Perceptions: Come hell or high water

When I was a student, a dozen or so wide-eyed visitors came into my college newspaper office, taking seats in bright neon orange chairs. I don’t remember what college they were from or if they were even journalism majors. All I remember is their questions.

“Did you evacuate?” “How long were you out of school?” “Where did you go?” “What is college life like now?”

And the big one, “What did you lose?”

Some of us spoke up: Classes canceled. Two family homes, gone. Parents and siblings still displaced in other states. Jobs lost. Too many destroyed apartments to count.

“This has been a turning point in our lives,” our sports editor told them. “For some people, it’s when their dad dies, or when they get married. But for us, there will always be a before and after Katrina.”

This Aug. 29 marks 20 years after the monster hurricane. But when I blink, it could’ve happened yesterday.

I was a junior at Loyola University New Orleans (yes, I’m one of those Jesuit-educated people) when Hurricane Katrina struck the city I fell in love with as a freshman in 2003. The food, music, culture, architecture, traditions, people, character … I was somewhere I belonged. It was home.

And then I was forced to leave.

I had evacuated from Hurricane Ivan the year before. A contraflow drive to Texas, a few days with my little sister and back again. No big deal. I, again, packed a bag — two days’ worth of yoga pants and T-shirts — and hopped in my 1999 Mazda and headed west.

Nothing can prepare you for watching the place you love die in front of you on live television.

Eighteen hours later, I made it out. More than 1,400 people never did. Then the levees broke. Nothing can prepare you for watching the place you love die in front of you on live television.

Nine weeks later, I returned with my dad to see what was left of my one-bedroom apartment along the historic St. Charles Avenue streetcar line. I’ve only seen my dad, a Louisianan born and raised, cry three times in my life. As we crossed Lake Pontchartrain and hit the parish line, tears streamed down both our cheeks.

Devastation surrounded us. Blue tarps signaled where roofs used to be. Mountains of debris covered street corners. High water marks etched the magnitude of destruction, sometimes 10 feet up a home’s exterior. And the smell. The smell could suffocate you.

My apartment building was spared from flooding, but a tree had crashed through the roof. Water seeped down the walls, feeding growths of thick black mold. My front door was kicked in by my downstairs neighbor, a chef who stayed behind, looking for water. For 10 days he guarded the building from looters, sitting on the top of the staircase with a pistol.

Only 20% of housing in the entire city remained habitable. It was a war zone.

Humvees full of National Guard soldiers patrolled the streets at night, rifles drawn, after the city’s evening curfew. Restaurants were shuttered. Schools and homes were abandoned. Only 20% of housing in the entire city remained habitable. It was a war zone.

The utter devastation hit me as I took a drive one afternoon. I saw, on the corner of Jackson and Magazine streets, a makeshift grave where the body of New Orleanian Vera Smith had rested. Her body decayed for four days on the sidewalk after the storm’s landfall before neighbors covered her with a white sheet and a spray-painted epitaph: “Here lies Vera. God help us.”

In those few months, I saw the ugliest side of what life can hand you. There’s what people saw on the news, then there’s what we lived — and they’re completely different, yet exactly the same.

The city’s population was cut in half, but more than 90% of undergraduates returned to Loyola in January 2006, myself among them.

Today, when people ask me, I often say Katrina was the worst and best thing that ever happened to me. Without it, I never would have met my husband of 12 years, Stefan. He was a contractor for the Federal Emergency Management System.

I ask myself, “What did I gain?” The unexpected strength to find myself. The storm rewrote my story, forcing me to rebuild not just a life but an identity.

A year after we met, I followed him back to his hometown of Dayton. The thought of leaving my beloved New Orleans ripped me apart. But I arrived in Dayton a new person with new ink — a small fleur de lis tattoo on my foot, a symbol of New Orleans’ rebirth.

Katrina, tragic as it was, somehow brought me the life I have now. It remains the line that divides my life into before and after. I sometimes think about that big question from the newspaper office that day. Instead, I ask myself, “What did I gain?” The unexpected strength to find myself. The storm rewrote my story, forcing me to rebuild not just a life but an identity. And New Orleans will always be stitched into the fabric of who I am.