Current mood:

sad

Waiting for Katrina from thousands of miles away
The reports about the monster that is Katrina, now bearing down on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, are playing in the background and my heart is breaking.

Some of my faithful readers might wonder at this over the top reaction. I mean, sure it's a huge story and a major human drama, but why am I taking this so personally?

I lived in Biloxi, once upon a time. I rode out Hurrican Elena in a shelter there on Keesler Air Force Base. I watched my children play on the beach, where casinos now stand boarded against the monster. I helped run a science fiction convention held at the Royal D'Iberville, facing the Gulf across the Coast Highway. I saw concerts at the Coliseum where the Weather Channel's crew is now holed up to ride out the storm.

After my divorce I lived in Biloxi and spent time with friends in New Orleans and Algiers Point. I drove regularly over the bridge at Slidell into New Orleans, a long spear of road up and over the water until you are out of sight of land on all sides. I fell in love in New Orleans, more than once. I walked in the moonlight on the Moon Walk and listened to the street musicians and watched the Big Muddy make her slow way to the sea.

grillghod and I fell in love and courted in New Orleans, specifically in the French Quarter. We wandered those cobbled streets, holding hands, exchanging urgent kisses in Pirate's Alley, closing the Irish pub and ending our nights sitting dazed with love and music at the Cafe Du Monde.

New Orleans is one of the places we consider ours. Part of the story of our nearly two decades together was written there, in that steamy, messy, poor but beautiful city. I love it almost as fiercely as I love him.

Something like one in six people in New Orleans do not own a car, depending on the busses and the charming trolley cars to go about their lives. There is no public transportation that can carry them out of the danger zone. Instead they crowd into the Super Dome, having been warned that most if not all of the wood framed buildings will fall, that the storm surge will almost certainly swamp the Ponchatrain and flood the bowl the city sits in. Mobile Bay may see a storm surge of twenty feet.

I think of those streets along the Gulf Coast, lined with live oaks and cypress draped in Spanish moss. I remember lazy afternoons of watching my small children paddling in the still, warm water of the Gulf, nights of kisses and music. I hear a tide of voices; the drawl of Mississippi, the unmistakeable Cajun lilt, the indescribable New Orleans accent.

I'm thousands of miles away, and my heart is breaking.