Returning Home, Part II

After leaving my destroyed childhood home one month after Hurricane Katrina leveled a parish of 70,000 residents, I ventured to a nearby townhouse I had rented to see what nature had done to it.


The interior of my grandfather's house had been inundated with five feet of water and since the house was built three feet above ground, the neighborhood where I grew up had been under a minimum of eight feet of water during Katrina's worst. I figured the apartment on the eastern side of Paris Road, where the ground is lower, and its contents would be in even worse shape.


St. Bernard Parish is a peninsula bounded in its western, suburban portion by the Mississippi River to the south, where the land is high, and to the north by the Forty Arpent Canal, Bayou Bienvenue, salt marsh, and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. It is because of the MRGO that there is currently salt marsh on the parish's northern periphery instead of acres upon acres of lush cypress swamp.


The closer one lived to the Mississippi River, the better his or her home fared. The closer someone resided to the 40 Arpent Canal, the better the chance that they returned to an empty slab. In addition to having a lower land elevation, the apartment was also further to the north than my grandfather's house.


I had to take a roundabout way there since five or six homes had floated two hundred yards over a canal and into a row of apartment complexes. What might appear surreal to most first timers is now simply a short-cut nuisance after a dozen recovery trips.


My first attempt at entry was "discouraged" by the combination of a lurking military helicopter and a corroded door lock. Since my first visit, rescue personnel had dropped by and removed my original impediment, smashing the doorknob in with a maul. I noticed where the "body teams" had painted an orange "x" with a zero below it, indicating that no bodies were found on the site. I also noticed the first unit, whose occupants were carting in ice chests of booze as I was frantically packing my bags to hit the road, had its second-story front window busted out, leading me to assume that the storm partiers had to be rescued (an assumption later confirmed).


Along side the yellow brick walls was a one foot thick remainder of the oil spill from the Murphy Oil Refinery that had compounded the forsaken parish of St. Bernard's woes.


While my grandfather's house had a few inches of mud in it, my rubber boots sank into at least six inches of still wet mud at the townhouse. (Note: my first attempt was without boots and I have a lovely chemical burn tattooed on my left ankle.) As hard as I tried, I could not visualize in my mind prior to seeing it for myself what Katrina had done. Nothing was where it had been: the television was in the mud, bookshelves were smashed into pieces, and photographs that were once on the wall submerged into the dark goop.


While the sight took my breath away, I had an important mission: get the gun!


One of my prized possessions is a .357 stainless steel revolver I bought while at LSU. Fearing looters might get their hands on my piece and commit dastardly deeds with it; my primary concern was securing the handgun from where I hid it. While walking up the stairs, I wondered to myself about the maximum height of the water inside.


Upon reaching the second floor I saw a blue blazer on the top step. Wait a minute; I didn't leave that natty, old sports coat there! In fact, I left it on the bottom floor, so ended the mystery of the water level.


In contrast to the first floor Armageddon, the second floor looked just as I had left it. When I went to retrieve my pistol, I noticed that it and the towel I used to cover the unloaded weapon were wet. Oh hell.


Closer inspection to the walls showed that the water line had been a little less than a foot on the second floor, so while everything appeared fine, anything that was on the ground was ruined. Which brings up what stands as one of the stupidest things I have ever done...quite a distinction when considering the large competition for the title.


Hours before fleeing, I had a feeling that Katrina was not going to be like the other storms that had battered St. Bernard during my lifetime. This one was going to be bad.


So I went about moving books on the first floor that were on the bottom shelves three feet higher to the top shelves. I fully anticipated five feet of water, an unprecedented deluge for that part of Chalmette. That there was grass all over the first floor ceiling, at least where it had not collapsed, proved that my "doomsday" prediction was off a few cataclysms. What hurt was that I thought the threat to the second floor was not from below but from the rattling windows, so I took my collection of rare Louisiana books and placed them in a cardboard box on the floor of the second story far, far away from the windows.


Wyle E. Coyote himself would have been proud of such an Acme tactic.


Needless to say, the books were water and mold damaged, including some that I had taken off shelves where they would have been fine. As for the windows, which constantly shake during a mild shower, those plates of inferior glass held up like Gibraltar.


Nearly six dozen political posters from presidential campaigns from the sixties onward that I had planned to donate to various archives had become one giant moist ball of colored paper, though a few of the sturdier cardboard ones were significantly damaged though not to a point where I could bring myself to toss them.


Returning downstairs, I took it all in. Though items that had weighed dozens of pounds had been tossed around, I saw that my seersucker suit coat had remained in place on the stairwell where I had lazily hung it, which would end up being a loss due to a stubborn rust stain on a lapel. The kitchen was hardest part of the apartment to access. The mud was deeper there, forcing me to strategically place down yard signs from my failed state representative run as "lily pads" for me to hop around on so the toxic sludge would not spill into my boots.


My trip to the kitchen was brief having seen enough when I gazed at a chair hanging from the chandelier. I guess the half-used box of baking soda can remain in the fridge.


The first trip was a quasi-success. While my worst fears about the flooding were confirmed and then some, I was able to save and salvage more than the bottom floor had indicated upon first glance.


In fact, I would say that I was lucky. Sure I lost a lot, the most painful casualties naturally being those possessions I endangered by trying to protect them, still I was able to salvage much. Some was as easy as taking a certain picture or poster off a wall on the second floor and dusting off some light mold accumulation. Other items of sentimental value required the use of a shovel to dig out, namely my first baseball glove and a photograph of a departed friend that somewhat survived after being under a watery muck for eight weeks. What was so amazing about that particular save was that the black and white picture taken at Pat O's was nearly unidentifiable except for her face. Also, similar pictures in that same space had been ruined beyond identification.


For another eight weeks, I dropped by the apartment to see what new treasure I would unearth...kind of like playing Indiana Jones in my living room, minus harassment from Nazis, rats, and snakes.


The first thing I pulled out from the muck was a three by five feet American flag attached to a pole I had intended to fasten near my door, but didn't because I did not have a ceramic drill bit. Though tattered and muddy, Hurricane Katrina had given the national banner an opportunity and a place to display it as I plunged the bottom of its pole into the soft ground in the courtyard where it has remained.


Hurricane Katrina meant something different to all who were directly affected by her. For the most unfortunate, the notorious hurricane marked the last chapter of their life as the storm claimed an estimated two hundred residents in St. Bernard alone.


Being an individual that the likes of Karl Marx, Ted Turner, and ex-Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura would consider weak-minded by virtue of my being religious, I cannot help but find an association between the disaster and my faith.


Just as I was about to leave my grandfather's house, I had noticed that the dinning room table, which had not been used for dinning in two decades, had floated yet remained on its legs in contrast to almost every other piece of furniture in the house. Most prominent on the table was a picture of Jesus and the Bible, which had been opened by someone or something to a most appropriate chapter, the Book of Job- the tale of a holy man whose faith was tested to the limits as he lost everything that he held dear, yet his enduring faith was rewarded by having everything restored many times over.


Make no mistake, I don't consider myself to have worn Job's sandals in the aftermath of Katrina and am thankful that the Almighty chose not to see exactly how good of a Christian I really am. If this was a pop quiz, I just hope I passed.


Like I said before, I was one of the lucky ones; everything I lost was material. In some cases difficult or expensive to replace, but unlike a grandmother or an uncle, what I lost was replaceable.


It's only stuff.