Katrina, three years on

I am writing these words on the evening of August 28th, 2008. At this moment three years ago, I was on my way to a friend's house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in advance of a Category 5 hurricane that was nine hours from landfall. Although I did not know it then, I was making the drive from the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the final time, aside from a few salvage trips made in October and November.

As it turned out, the eye of Katrina passed just to the west of the town in which I lived, bringing with it tornadoes and a thirty-five foot deep storm surge. The eastern eyewall -- the most destructive part of a hurricane's rotational system -- thus passed directly over my house. From what people who stayed there during the hurricane told me, it took twelve hours for the entire eyewall to move through. The black water storm surge, akin to a tsunami, remained onshore for five hours before receding.

I had waited until the last possible moment to leave my home in Bay St. Louis and was apprehensive about having to sit in traffic late at night with the storm approaching. The Interstate highways had been gridlocked earlier that day with people fleeing New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. But because I'd waited so long, everyone else had come and gone, and I-10 was virtually abandoned.

In some ways, that was the most peaceful trip I ever made along that route. Although the Weather Channel radar had shown bands of wind and rain beginning to reach the Interstate, I didn't run into any during my drive. It was calm, eerily quiet... a pregnant, "waiting" kind of calm, as when you take in a breath and hold it before exhaling. As I reached the I-10/I-59 interchange just north of Slidell, Louisiana, I recall thinking, "the storm will be coming ashore somewhere around here."

Before I left my house, I made a couple of phone calls to people I knew were staying, to let them know I was leaving. One was to my landlord and his wife, who were in their seventies and had built their retirement home in Bay St. Louis. The other call was to a friend around my age who lived in a house inherited from her mother, located one-half block from the beach in Waveland. I did not find out for several weeks what had happened to them.

I started this blog in late September, 2005, for the purpose of recording my post-hurricane experiences as they were happening. You can read what I wrote during that time period by clicking on "Katrina Diary" in the Categories list in the blog sidebar. I also have several albums of Katrina photos published here, which can be accessed from links in the sidebar.

When I talk about Katrina with people nowadays (which isn't very often), I usually say that the hurricane did me a big favor. I was ready for some major changes in my life. I had thought the changes would come about in a little more orderly manner; for example, I was considering a move to Portland, Oregon, but had assumed that I would visit there first to make sure I liked it. Apparently, I needed to be there NOW. If that meant moving cross-country to a new area sight-unseen and bereft of all my possessions, so be it.

Katrina didn't give me just a gentle nudge in the right direction. But I suspect a gentle nudge might not have done it. Although I knew my old way of life was dying, and in fact I wanted it to, there still would have been too many reasons to delay -- taking care of my aging parents, for example. But after the hurricane, with both New Orleans (my hometown) and Bay St. Louis essentially destroyed, there was no possibility of going back. There was nothing to go back to, at least not in the form it had taken before. Although that thought may be horrifying, it was also liberating.

And now I hear Janis Joplin singing, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."  How simply and exquisitely true.

When I arrived in Portland on December 11, 2005, five days before my 52nd birthday, I had been operating in full-throttle adrenaline mode for three and a half months. I was still in shock, and knew I needed to go to ground fairly quickly.

At that time, I knew only one person in Portland. With my three cats, I slept on a mattress in her living room for four weeks until I found a place to rent. During that month, I put a couple thousand miles on my car, driving around for hours, getting lost and finding my way back; becoming familiar with -- no, claiming -- my new territory. I ended up renting a small cottage on a creek in the country north of Vancouver in Washington State, across the Columbia River from Portland.

What I thought I was going to do at that point was rest, get my bearings, and then move forward in my new life. During the two years prior to the hurricane, I had done so much clearing out and preparing -- physically, emotionally, and psychically -- that I thought I was ready to do that. So I began reaching out to meet people here and getting involved in community activities. I quickly found out that it was too soon. Due to the effects of PTSD, I was not able to make any commitments of time and energy, and when I tried to do so, it created problems. I had to scale back and prioritize and give myself time to find out what the next steps were, rather than "pushing the river".

I've done a lot in the past 2 1/2 years. I now live and work in the Columbia River Gorge, an incredibly beautiful area in the Cascade Mountains that three years ago I did not know existed. I've been through two full cycles of the seasons here, and have begun learning what to do and what not to do when living in a mountainous rural area. I'm adjusting to living in a comparatively progressive, less religiously judgmental and more supportive environment, much different from the one in which I grew up and spent most of my life.

Yet it has been a long, slow process of recovery ... two steps forward, one step back, interspersed with the occasional giant leap and a lot of downtime. From talking with my friends from the Gulf Coast who relocated elsewhere, this is universal among us Katrina survivors. Some days I would walk along the Columbia River, soaking in the natural beauty of the water and cliffs and sky, and at the same time, paradoxically, it all felt so unreal. I was simultaneously intensely present and not present at all.

For most of the last 2 1/2 years, I have felt ungrounded, unsafe being in my body. Although I live surrounded by nature, I felt so unsupported by the earth that I even felt unsafe walking. As a result, I moved tentatively and unnaturally, as if the ground were shaking.

It's only been in the last six months that I've begun feeling like a normal human being again. I feel like a butterfly emerging from the cocoon, stretching and loosening up the tightened joints and muscles. I am beginning to feel confident putting demands on my body again, and I am more at ease with people. I am coming home, to myself and to my new world.

 

Comments

[marlaine]

hi ;)
long time no read...
i moved away from blogging and was telling a friend the other day that i'd like to begin again...and then you wrote me
how....serendipitous :)
life is going ok...
you sound like you are blossoming and flourishing
how wonderful!
continue
xo
m

[Kitty]

Marlaine, it is wonderful to hear from you. :) If you start blogging again, make sure to let me know.

[Sharon]

An amazing start to a life-changing journey.