor wet cat, and I thought, if I had hours to pack my things for evacuation and I didn't even bother to bring socks because I thought I'd be back in two days, how many people thought the same thing and left their pets with plenty of food and water-- but only enough for a week? The human victims will get help. That soaking wet white cat is all alone and its people are not coming back. They can't come back. It's sitting in the water wondering why they abandoned it, because pets don't understand.
There are all these stories about people being forced to leave their pets behind when they got into boats or helicopters. I wasn't there, having evacuated by car, so maybe you could argue that I don't know what I would do in that situation, but I can tell you that you would have to physically pry my cat from my arms before I would ever, ever leave it. I would stuff it in a bag. I would even stay behind.
So I gave money to the Humane Society. Let's just say it was a donation in memory of Jane.
I thought this was a really good article, expressing a lot of my own sentiments about living Uptown and also articulating the hard truths about New Orleans that we tend to ignore. I haven't lived there as long but I know what he means. But then, I also used to take the streetcar to work because I didn't have a car, and worked at least one service industry job where they called me "little white girl" (because I was the only one), so I think I have acquired somewhat of a diversified perspective of the city. Frankly, I don't have quite enough money to be able to hide in my Garden District mansion and only see that part of the city... but damn, I still wish I had a Garden District mansion.
According to this neat little map my house and car on Danneel Street are dry. You can roll over it to look at different areas.
I checked my bank account this morning and there it was, in all its gloriousness, a day late but there... a paycheck!
Arrived in Boston last night, our fourth city in as many days. But this one we will stay in, which makes it different. It feels good to finally reach your destination.
Stopped at the Lee Outlets on our way over, which brings up the question of: how are you a refugee if you just dropped $100 at J Crew? None of it was stuff I would have bought, if it weren't for the fact that all my sweaters are hung up neatly in a closet in New Orleans that you can't get to by any roads. And now I have more than one pair of pants. (I own TWO pairs of pants. Whoo.) But it seemed as if my life was infinitely more under control now that I had a striped belt and a pink sweater (and a green sweater, and a white shirt, and the other 8 items I purchased at the Gap, where there was an excellent sale...) There. And I've justified my shopping. By the way, as the news media informs us, if you were previously unaware (like me), "refugee" is not P.C. The proper term is "displaced person."
I thought maybe they'd find some way to direct deposit my paycheck today, since it is payday. No such luck. Dollars dwindle. And the promised update of the work website has not occurred. I just hate that I worked so hard at maintaining some kind of savings, even at my low paying job, and now I am going to have to use them all just to buy stuff I already have. Some good news though-- apparently I can go to any Walgreens to get my prescriptions because they have me in their computer, and there is one 2.7 miles away according to their website. I am going to assume I still have health insurance. All the more reason to get prescriptions filled ASAP.
Irritated. Worried.
But it is sunny outside. This is a new chapter in the story of my life, and it starts... with a shower.
"Pretty soon they're singing one by one the same old line
They say, I'm all right, I just can't get home tonight"
- Counting Crows
Brief stop at my parents' house (where my boyfriend is convinced that my pets are trying to eat him-- which they are not, my cat just has a penchant for sitting on people's faces) before heading to Boston today.
I'm in quite the interesting and frustrating social and financial limbo. Do I still have a job? How can I have a job if the windows are blown out of the office and there's water in the street? (It's on Poydras Street across from the Superdome, if you've seen the pictures.) Come to think of it, since what I do at my job is open new files and call clients, what on earth would I DO at my job now that no one is there to open a case and even if they were they don't have phones? Not to mention that I don't know how many of our clients are homeless or dead. Many of them were low income and lived in the East. What about my paycheck I'm due tomorrow? Will I be laid off? Do I still have health insurance? And where do I go in Boston without paying exorbitant copays since I have Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana? Can I collect unemployment? I need prescriptions and new contacts, and both those doctors are in New Orleans. How am I going to be able to get these things, which I need in the next 2 weeks? Do I get a job in Boston? Do I pay car insurance on a car I am unable to drive because it is sitting in my driveway in New Orleans? Am I going to have to pay rent on an apartment no one can live in, because my stuff is there? And... do I or do I not pay my Entergy bill? On one hand, the bill is for services already rendered, so I should pay it. On the flip side, what can they do, threaten to cut my power off??
But I am alive. And there's a strong possibility I still own something in New Orleans. Which places me better off than thousands of citizens of our fair city. Poor city. I am obsessed with the news. Every five minutes I excuse myself, "Sorry, I have to go look at the destruction again."
It's a mess, that's what it is. Poor city. It was actually less than 60 degrees here last night. I just want to go back to my city.
Bry got a picture of my neighborhood on a satellite image yesterday, and outlined my block in red.
The bad news: There is water in the street, and a suspicious looking spot on the roof that may be-- what? a hole? a chunk of debris? Impossible to tell. You can't see my car, but that side of the house is shadowed.
The good news: The water is probably not deep, since it stops just a couple blocks down. The mysterious blotch on the roof is not over my room (?? questionable--this isn't really good news, it still sucks if there is a hole in the roof and I know this having had my ceiling cave in this July in Cindy). The house is still there.
Anything else remains unknown. But it looks like maybe we'll only have water/wind damage from broken-out windows (which can't be seen). So I probably DO still own clothes, etc.... I just can't get to them.
Today's rave: Anne Rice's essay on New Orleans in the New York Times.
Because I'm coming back!! Leaving for Boston early tomorrow AM, where Mike will be going to B.U. this semester for his 3rd year of law school, and I will be doing... well, whatever it is that people who own no socks or jackets do in Boston. It looks as if I may be able to take my classes online, but no details from UNO yet on how that will work. And my job... well, hell! I hated my job anyway! Liberation!
I hate leaving my car and belongings so far away with no way of knowing whether they are all right, but I guess it's an easy choice to make when you're left without a choice. And many other people are in the same situation, or worse.
I will update with address information when I acquire a residence.
Unlike most disasters, as the days go on, this one seems to be getting worse. Couldn't sleep last night because I saw on the news a woman who was sitting on top of the I-10 overpass next to her husband's body, which was wrapped in a blanket in the 90 degree heat and which no one would take away.
Now I have to worry not only about if I lost everything to wind/water damage, but if looters are at this moment stealing my TV and my car and breaking my personal items. It's a very small TV and I don't really care, but the thing that gets to me is I keep picturing people tossing about my priceless and irreplaceable pictures and memories just to see if there is jewelry underneath, and then throwing them in the water and stepping on them. I think these hoodlums ought to be shot on sight. Didn't they declare martial law? Honestly, I'm a very liberal person. Looting a store for food when you're starving is one thing. But TVs? Electronics? THERE IS NO POWER. YOU ARE HOMELESS. These people have got to have a less-than-human stupidity level. What do they expect to do with a stolen flat screen TV in these circumstances? A gang hijacked a bus that was evacuating nursing home residents, stole all their supplies, and left them to die. That enrages me so much that my political values seem to have just disappeared (they are ignorant and uneducated, they are in poverty, etc.). Nope. These people simply need to be shot. They have absolutely no worth as human beings. I firmly believe this. There are plenty of low-income 9th Ward evacuees who are clean, decent, moral people, who are waiting at the Superdome and whose evacuation had to be halted this morning because of the gunfire, who are not behaving like this.
Still have no idea where I am going, what I am doing, whether I have anything left. It's a kind of limbo that is very hard to live with.
I forgot to mention this before, but you may not be able to get through on my phone. I can call out, but it's pretty much impossible right now to call into the 504 area code. Also, my two school emails are down (as are both schools' entire websites), and I can't check them. So if you want to contact me, leave a message here or email me at my hotmail address.
This is just to let everyone know that I got out. Mike and I left at about 3:30 Sunday in his car. (I left mine parked in our driveway, which is a couple feet above sea level, so we'll see.) We were sitting in traffic on I-10 and the bridge (both of which are now underwater/gone) until about 9 PM. By that time it had started raining and the water along the road was starting to rise a little, which was making us nervous. We made it to Hattiesburg, MS by 11:00, and stopped above Tuscaloosa, AL to sleep on the grass at a rest area from 3:00 to 6:00. By 10:00 AM Monday, we made it to Aunt Carol & Uncle Doug's house in Nashville.
Last night we heard that New Orleans had been spared a direct hit, but from the news that's coming in today, at least one levee was breached and massive sections of the city are under 20 feet of water. My neighborhood is OK from what I've heard, except for a lot of trees down and structural damage. The roof on my house was new, having been destroyed in Tropical Storm Cindy, so I want to say it may have made it... but these winds were about 50 mph higher, and I am not confident about it. I am bracing myself to come home and have nothing. But right now we don't really know when that will be-- they aren't allowing people back into the city, and the road we took to get here is gone. I tried to call into work this morning, but I just got a busy signal. From the news I've seen this morning (the Times Picayune isn't producing a paper edition at all, just in .pdf form online-- as of a couple minutes ago, the water was rising at their building and they announced they are evacuating, so this may in fact be the last paper), water is still coming into the city and areas that were dry last night are flooded today. Spared? I don't know... Certainly it seems rude and presumptuous to say it was spared, when several low income neighborhoods are completely underwater and gone. A lot of these people are on the roof because they don't own vehicles and can't get out.
It seems like everyone was optimistic yesterday because the worst case scenario didn't happen. OK, the worst case scenario was a disaster and loss of life on the scale of December's tsunami. So while I'm glad that didn't happen... New Orleans is not fine. From the news I've seen this morning, the water is still rising, there may not be power for months, and martial law was just declared.
So we will sit here and wait. As the water trickles in.
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.
Current Occupation: Holding down the fort.
Location: The fort.
It's now a Category 5. We may not be here much longer... in other news, I am going back to bed.
Have just received in my email a party invitation which includes the following line:
"If you're still in town, it could be your last party, so come ready. Beginning Sunday night...until the roof comes off. RSVP!"
Also, in case you were worried, never fear: my neighborhood is in fact 2-5 feet above sea level. We on the high ground here, bebe!
