Notes from Katrinaville

As Gustave stares us down, memories from Katrinaville are inevitable. Today is the third year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and here in the Coastal South, you can cut the tension with a knife. The real question is less what's going to happen than is it going to happen again, and so soon. Can we handle being wiped out again, or will we become an American Pompeii after these storms are through?

What a way of life! We sit at the end of nature's natural lane in the sea; we wait like striped pins for God's bowling balls. Every generation of people who has built a life here has had one storm story, but global warming has given us the dark gift of two or three this generation. Older people from New Orleans will tell you about Hurricane Betsy in 1965, Gulf Coast residents will tell you about Hurricane Camille in 1969, but now those same people have more than one catastrophic storm in their lifetime. How are we to adjust?

As New Orleanians our families are already scattered, our recovery in its infancy. There is no end to the depth of emotional and psychosocial damage we've sustained. We are a resilient and strong people, but there is arduous and unexplored territory ahead. It's like hacking your way through a new jungle with an old machete.

Yesterday the displaced portion of my family was interviewed by a local news station in Atlanta. They spoke on memories of Katrina and the oncoming storm, and possible onslaught of evacuee relatives, of which I am one. I couldn't speak as I was seized with emotion. How strange to see relatives you know and love once in awhile, or on television, living in another place, when just three short years ago, they were seen so often we took it for granted, daily even, living around the corner. That is Katrina's greatest, most merciless theft, and Katrinaville's most haunting legacy: ghosts of memories.

Post Theme: Black Rain by Ben Harper