DO NOT FORGET
some things still weigh on my mind, some things still haunt me
my cousin wrote this of hurricane katrina
READ IT AGAIN
DON'T YOU FORGET
a certain something sparked this, and for that, FUCK YOU
but in any case, pay attention to her words
8-29-05
I slept, mostly, on a pallet on the floor of room 3116, 3 Clara East, the rehab unit of Memorial Medical Center. The bed in that room was attached to one of those metal bars with the hanging triangle patients use to pull themselves up into sitting position. Outside the window, there were small potted trees and the wall of another building, forming a sort of gully between buildings. When the winds started, they whooshed and rustled, but the glass remained firm. Rain hit the window with the sound of gravel or cracking glass, and a few times we had to move back. Some of the windows in the waiting area burst and doors were screwed shut to cut down on the wind in the unit. The clocks stopped at four fifty-five. By morning, all that was left of the weather was a strong breeze and a few feet of flooding that receded by the afternoon.
Breakfast consisted of what Momee shared from her meal, since dietary was only feeding the employees. Tater tots and scrambled egg powder and very nasty sausage that I wouldn’t touch, even starving. They also handed out a bottle of water with each meal.
Before Papa got back from the house with an extension cord, the nurses connected every six-foot extension cord they could find to hook the vending machine up to a red (generator) outlet. They even used a TV on a cart with a built-in surge protector. We took ten minutes, got snacks, and unplugged everything.
I volunteered and was assigned a four to six shift with dietary.
A few hours later, the water started to rise again. It kept rising. Word reached us that the levee had broken at the Seventeenth St. Canal (the place we ate dinner with Chuck, where we saw an alligator and introduced him to stuffed artichoke, Sid Mar’s). That’s when we knew the water wouldn’t be receding. Dinner that night was again only for employees. Water and dried out chicken and soggy vegetables and rice. Lunch had been red beans and rice with sausage. Momee and I split it, though she insisted I eat the larger portion.
I ended up unable to help that day because really everyone needed nurses and doctors and men with muscles. I was none of these things. Dietary work was canceled for me. Instead, I was sent to the first floor, where I was of no use, but I did see a family, an old man and woman and young woman with them. The old couple used canes and waded up to the doors. We couldn’t let them in, but, despite the lockdown, a doctor directed them to the emergency room entrance and let them in.
The water continued to rise.
The generators did not power air conditioning, at least not in our room. We woke up soaked in sweat and splashed our faces with water we suspected to be contaminated. Anything to cool off. The generators did power the ice machine, across from our room, which generated heat and made ice no one dared to use because, again, contamination.
Momee worked into the morning and then napped, sprawled over the bed. Later, she and I made fans from cardboard and tongue depressors and nylon tape. We decorated them even. “How 3CE keeps COOL in a crisis.”
We conserved water, not knowing how long we’d be in the hospital. Eighteen bottles and three people. Papa mixed lemonade powder in his to make it more palatable. I left mine plain so I wouldn’t guzzle it.
We showered that evening, because we didn’t know when we’d next get the chance.
8-30-05
Monday night and Tuesday day.
Tuesday, dietary fed everyone. A bottle of water and a Styrofoam cup of eggs, grits, and sausage. There was no lunch. Dinner was the best pasta and meat sauce I’ve ever had. The man who’d made it directed the line, shouting “Welcome to New Orleans’ finest Italian restaurant,” and things like that. Papa knew who had made it because he volunteered and made three thousand sandwiches with maybe a dozen other volunteers. By the end, he says, all that was left was him, a twelve year old girl, and a woman with asthma.
At one point, I wandered to the nurses station just in time to hear someone say, “They’re only letting people bring one small bag? But what about Mr. Jorge? Can he bring his leg?” Someone answered, “Put it on him.” Later, I helped Momee and some other nurses move a patient. Rather, the nurses were moving patients and Diane handed me a prosthetic leg and said, “Carry this?” Apparently he was able to bring his leg. He ended up back on the unit and was evacuated later that day, and almost lost the leg, I hear, but Momee spotted it standing in a hall and rushed it back to him. He would have been evacuated through busted out windows on the first floor onto an airboat.
We tried to preserve power by keeping the lights turned off whenever we could, waiting for the generators to give out. The generators, someone told me, were under the elevators, and water would get into the elevator shaft and then trickle over the generators. Before the generators went out, we used a long orange extension cord to power the vending machine again, and again got snacks and drinks to last us awhile. I also showered before the power cut, what would be my last shower for a good long while. Knowing my cheddarwurst wouldn’t make the night, I heated two up and gorged on meaty, cheesy goodness before I lost the ability.
I read the entire kokology book-one of those books that asks questions like, if you could play one of these three instruments in an orchestra, what would it be and then tells you what that means about you-sat on a sofa up front where it was cooler and drew with crayons in my doodle pad. I got up to use the bathroom, and when I came back, the crayons and pad were gone. I wanted to cry, it was so frustrating. A short while later, the generators finally gave.
8-31-05
Tuesday day melded into Tuesday night, as, with no fan, it was too hot to sleep in the room. I tried to sleep on a sofa, and managed an hour or two, before waking up drenched in sweat, my white shirt sticking to me, with a strange bloodstain on the front that hadn’t been there when I went to sleep. I wandered out by the nurses station, lit with two flashlights set on end. Someone slept in an easy chair and the others laughed and talked. Someone’s family was there as well, with an infant who smiled at everyone.
I found Momee in the quieter back room with Tom, who had me personalize and sign his fan. She poured over charts and papers because the person who was supposed to work was sleeping. Later, the nurse showed up and Momee and I pulled out the travel Scrabble and played by book light. She won.
Papa was guarding the Magnolia garage entrance, and when we visited him, he snapped at us to turn out flashlights off. Four men in a boat were circling the hospital, looking for a way in. In other places, people had shot at the light from flashlights. The other guards slept while Papa sat vigil in a folding chair, the kind you bring to a concert. We whispered conversation for a while and I gave him my fan before we found our way back to the unit. The dogs were frightened wherever we saw them, and a part pit bull barked at us. Momee slept propped in an office chair with her feet on a folding chair. I slept in the other folding chair with my feet propped up as well. We only slept an hour or two, and really, next to the loud nurses station, it wasn’t really sleep. At this point, there was no night and day. A couple of hours sleep at a time, whenever you could catch it.
At one point, we go out to the smoking patio with Flo and see the stars. There was something incredible about that. The city sky was as clear as ever, clean-swept after a storm, and all the lights were out so every star in Orion was visible. The sky was salted, a spill of talcum on blue tile.
One in the morning Wednesday, we were woken by people in fatigues shouting at us to pack up and pack off. “Get up! Get up! Get up! You’ve gotta get on a boat, now! They’re not gonna wait!” We pulled the still-wet laundry (sink-washed) from its hangers and grabbed our bags and trudged downstairs to the longest line I’ve ever seen. And then we found out Momee couldn’t leave because she was a nurse, and therefore “essential personnel.” So, now we’re awake and have no room, but can’t leave. Well, Papa and I could leave, but we won’t without Momee.
We bring our things back to the third floor and set up in a room near the front. But it’s too hot, and someone punched the windows out of the breezeway on that floor, so we move again. Another two hours sleep, and it’s just too hot. We hang out in the breezeways, Papa and I, while Momee works places and tries to rest when she can. Papa responds every time someone shouts that they need men (because the PA went out with the generator), but I’m never left alone. Everyone strains at broken glass to get to a breeze. Soldiers bust the windows out of the second floor. I watch one soldier nurse a bottle of water, oh so slowly, while sitting on what looks like it was once a window. The little three-year-old fidgets and climbs on things and plays with broken glass until a young man tells him to stop. Then the young man and woman, both in their twenties, start to argue and I leave for quieter, if warmer, pastures.
Momee and I spend some time out on the front steps. Well, the top two front steps. The rest were submerged. We talked with a woman who had a small dog with her that barked at big dogs and hid from little ones. Papa pointed his truck out to us. Rather, he pointed out the roof racks before they went completely under. The racks were seven feet tall.
9-1-05
Someone busted into a vending machine some time around Wednesday night and the kids (older teens maybe, but they were acting like kids) near me made a lot of noise over it. An argument arose. The kids said some white kids broke into the machine and the security guys (not really security, just strong men thrown into the role) were only blaming them because they were black. I was nervous and also aggravated because they’d been waking me up for the past hour being noisy about the busted machine. One of them cut his hand on the broken glass. I don’t know who broke into the machine and I don’t much care. If the white kids did break into the machine, at least they didn’t wake me up. I moved to the breezeway after that.
Thursday was more serious, or maybe we were just too tired to play Scrabble. Really, Thursday was a hotter, fouler smelling version of Wednesday. The air was heavier, felt heavier anyway. We slept a couple of hours on sticky vinyl sofas dragged into a breezeway with busted out windows and fanned patients on the second floor. We rotated, took turns watching the bags.
The second floor was a very odd. It was something out of a movie. The heat and the smell and the surreality of everything confused patients until they didn’t know where they were or what was going on. And then one side of the room, the side I spent mist of my time on, looked like a collection of broken Greek statues. Diabetes I think. Patients missing legs and arms cut off at different points. Slipping farther away than the others who didn’t know where they were. At least those people thought they were somewhere. These people lolled on Convertacots, unaware. A woman told me to let a nurse know if anyone weren’t breathing, but not to make a big deal out of it, not to scare the other patients.
A fan running on a portable generator broke at one point and we fixed it with tongue depressors and vinyl tape. Of course, it only lasted so long as the generator lasted, and that wasn’t long at all. At this point, any generators we had were used to cool the patients. Everything else was frivolous.
We were yelled at now and then by National Guard. Get out, get out, get out. Get to the boats. You need to leave. Papa and I nodded and ducked onto a balcony until they left. We weren’t splitting up. And I really didn’t want to walk through that water.
There was a doctor with her cat. She was one of the people running things. She joked that being a cheerleader in college was paying off, because she could shout and be heard over everything else. She fussed at the National Guard at one point when they came through and upset the patients. I think everyone was out of their depth.
Eventually, we ended up at the base of the parking lot ramp, one of those twisty candy cane affairs, with a few men driving patients to us in the beds of their pickup trucks. I was pretty much useless here. We were outside so no one needed fanning and I don't remember having any water at that point, so no one was getting any anyway.
The airboat started taking nurses, so my mom and I put our feet in garbage bags that reached to just above the knee and then put our shoes on over. We would have to walk a few blocks through the water to get to the bus because the boats couldn't get us all the way to dry land. The plastic was hot and leeched sweat out of us.
Eventually, the boat stopped coming, so we had to take the last of the patients to the roof. It's a long walk up the ramp, I don't remember how many levels. The bags on my shoulders, one with my computer in it and the other with my mom's, and filled with our clothes and cell phones and deodorant, were heavy and my shoulders burn.ed
It was worth it. On the roof we found cases of water, peanut butter crackers, graham crackers (which are exciting if only because they're not peanut butter crackers), canned roast beef, fruit cups. It was a feast, kingly eating. There were perhaps sixty of us left and we fell on this windfall like puppies in a dog chow commercial. The food had just been dropped, or they were keeping it to give to patients being flown out, or something. I don't know what. I don't think it was just for patients leaving, because that doesn't make any sense.
The helipad was rusted and flimsy-looking, like scaffolding. I'll find out later that before the first helicopter landed, a volunteer, they didn't know whether or not it would hold the thing's weight. I'm glad I didn't know this at the time.
The last official patient to be loaded onto a helicopter was a large man on a gurney. The last injured person to be loaded onto a helicopter was a man who helped carry the patient. Just as the helicopter lifted up, he collapsed, face scrunched up and panting. Something with his ribs. Like a cracked rib poking into his lung.
When the sun set we had to turn off our flashlights. At first, we thought we were conserving battery power. But really, people were shooting at the light. And at this point, we only had four people with guns left. And the looters were in the building. At least, that's what I heard later.
The small generator on the roof stopped working early in the evening and our flashlights were taped around the helipad. We had trouble getting helicopters. Our first set got taken by one of the organizations with the rescue efforts. So the hospital ordered more, privately owned helicopters, but the fuel got taken.
It wasn't like helicopter's weren't coming. They were. The Coast guard red ones and big black-green ones. They just weren't coming very often. At all. We were joined very late in the evening by a doctor who got stuck on the roof of a nearby building. I don't remember why, but he got picked up and then dropped off to wait with us. There was a scary moment where he dangled from a rope or ladder or something hanging from the helicopter. He confirmed, when he joined us, that yes, it was very scary.
At one point while we were waiting, the sky emptied of helicopters except for one. My dad explained that wherever the president was there was a no fly zone. This didn't make sense to me. People were shooting at the helicopters. Being the only thing in the sky only made you more of a target. I have to say, I have never disliked the president more. I mean, this isn't a political thing, but I really resented the fact that, in a show of sympathy, or whatever it was that called for a fly-over, the president delayed my getting out.
Fog rolled in as night fell and the helicopter's had to stop coming. It got cold, or we were just so used to the hundred degrees inside that it seemed cold. We had a roll of garbage bags and everyone got one to wrap up in. We slept on the ramp leading up to the helipad, maybe twenty feet above the roof proper.
No matter how odd a situation, you're eventually going to need to pee. So we used the roof and the dark and that was that. Later, we would end up at the Wyndham Anatole in a room with a bathroom bigger than our kitchen.
9-2-05
I think it was four am when something to our east exploded with an echoing boom that woke us all up. Orange and yellow flickered in reflection off of buildings. The sun rose behind a thick black column of smoke that stretched and angled towards us. And we griped. We were worried that the smoke would delay the helicopters longer. As it turned out, the smoke was potentially toxic fumes, so we became a priority.
We got on the second to last, maybe third to last helicopter. My dad was excited over it because it was an old one that had probably been used in Vietnam. I think I would have been scared if I weren't so tired. From the helicopter, the view was ... you can't really get a sense of it, even from the footage on the news. We lived near the hospital and could see our apartment from the sky. My mom started crying, but she stopped by the time we reached Northshore Hospital.
Hot food. Ham and eggs and grits and toast. Bottled water. Cold. And the nurses actually apologized for not having working lights in the bathrooms. As though we cared. They also made us take showers. They were quite adamant about it. I think our noses had already shut down out of self defense, but theirs hadn't. Clean clothes, a shirt with a Clydesdale from a beer company and pants that were too big and too long,but I belted them and rolled the cuffs. They were clean.
When we got on the bus that would take us to Dallas-and we got on that bus as soon as it came because buses were being commandeered if no one was in them-we looked like a twisted, beery version of a church group, all in scrub pants and the same shirt (because the dark green one was the only one that wasn't very obviously a beer shirt).
I knew it was over when I watched the photo journalist's Hawaiian shirt recede in the back window of the bus. It would be a long bus ride with a memorable stop at a buffet (ever seen a video of locusts in fast-forward?) and a surreal few days at the Wyndham Anatole, but the easy part was over.
The easy part? Are you insane?
The whole shebang, the hospital and the roof and the helicopter, that was all easy compared with the rest. And that's the interesting part too. That's the part that tells well. But really, when you're trying to keep track of food and water and sleep and work and your family, trying to avoid the National Guard and keep in the broken windows and not get heatstroke, you're too busy to be worried or feel loss or anything other than stress. You act and you do what needs doing. The thinking comes later.
My grandmother insisted that we all had “traumatic post syndrome.” But really, there was nothing to have PTSD over. It's the thinking that's a killer, and that came later. But thinking doesn't make for a good story. And god knows it's nothing I want to talk about.
So my mom's in Birmingham now, my dad's in the city, and I'm at the dorm for another two weeks (as of the official posting of this site) and then I'm bouncing around a bit. The cats and the rabbit are safe in Birmingham; my parents got them out a month later. We're all kind of scattered across the south, with one family member in Oregon, which confuses the heck out of the rest of us, because that's not even close to southern. But then, my family got to New Orleans when a hurricane was on it's way and the evacuation plan in the swamps consisted of a flatbed train and whatever you could carry. Momié and her sisters just stayed. It kinda comes full circle when you look at it like that.
In August, I'll have to replace my state ID. I don't have a New Orleans address now, so I'll have to get one for Birmingham. And it's an okay city, but I don't want to. And that's the thing. The hurricane sucked. It was hot and miserable in that hospital and I never want to do anything like that ever again. But I was home the whole time. And I can't say that anymore.
my cousin wrote this of hurricane katrina
READ IT AGAIN
DON'T YOU FORGET
a certain something sparked this, and for that, FUCK YOU
but in any case, pay attention to her words
8-29-05
I slept, mostly, on a pallet on the floor of room 3116, 3 Clara East, the rehab unit of Memorial Medical Center. The bed in that room was attached to one of those metal bars with the hanging triangle patients use to pull themselves up into sitting position. Outside the window, there were small potted trees and the wall of another building, forming a sort of gully between buildings. When the winds started, they whooshed and rustled, but the glass remained firm. Rain hit the window with the sound of gravel or cracking glass, and a few times we had to move back. Some of the windows in the waiting area burst and doors were screwed shut to cut down on the wind in the unit. The clocks stopped at four fifty-five. By morning, all that was left of the weather was a strong breeze and a few feet of flooding that receded by the afternoon.
Breakfast consisted of what Momee shared from her meal, since dietary was only feeding the employees. Tater tots and scrambled egg powder and very nasty sausage that I wouldn’t touch, even starving. They also handed out a bottle of water with each meal.
Before Papa got back from the house with an extension cord, the nurses connected every six-foot extension cord they could find to hook the vending machine up to a red (generator) outlet. They even used a TV on a cart with a built-in surge protector. We took ten minutes, got snacks, and unplugged everything.
I volunteered and was assigned a four to six shift with dietary.
A few hours later, the water started to rise again. It kept rising. Word reached us that the levee had broken at the Seventeenth St. Canal (the place we ate dinner with Chuck, where we saw an alligator and introduced him to stuffed artichoke, Sid Mar’s). That’s when we knew the water wouldn’t be receding. Dinner that night was again only for employees. Water and dried out chicken and soggy vegetables and rice. Lunch had been red beans and rice with sausage. Momee and I split it, though she insisted I eat the larger portion.
I ended up unable to help that day because really everyone needed nurses and doctors and men with muscles. I was none of these things. Dietary work was canceled for me. Instead, I was sent to the first floor, where I was of no use, but I did see a family, an old man and woman and young woman with them. The old couple used canes and waded up to the doors. We couldn’t let them in, but, despite the lockdown, a doctor directed them to the emergency room entrance and let them in.
The water continued to rise.
The generators did not power air conditioning, at least not in our room. We woke up soaked in sweat and splashed our faces with water we suspected to be contaminated. Anything to cool off. The generators did power the ice machine, across from our room, which generated heat and made ice no one dared to use because, again, contamination.
Momee worked into the morning and then napped, sprawled over the bed. Later, she and I made fans from cardboard and tongue depressors and nylon tape. We decorated them even. “How 3CE keeps COOL in a crisis.”
We conserved water, not knowing how long we’d be in the hospital. Eighteen bottles and three people. Papa mixed lemonade powder in his to make it more palatable. I left mine plain so I wouldn’t guzzle it.
We showered that evening, because we didn’t know when we’d next get the chance.
8-30-05
Monday night and Tuesday day.
Tuesday, dietary fed everyone. A bottle of water and a Styrofoam cup of eggs, grits, and sausage. There was no lunch. Dinner was the best pasta and meat sauce I’ve ever had. The man who’d made it directed the line, shouting “Welcome to New Orleans’ finest Italian restaurant,” and things like that. Papa knew who had made it because he volunteered and made three thousand sandwiches with maybe a dozen other volunteers. By the end, he says, all that was left was him, a twelve year old girl, and a woman with asthma.
At one point, I wandered to the nurses station just in time to hear someone say, “They’re only letting people bring one small bag? But what about Mr. Jorge? Can he bring his leg?” Someone answered, “Put it on him.” Later, I helped Momee and some other nurses move a patient. Rather, the nurses were moving patients and Diane handed me a prosthetic leg and said, “Carry this?” Apparently he was able to bring his leg. He ended up back on the unit and was evacuated later that day, and almost lost the leg, I hear, but Momee spotted it standing in a hall and rushed it back to him. He would have been evacuated through busted out windows on the first floor onto an airboat.
We tried to preserve power by keeping the lights turned off whenever we could, waiting for the generators to give out. The generators, someone told me, were under the elevators, and water would get into the elevator shaft and then trickle over the generators. Before the generators went out, we used a long orange extension cord to power the vending machine again, and again got snacks and drinks to last us awhile. I also showered before the power cut, what would be my last shower for a good long while. Knowing my cheddarwurst wouldn’t make the night, I heated two up and gorged on meaty, cheesy goodness before I lost the ability.
I read the entire kokology book-one of those books that asks questions like, if you could play one of these three instruments in an orchestra, what would it be and then tells you what that means about you-sat on a sofa up front where it was cooler and drew with crayons in my doodle pad. I got up to use the bathroom, and when I came back, the crayons and pad were gone. I wanted to cry, it was so frustrating. A short while later, the generators finally gave.
8-31-05
Tuesday day melded into Tuesday night, as, with no fan, it was too hot to sleep in the room. I tried to sleep on a sofa, and managed an hour or two, before waking up drenched in sweat, my white shirt sticking to me, with a strange bloodstain on the front that hadn’t been there when I went to sleep. I wandered out by the nurses station, lit with two flashlights set on end. Someone slept in an easy chair and the others laughed and talked. Someone’s family was there as well, with an infant who smiled at everyone.
I found Momee in the quieter back room with Tom, who had me personalize and sign his fan. She poured over charts and papers because the person who was supposed to work was sleeping. Later, the nurse showed up and Momee and I pulled out the travel Scrabble and played by book light. She won.
Papa was guarding the Magnolia garage entrance, and when we visited him, he snapped at us to turn out flashlights off. Four men in a boat were circling the hospital, looking for a way in. In other places, people had shot at the light from flashlights. The other guards slept while Papa sat vigil in a folding chair, the kind you bring to a concert. We whispered conversation for a while and I gave him my fan before we found our way back to the unit. The dogs were frightened wherever we saw them, and a part pit bull barked at us. Momee slept propped in an office chair with her feet on a folding chair. I slept in the other folding chair with my feet propped up as well. We only slept an hour or two, and really, next to the loud nurses station, it wasn’t really sleep. At this point, there was no night and day. A couple of hours sleep at a time, whenever you could catch it.
At one point, we go out to the smoking patio with Flo and see the stars. There was something incredible about that. The city sky was as clear as ever, clean-swept after a storm, and all the lights were out so every star in Orion was visible. The sky was salted, a spill of talcum on blue tile.
One in the morning Wednesday, we were woken by people in fatigues shouting at us to pack up and pack off. “Get up! Get up! Get up! You’ve gotta get on a boat, now! They’re not gonna wait!” We pulled the still-wet laundry (sink-washed) from its hangers and grabbed our bags and trudged downstairs to the longest line I’ve ever seen. And then we found out Momee couldn’t leave because she was a nurse, and therefore “essential personnel.” So, now we’re awake and have no room, but can’t leave. Well, Papa and I could leave, but we won’t without Momee.
We bring our things back to the third floor and set up in a room near the front. But it’s too hot, and someone punched the windows out of the breezeway on that floor, so we move again. Another two hours sleep, and it’s just too hot. We hang out in the breezeways, Papa and I, while Momee works places and tries to rest when she can. Papa responds every time someone shouts that they need men (because the PA went out with the generator), but I’m never left alone. Everyone strains at broken glass to get to a breeze. Soldiers bust the windows out of the second floor. I watch one soldier nurse a bottle of water, oh so slowly, while sitting on what looks like it was once a window. The little three-year-old fidgets and climbs on things and plays with broken glass until a young man tells him to stop. Then the young man and woman, both in their twenties, start to argue and I leave for quieter, if warmer, pastures.
Momee and I spend some time out on the front steps. Well, the top two front steps. The rest were submerged. We talked with a woman who had a small dog with her that barked at big dogs and hid from little ones. Papa pointed his truck out to us. Rather, he pointed out the roof racks before they went completely under. The racks were seven feet tall.
9-1-05
Someone busted into a vending machine some time around Wednesday night and the kids (older teens maybe, but they were acting like kids) near me made a lot of noise over it. An argument arose. The kids said some white kids broke into the machine and the security guys (not really security, just strong men thrown into the role) were only blaming them because they were black. I was nervous and also aggravated because they’d been waking me up for the past hour being noisy about the busted machine. One of them cut his hand on the broken glass. I don’t know who broke into the machine and I don’t much care. If the white kids did break into the machine, at least they didn’t wake me up. I moved to the breezeway after that.
Thursday was more serious, or maybe we were just too tired to play Scrabble. Really, Thursday was a hotter, fouler smelling version of Wednesday. The air was heavier, felt heavier anyway. We slept a couple of hours on sticky vinyl sofas dragged into a breezeway with busted out windows and fanned patients on the second floor. We rotated, took turns watching the bags.
The second floor was a very odd. It was something out of a movie. The heat and the smell and the surreality of everything confused patients until they didn’t know where they were or what was going on. And then one side of the room, the side I spent mist of my time on, looked like a collection of broken Greek statues. Diabetes I think. Patients missing legs and arms cut off at different points. Slipping farther away than the others who didn’t know where they were. At least those people thought they were somewhere. These people lolled on Convertacots, unaware. A woman told me to let a nurse know if anyone weren’t breathing, but not to make a big deal out of it, not to scare the other patients.
A fan running on a portable generator broke at one point and we fixed it with tongue depressors and vinyl tape. Of course, it only lasted so long as the generator lasted, and that wasn’t long at all. At this point, any generators we had were used to cool the patients. Everything else was frivolous.
We were yelled at now and then by National Guard. Get out, get out, get out. Get to the boats. You need to leave. Papa and I nodded and ducked onto a balcony until they left. We weren’t splitting up. And I really didn’t want to walk through that water.
There was a doctor with her cat. She was one of the people running things. She joked that being a cheerleader in college was paying off, because she could shout and be heard over everything else. She fussed at the National Guard at one point when they came through and upset the patients. I think everyone was out of their depth.
Eventually, we ended up at the base of the parking lot ramp, one of those twisty candy cane affairs, with a few men driving patients to us in the beds of their pickup trucks. I was pretty much useless here. We were outside so no one needed fanning and I don't remember having any water at that point, so no one was getting any anyway.
The airboat started taking nurses, so my mom and I put our feet in garbage bags that reached to just above the knee and then put our shoes on over. We would have to walk a few blocks through the water to get to the bus because the boats couldn't get us all the way to dry land. The plastic was hot and leeched sweat out of us.
Eventually, the boat stopped coming, so we had to take the last of the patients to the roof. It's a long walk up the ramp, I don't remember how many levels. The bags on my shoulders, one with my computer in it and the other with my mom's, and filled with our clothes and cell phones and deodorant, were heavy and my shoulders burn.ed
It was worth it. On the roof we found cases of water, peanut butter crackers, graham crackers (which are exciting if only because they're not peanut butter crackers), canned roast beef, fruit cups. It was a feast, kingly eating. There were perhaps sixty of us left and we fell on this windfall like puppies in a dog chow commercial. The food had just been dropped, or they were keeping it to give to patients being flown out, or something. I don't know what. I don't think it was just for patients leaving, because that doesn't make any sense.
The helipad was rusted and flimsy-looking, like scaffolding. I'll find out later that before the first helicopter landed, a volunteer, they didn't know whether or not it would hold the thing's weight. I'm glad I didn't know this at the time.
The last official patient to be loaded onto a helicopter was a large man on a gurney. The last injured person to be loaded onto a helicopter was a man who helped carry the patient. Just as the helicopter lifted up, he collapsed, face scrunched up and panting. Something with his ribs. Like a cracked rib poking into his lung.
When the sun set we had to turn off our flashlights. At first, we thought we were conserving battery power. But really, people were shooting at the light. And at this point, we only had four people with guns left. And the looters were in the building. At least, that's what I heard later.
The small generator on the roof stopped working early in the evening and our flashlights were taped around the helipad. We had trouble getting helicopters. Our first set got taken by one of the organizations with the rescue efforts. So the hospital ordered more, privately owned helicopters, but the fuel got taken.
It wasn't like helicopter's weren't coming. They were. The Coast guard red ones and big black-green ones. They just weren't coming very often. At all. We were joined very late in the evening by a doctor who got stuck on the roof of a nearby building. I don't remember why, but he got picked up and then dropped off to wait with us. There was a scary moment where he dangled from a rope or ladder or something hanging from the helicopter. He confirmed, when he joined us, that yes, it was very scary.
At one point while we were waiting, the sky emptied of helicopters except for one. My dad explained that wherever the president was there was a no fly zone. This didn't make sense to me. People were shooting at the helicopters. Being the only thing in the sky only made you more of a target. I have to say, I have never disliked the president more. I mean, this isn't a political thing, but I really resented the fact that, in a show of sympathy, or whatever it was that called for a fly-over, the president delayed my getting out.
Fog rolled in as night fell and the helicopter's had to stop coming. It got cold, or we were just so used to the hundred degrees inside that it seemed cold. We had a roll of garbage bags and everyone got one to wrap up in. We slept on the ramp leading up to the helipad, maybe twenty feet above the roof proper.
No matter how odd a situation, you're eventually going to need to pee. So we used the roof and the dark and that was that. Later, we would end up at the Wyndham Anatole in a room with a bathroom bigger than our kitchen.
9-2-05
I think it was four am when something to our east exploded with an echoing boom that woke us all up. Orange and yellow flickered in reflection off of buildings. The sun rose behind a thick black column of smoke that stretched and angled towards us. And we griped. We were worried that the smoke would delay the helicopters longer. As it turned out, the smoke was potentially toxic fumes, so we became a priority.
We got on the second to last, maybe third to last helicopter. My dad was excited over it because it was an old one that had probably been used in Vietnam. I think I would have been scared if I weren't so tired. From the helicopter, the view was ... you can't really get a sense of it, even from the footage on the news. We lived near the hospital and could see our apartment from the sky. My mom started crying, but she stopped by the time we reached Northshore Hospital.
Hot food. Ham and eggs and grits and toast. Bottled water. Cold. And the nurses actually apologized for not having working lights in the bathrooms. As though we cared. They also made us take showers. They were quite adamant about it. I think our noses had already shut down out of self defense, but theirs hadn't. Clean clothes, a shirt with a Clydesdale from a beer company and pants that were too big and too long,but I belted them and rolled the cuffs. They were clean.
When we got on the bus that would take us to Dallas-and we got on that bus as soon as it came because buses were being commandeered if no one was in them-we looked like a twisted, beery version of a church group, all in scrub pants and the same shirt (because the dark green one was the only one that wasn't very obviously a beer shirt).
I knew it was over when I watched the photo journalist's Hawaiian shirt recede in the back window of the bus. It would be a long bus ride with a memorable stop at a buffet (ever seen a video of locusts in fast-forward?) and a surreal few days at the Wyndham Anatole, but the easy part was over.
The easy part? Are you insane?
The whole shebang, the hospital and the roof and the helicopter, that was all easy compared with the rest. And that's the interesting part too. That's the part that tells well. But really, when you're trying to keep track of food and water and sleep and work and your family, trying to avoid the National Guard and keep in the broken windows and not get heatstroke, you're too busy to be worried or feel loss or anything other than stress. You act and you do what needs doing. The thinking comes later.
My grandmother insisted that we all had “traumatic post syndrome.” But really, there was nothing to have PTSD over. It's the thinking that's a killer, and that came later. But thinking doesn't make for a good story. And god knows it's nothing I want to talk about.
So my mom's in Birmingham now, my dad's in the city, and I'm at the dorm for another two weeks (as of the official posting of this site) and then I'm bouncing around a bit. The cats and the rabbit are safe in Birmingham; my parents got them out a month later. We're all kind of scattered across the south, with one family member in Oregon, which confuses the heck out of the rest of us, because that's not even close to southern. But then, my family got to New Orleans when a hurricane was on it's way and the evacuation plan in the swamps consisted of a flatbed train and whatever you could carry. Momié and her sisters just stayed. It kinda comes full circle when you look at it like that.
In August, I'll have to replace my state ID. I don't have a New Orleans address now, so I'll have to get one for Birmingham. And it's an okay city, but I don't want to. And that's the thing. The hurricane sucked. It was hot and miserable in that hospital and I never want to do anything like that ever again. But I was home the whole time. And I can't say that anymore.