First Chapter - a memoir in progress
okay... here it is: the first working chapter of my memoir about coming to Germany, a preface of sorts. Let me know what you think if you get the chance to read the whole thing.
THE STORM BEFORE DEPARTURE
Before I left, I was worried that I wouldn’t remember much from the week of Katrina. I worried that leaving the country might sever some crucial nerve connecting my emotive self to that of the Louisianans. I had not written for some while and was working against the summer slums. Everything was scattered. I had just moved out of my house on West Grant Street-my futon still sitting in my brother Joey’s garage, covered in boxes. In the midst of moving, I was busy reserving train tickets, hostels, looking at maps, hunting down documents for financial aid, saying goodbyes. I had found myself in bubble; a bubble that kept me from the bombardments of that instant in which life occurs: the big Now. Where was I? The year 2005, a September’s eve, ready for everything and nothing, and along came Katrina, angel of sorrow, born of the Bahamas. A tropical depressions, trade winds, the “biggest natural disaster in U.S. history.” I wanted to write everything down: each face, each overheard story, each second. But then my condition did not offer much to the occasion.
What I do remember were the streets, overflowing with cars at every gas station, filling lawnmower cans of every shape and size. Malfunctioning stoplights had reduced most of the intersections into four-way stops. Every once and a while helicopters would chop by. Chaotic and lawless are not sufficient to describe what I saw. I remember on August 30, waiting in a line of cars to board the entrance ramp to I12, and watching the people . A few individuals were holding up posters, pledging free food and accommodation to evacuees at nearby church. On the streets, others were getting impatient and cutting around me via the medians. In those brief moments of lucidity, human nature tried to reveal itself. This is what people do when they panic; then you see the true order of their priorities. The storm seemed to have brought the worst and best in us.
I couldn’t call any one, internet was down. And so I drove my car around trying to say my last goodbyes, dropping off envelopes I had prepared with my contact information in them. Kristen was back at camp ASCAA, in northern Alabama-as though she had not come back- Lynda was with her husband Alex and his parents. Passing through the LSU area, I was opportune to knock on a few doors, but without much success. Judah, no. Travis, no. In the end I found a small group of friends on Carlotta Street. A handful of estranged faces situated around the T.V. smoking cigarettes and staring. And to think, the last I would see of them for a while was a few pale figures, speechless. But what otherwise? There was nothing else to with such a gratuitous monstrosity. Radios boomed from every car doors at gas stations and household, all full of trembling voices, commercial voices, some obnoxious, some terrifying. Nightmarish apocalyptic dirges. It was a historical moment we had all been warned about and did not believe likely. Suddenly New Orleans was flooding. Our mini-Europe was drowning alive.
“Reporting from the crescent city: the levee has broken, now, a two points, I repeat, two of the -Industrial Canal at Tennessee Street, 17th Street Canal.” The bowl of New Orleans was gaining water rapidly. It sounded like some pit-and-the-pendulum gig, the last moments of life spent staring death in its face. Many cities along the coast had been wiped away on that grim Monday. The facts would wash up later, after a number of politically shady activities, and one large report later. I was having trouble responding emotionally to the things that were happening. My heart was spread thin. Real thin.
I was leaving for Germany in two days. And so feelings had been migrating for almost a year into what was, at the time, still a European dreamscape. How it all began cannot be clarified in any logical sense, simply because I didn’t understand myself. In my going away essay, I mustered every excuse I could to get the extra grant money: It was pinnacle and conclusion of my childhood romanticism, come to a bud, blossoming again in the possibilities a new land, a new life. It was an attempt to reverse the many years of small-town miseducation, an attempt to reconcile a sense of guilt brought about by the colonization of the Native American lands. I wanted to get abover the watermark and be able look in on the New World from the outside.
Why Germany, then? Indeed every body I’ve met has looked at me rather strangely when I begin to tell them the whole story. I try to omit the part about the girl but it never works. The key to the unquenchable wanderlust is buried somewhere, in a time long since past, in a small town far away from the sea. In a town called Livingston, where I grew up and where I, in graduation year of 2003, met a certain Swiss girl. Our story was incomplete and embarrassing. But did not some wise man once say the best stories are left unfinished? Whatever. There was something in the language, something in the photographs she carried with her. An fierce curiosity was born.
Many years later, the summer of 2005, my heart was all aflutter, already airborne and hovering over Baton Rouge. I had began studying German, for real. Dreams were scattered, from the Alps sweeping down into various tributaries of the Rhine, some tucked into the thickets of Black Forest, amber dreams of wheat beer in timber-framed “kneipen.” I was tired of thumbing books in the travel section of the local bookstores.
Zoom forward to the week before departure, and here my home city had suddenly become a circus of cops and nerve-racked refugees. As I drove around the city alone in my soon-to-be-sold car that gloomy Tuesday, I could hardly recognize my own condition. I had my last few errands, my last few goodbyes. Was I sad? Excited? Nervous? I don’t know. It felt empty. A poem I wrote once, however, suggests that this empty feeling-empty chest-feeling, empty mind-could perhaps be everything, all thrashing in the heart. Summers cataract was only beginning to dissolve, yet the lights and sounds could make an impression. They were beginning to seep through, in torrents of red and blue, sirens that sing of death, ultra-tragic news non-stop, twenty-four hours, voices repeating the words, which at some point started to seem trite, meaningless and trendy, “Devastation…” “devastation…” “devast..” The experience was numbing, the details of my remembering were somehow washed away, due to my position in time.
Who would have known a storm the size of Great Britain would rip straight across the Gulf Coast, taking 1,418 lives, 75 billion dollars worth of residential and business and government property? It was a natural mess, a cultural mess. It turned out later to be a political mess as well. Many people say we are crazy for living where we do. Indeed, no one wants to insure us. Perhaps it is something about the gulf air, the sweet southern flowers, the idea of being at the frontier of an ever-changing universe that makes one feel more alive in Louisiana.. A ripple-no-a tidal wave of misfortune was projected to run across the country, an economic nightmare, the next depression even, they cried on the radio. Baton Rouge was to double in size. Around 2000 people were never to return, scattered like lost dreams, never to be collected.
We heard about the storm somewhat suddenly, and as usual didn’t want to take it seriously until it was all over the news how “big” this would be. A number of storms had already threatened us before. All the bored college students were at the edge of their seats, waiting for cancel class, wanting to throw hurricane parties. I was invited to one, but like many others, just did not show up.
I was with by brother, Joey, at his new house in Denham Springs when she went by. We weren’t taking much seriously then. While the wet tropical winds waft through the house, we drank white Russians and beer, began cooking gumbo with a propane burner. Joey’s house was brand new, with clean leather furniture, a kitchen full of groceries and all the envied culinary gadgets, Teflon pans, and utensils. That he had worked his ass off for all of this made me very proud of him. After many years of annoying each other to know end.
In the clutter of cooking we had taken many things out of the fridge. I saw a small Winn-Dixie pack of bratwurst in the meat compartment, and pronounced “Braaaatvoohrst” with my then moderate German accent. Joey suggesting that I cook them and so I did, with eggs. He began to cut up vegetables: onions, bell peppers, carrots, garlic, celery. We piled the countertops with all ingredients. I stirred the roux outside, the garage door open to the wind and water, all my books, candles, appliances packed into boxes and stacked on the futon I had been sleeping on my first year at LSU. The mood was free, playful, but there were small hints of vulnerability everywhere. My brother and I joked and cursed, talked music and goals, work and about people both talented and incredible. At one point Joey attempted to translate German without ever having studied. He used the cognates and made up his own verbs and relationships, to create embarrassing, sometimes vulgar scenarios.
Later I unpacked my computer and we listen to music until the batteries died out. In what we experienced as the “peak” of the storm, we ran out into the wind, leaning into it slightly and laughing. A moment of cosmic irony, it was. Smiling casually at one another or looking out across the empty field of the yet-to-be-completed subdivision, there was this sense of freedom and closeness that I had yet to experience with Joey. We had done the very same thing as kids during hurricane Andrew, cooking shish kabob over a couple cans of Sterno. Back in the house all the windows were open. The air was clean, cool and smelled of oceans. From the dining room beside the kitchen, out across undeveloped mud-field, we could make out reasonably sized trees snapping at the middle. The exposed splinters glowed bright orange in the overcast. We went back to the table. When it darkened we lit candles and took experimental photographs of them and the way the light flickered on either side of the face. We drank more Budweiser and some chocolate liquor.
I had spent the previous month with my brother in a similar fashion, trying do enjoy my time. If not I was packing all my belongings into the closet in the middle “music room,” where my drums were staying. We had become closer than we ever were before. I realized that my brother, though he has not set foot on a college campus except to see a football game, is ten times cooler and more interesting of a person than most the people I’ve met at the university. I thought of our trip to Grand Isle recently, of the good time we had and how Grand Isle was sitting out there now on the edge of the gulf of the world staring down the barrel of this massive storm. Later on that night our electricity returned and we played Halo on the X-Box amidst a smattering of small talk. The good life, no?
The next day of course, nothing was working and I was forced into that car. The night before I visit Alex and Lou in the country club. The ride was dark and haunted by my compulsion to listen to the radio, to know what was happening. When I arrived, Alex’s family sat in the living room watching the news from a high definition widescreen. I stayed in the kitchen, gave them both big hugs and we looked at each other, like, “where the fuck did that come from?” We stood around for a bit, not really talking but glad to be near each other. Eventually Alex suggested that we go for a ride. Then suddenly he opened the garage up to a golf cart. I was stoked. If I had ridden one before I could not remember it. We drove around the neighborhood, past large chandelier-like houses and piles of tree-limbs and debris stacked on the sidewalks. The times were weird. A sudden lucidity had made even the smallest of sounds loud. He let me drive the cart once, and then the batteries started weakening I gave it. He passed me his pipe and I felt lost in the world, clinging to my friends one last time. I drove home then, sleepy-eyed, the radio blaring the same news. Somehow, the terror was easier to imagine at night, alone in my car. New Orleans a pitch black swamp-city, burglars, rapists, children all packed into the Super Dome, 80% underwater. I eventually changed the station and breathed deep. Long ride home, from Baton Rouge to Livingston.
When I arrived, I heard immediately the chugging off an industrial generator Dad had brought home from work. An orange extension cord stretched from the drive way, through the guest-bathroom, to the kitchen, keeping the fridge on and powering a small T.V. in the living room. It was a quiet Wednesday night; the screen flashing on their somber faces. Everyone sat around, in the singular glow, expressionless, watching images of everything: looters, pregnant women, military men in camouflage, mugging and holding automatic rifles. It was a pity to find my seven-year-old brother Jace was not so playful as usual. After a while of television, he feel asleep on the couch next to me. I want to wake him up, take him in my arms and flip him around, but could not bring myself to disturbing him. Dad spoke with a quiet, almost undetectably solemn voice, “You want something to eat?” No, I said. That’s alright. I should have took him up on the offer. That last meal couldn’t have been anything. Crawfish bisque, file gumbo, chicken and broccoli casserole. I wouldn’t be getting much of that cooking for some time. My last night in Louisiana, in America for a year. Everything I would take with me crammed into a single suit case that I had leaned against the hallway on my way in.
Dad dropped me off at the airport at 6 am or so, without much to say, except, “Be careful, it’s another country.” The implications of which could only be transmitted through the quivering sound of his voice. In the airport, I listen to two women, three feet away, who had visited New Orleans as tourists, who stayed in the Marriot Hotel and who slept on the ballroom floor, while tiles fell from the roof above them. They were there and heard when gunshots rang out from the Footlocker below. Looters were breaking windows, she said, and they had set it on fire when they couldn’t find a way in. With one of the women was a little girl with black hair and Asian eyes. For a moment she stared blankly off, listening to the other woman talk, then she attempted to enter the conversation, as politely as possible.
“Excuse me, miss?” The woman didn’t notice. “Excuse me, miss,” she said, in the same patient, innocent voice. The child was truly charming. I smiled to her, letting her know that someone was listening. Then, after some five or six ‘excuse me’s, the other woman paused, and asked in a sweet, Mom-voice, “Yes, honey, what is it?”
“How high was the water?” she held her hand at her stomach, then her neck. “Did you see any alligators?”
The women however just continued and she got no answer. They went on to talk about how the New Orleans airport did not want to lose money by sending out planes that wouldn’t be able to take people back into New Orleans. The also mentioned the rescue responses.
On a TV directly across from me footage was being shown of people wading through the Ponchatrain water with shopping carts full of random merchandise: tennis shoes, radios, jewelry, cigarettes, grocery carts full of bottled water.
Some were saying that Baton Rouge would take on a large portion of the New Orleans population. Two Phoenix cities would rise from the chaos. My imagination was at the will of my nerves. A gave into thousands of different possibilities-the future was seeming more and more plastic with every day. What will I see when I get back? What will happen to this country, this country that before now I had only spoken passively about?
It all slid across the surface of the strange bubble I was in. What tried to penetrate was the reality of the situation. What tried to penetrate was the realization that we’re actually very small creatures in a ridiculously large and powerful universe. We all seemed suddenly naked and so tiny, up against that power-all our cities, all our roads everything, just tiny sand castles at the edge of an endlessly powerful sea.
THE STORM BEFORE DEPARTURE
Before I left, I was worried that I wouldn’t remember much from the week of Katrina. I worried that leaving the country might sever some crucial nerve connecting my emotive self to that of the Louisianans. I had not written for some while and was working against the summer slums. Everything was scattered. I had just moved out of my house on West Grant Street-my futon still sitting in my brother Joey’s garage, covered in boxes. In the midst of moving, I was busy reserving train tickets, hostels, looking at maps, hunting down documents for financial aid, saying goodbyes. I had found myself in bubble; a bubble that kept me from the bombardments of that instant in which life occurs: the big Now. Where was I? The year 2005, a September’s eve, ready for everything and nothing, and along came Katrina, angel of sorrow, born of the Bahamas. A tropical depressions, trade winds, the “biggest natural disaster in U.S. history.” I wanted to write everything down: each face, each overheard story, each second. But then my condition did not offer much to the occasion.
What I do remember were the streets, overflowing with cars at every gas station, filling lawnmower cans of every shape and size. Malfunctioning stoplights had reduced most of the intersections into four-way stops. Every once and a while helicopters would chop by. Chaotic and lawless are not sufficient to describe what I saw. I remember on August 30, waiting in a line of cars to board the entrance ramp to I12, and watching the people . A few individuals were holding up posters, pledging free food and accommodation to evacuees at nearby church. On the streets, others were getting impatient and cutting around me via the medians. In those brief moments of lucidity, human nature tried to reveal itself. This is what people do when they panic; then you see the true order of their priorities. The storm seemed to have brought the worst and best in us.
I couldn’t call any one, internet was down. And so I drove my car around trying to say my last goodbyes, dropping off envelopes I had prepared with my contact information in them. Kristen was back at camp ASCAA, in northern Alabama-as though she had not come back- Lynda was with her husband Alex and his parents. Passing through the LSU area, I was opportune to knock on a few doors, but without much success. Judah, no. Travis, no. In the end I found a small group of friends on Carlotta Street. A handful of estranged faces situated around the T.V. smoking cigarettes and staring. And to think, the last I would see of them for a while was a few pale figures, speechless. But what otherwise? There was nothing else to with such a gratuitous monstrosity. Radios boomed from every car doors at gas stations and household, all full of trembling voices, commercial voices, some obnoxious, some terrifying. Nightmarish apocalyptic dirges. It was a historical moment we had all been warned about and did not believe likely. Suddenly New Orleans was flooding. Our mini-Europe was drowning alive.
“Reporting from the crescent city: the levee has broken, now, a two points, I repeat, two of the -Industrial Canal at Tennessee Street, 17th Street Canal.” The bowl of New Orleans was gaining water rapidly. It sounded like some pit-and-the-pendulum gig, the last moments of life spent staring death in its face. Many cities along the coast had been wiped away on that grim Monday. The facts would wash up later, after a number of politically shady activities, and one large report later. I was having trouble responding emotionally to the things that were happening. My heart was spread thin. Real thin.
I was leaving for Germany in two days. And so feelings had been migrating for almost a year into what was, at the time, still a European dreamscape. How it all began cannot be clarified in any logical sense, simply because I didn’t understand myself. In my going away essay, I mustered every excuse I could to get the extra grant money: It was pinnacle and conclusion of my childhood romanticism, come to a bud, blossoming again in the possibilities a new land, a new life. It was an attempt to reverse the many years of small-town miseducation, an attempt to reconcile a sense of guilt brought about by the colonization of the Native American lands. I wanted to get abover the watermark and be able look in on the New World from the outside.
Why Germany, then? Indeed every body I’ve met has looked at me rather strangely when I begin to tell them the whole story. I try to omit the part about the girl but it never works. The key to the unquenchable wanderlust is buried somewhere, in a time long since past, in a small town far away from the sea. In a town called Livingston, where I grew up and where I, in graduation year of 2003, met a certain Swiss girl. Our story was incomplete and embarrassing. But did not some wise man once say the best stories are left unfinished? Whatever. There was something in the language, something in the photographs she carried with her. An fierce curiosity was born.
Many years later, the summer of 2005, my heart was all aflutter, already airborne and hovering over Baton Rouge. I had began studying German, for real. Dreams were scattered, from the Alps sweeping down into various tributaries of the Rhine, some tucked into the thickets of Black Forest, amber dreams of wheat beer in timber-framed “kneipen.” I was tired of thumbing books in the travel section of the local bookstores.
Zoom forward to the week before departure, and here my home city had suddenly become a circus of cops and nerve-racked refugees. As I drove around the city alone in my soon-to-be-sold car that gloomy Tuesday, I could hardly recognize my own condition. I had my last few errands, my last few goodbyes. Was I sad? Excited? Nervous? I don’t know. It felt empty. A poem I wrote once, however, suggests that this empty feeling-empty chest-feeling, empty mind-could perhaps be everything, all thrashing in the heart. Summers cataract was only beginning to dissolve, yet the lights and sounds could make an impression. They were beginning to seep through, in torrents of red and blue, sirens that sing of death, ultra-tragic news non-stop, twenty-four hours, voices repeating the words, which at some point started to seem trite, meaningless and trendy, “Devastation…” “devastation…” “devast..” The experience was numbing, the details of my remembering were somehow washed away, due to my position in time.
Who would have known a storm the size of Great Britain would rip straight across the Gulf Coast, taking 1,418 lives, 75 billion dollars worth of residential and business and government property? It was a natural mess, a cultural mess. It turned out later to be a political mess as well. Many people say we are crazy for living where we do. Indeed, no one wants to insure us. Perhaps it is something about the gulf air, the sweet southern flowers, the idea of being at the frontier of an ever-changing universe that makes one feel more alive in Louisiana.. A ripple-no-a tidal wave of misfortune was projected to run across the country, an economic nightmare, the next depression even, they cried on the radio. Baton Rouge was to double in size. Around 2000 people were never to return, scattered like lost dreams, never to be collected.
We heard about the storm somewhat suddenly, and as usual didn’t want to take it seriously until it was all over the news how “big” this would be. A number of storms had already threatened us before. All the bored college students were at the edge of their seats, waiting for cancel class, wanting to throw hurricane parties. I was invited to one, but like many others, just did not show up.
I was with by brother, Joey, at his new house in Denham Springs when she went by. We weren’t taking much seriously then. While the wet tropical winds waft through the house, we drank white Russians and beer, began cooking gumbo with a propane burner. Joey’s house was brand new, with clean leather furniture, a kitchen full of groceries and all the envied culinary gadgets, Teflon pans, and utensils. That he had worked his ass off for all of this made me very proud of him. After many years of annoying each other to know end.
In the clutter of cooking we had taken many things out of the fridge. I saw a small Winn-Dixie pack of bratwurst in the meat compartment, and pronounced “Braaaatvoohrst” with my then moderate German accent. Joey suggesting that I cook them and so I did, with eggs. He began to cut up vegetables: onions, bell peppers, carrots, garlic, celery. We piled the countertops with all ingredients. I stirred the roux outside, the garage door open to the wind and water, all my books, candles, appliances packed into boxes and stacked on the futon I had been sleeping on my first year at LSU. The mood was free, playful, but there were small hints of vulnerability everywhere. My brother and I joked and cursed, talked music and goals, work and about people both talented and incredible. At one point Joey attempted to translate German without ever having studied. He used the cognates and made up his own verbs and relationships, to create embarrassing, sometimes vulgar scenarios.
Later I unpacked my computer and we listen to music until the batteries died out. In what we experienced as the “peak” of the storm, we ran out into the wind, leaning into it slightly and laughing. A moment of cosmic irony, it was. Smiling casually at one another or looking out across the empty field of the yet-to-be-completed subdivision, there was this sense of freedom and closeness that I had yet to experience with Joey. We had done the very same thing as kids during hurricane Andrew, cooking shish kabob over a couple cans of Sterno. Back in the house all the windows were open. The air was clean, cool and smelled of oceans. From the dining room beside the kitchen, out across undeveloped mud-field, we could make out reasonably sized trees snapping at the middle. The exposed splinters glowed bright orange in the overcast. We went back to the table. When it darkened we lit candles and took experimental photographs of them and the way the light flickered on either side of the face. We drank more Budweiser and some chocolate liquor.
I had spent the previous month with my brother in a similar fashion, trying do enjoy my time. If not I was packing all my belongings into the closet in the middle “music room,” where my drums were staying. We had become closer than we ever were before. I realized that my brother, though he has not set foot on a college campus except to see a football game, is ten times cooler and more interesting of a person than most the people I’ve met at the university. I thought of our trip to Grand Isle recently, of the good time we had and how Grand Isle was sitting out there now on the edge of the gulf of the world staring down the barrel of this massive storm. Later on that night our electricity returned and we played Halo on the X-Box amidst a smattering of small talk. The good life, no?
The next day of course, nothing was working and I was forced into that car. The night before I visit Alex and Lou in the country club. The ride was dark and haunted by my compulsion to listen to the radio, to know what was happening. When I arrived, Alex’s family sat in the living room watching the news from a high definition widescreen. I stayed in the kitchen, gave them both big hugs and we looked at each other, like, “where the fuck did that come from?” We stood around for a bit, not really talking but glad to be near each other. Eventually Alex suggested that we go for a ride. Then suddenly he opened the garage up to a golf cart. I was stoked. If I had ridden one before I could not remember it. We drove around the neighborhood, past large chandelier-like houses and piles of tree-limbs and debris stacked on the sidewalks. The times were weird. A sudden lucidity had made even the smallest of sounds loud. He let me drive the cart once, and then the batteries started weakening I gave it. He passed me his pipe and I felt lost in the world, clinging to my friends one last time. I drove home then, sleepy-eyed, the radio blaring the same news. Somehow, the terror was easier to imagine at night, alone in my car. New Orleans a pitch black swamp-city, burglars, rapists, children all packed into the Super Dome, 80% underwater. I eventually changed the station and breathed deep. Long ride home, from Baton Rouge to Livingston.
When I arrived, I heard immediately the chugging off an industrial generator Dad had brought home from work. An orange extension cord stretched from the drive way, through the guest-bathroom, to the kitchen, keeping the fridge on and powering a small T.V. in the living room. It was a quiet Wednesday night; the screen flashing on their somber faces. Everyone sat around, in the singular glow, expressionless, watching images of everything: looters, pregnant women, military men in camouflage, mugging and holding automatic rifles. It was a pity to find my seven-year-old brother Jace was not so playful as usual. After a while of television, he feel asleep on the couch next to me. I want to wake him up, take him in my arms and flip him around, but could not bring myself to disturbing him. Dad spoke with a quiet, almost undetectably solemn voice, “You want something to eat?” No, I said. That’s alright. I should have took him up on the offer. That last meal couldn’t have been anything. Crawfish bisque, file gumbo, chicken and broccoli casserole. I wouldn’t be getting much of that cooking for some time. My last night in Louisiana, in America for a year. Everything I would take with me crammed into a single suit case that I had leaned against the hallway on my way in.
Dad dropped me off at the airport at 6 am or so, without much to say, except, “Be careful, it’s another country.” The implications of which could only be transmitted through the quivering sound of his voice. In the airport, I listen to two women, three feet away, who had visited New Orleans as tourists, who stayed in the Marriot Hotel and who slept on the ballroom floor, while tiles fell from the roof above them. They were there and heard when gunshots rang out from the Footlocker below. Looters were breaking windows, she said, and they had set it on fire when they couldn’t find a way in. With one of the women was a little girl with black hair and Asian eyes. For a moment she stared blankly off, listening to the other woman talk, then she attempted to enter the conversation, as politely as possible.
“Excuse me, miss?” The woman didn’t notice. “Excuse me, miss,” she said, in the same patient, innocent voice. The child was truly charming. I smiled to her, letting her know that someone was listening. Then, after some five or six ‘excuse me’s, the other woman paused, and asked in a sweet, Mom-voice, “Yes, honey, what is it?”
“How high was the water?” she held her hand at her stomach, then her neck. “Did you see any alligators?”
The women however just continued and she got no answer. They went on to talk about how the New Orleans airport did not want to lose money by sending out planes that wouldn’t be able to take people back into New Orleans. The also mentioned the rescue responses.
On a TV directly across from me footage was being shown of people wading through the Ponchatrain water with shopping carts full of random merchandise: tennis shoes, radios, jewelry, cigarettes, grocery carts full of bottled water.
Some were saying that Baton Rouge would take on a large portion of the New Orleans population. Two Phoenix cities would rise from the chaos. My imagination was at the will of my nerves. A gave into thousands of different possibilities-the future was seeming more and more plastic with every day. What will I see when I get back? What will happen to this country, this country that before now I had only spoken passively about?
It all slid across the surface of the strange bubble I was in. What tried to penetrate was the reality of the situation. What tried to penetrate was the realization that we’re actually very small creatures in a ridiculously large and powerful universe. We all seemed suddenly naked and so tiny, up against that power-all our cities, all our roads everything, just tiny sand castles at the edge of an endlessly powerful sea.