And the big one, “What did you lose?”
Some staff spoke up: Classes canceled. Two family homes, gone. Parents and siblings still displaced in other states. Jobs lost. Too many destroyed apartments to count.
“This has been a turning point in our lives,” our sports editor told them. ”For some people, it’s when their dad dies, or when they get married. But for us, there will always be a before and after Katrina.”
This August 29, I have lived 20 years after the Category 5 hurricane. But if I blink, it could’ve happened yesterday.
I was a junior at Loyola University New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck the city I fell in love with as a freshman in 2003. The food, music, culture, architecture, traditions, people, character … I was somewhere I belonged. It was home.
And then I had to leave.
I had evacuated from Hurricane Ivan in 2004. A contraflow drive to Texas, a few days with my sister and back again. No big deal. And that’s what I thought this time, too. But that Friday night at about midnight, my mom called. She begged me to just go get gas in my car and pack a bag, just to ease her mind. And thank God she did.
The next morning, I woke up and looked at the gas station across the street. I couldn’t see the last car at the end of the line. Within an hour, they’d be out of gas completely. And within another hour, I would be headed west.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
18 hours later, I’d made it out. More than 1,400 people did not. Then the levees broke and everything changed. Nothing can prepare you for watching the place you love die in front of you on live television.
Eight weeks later, I returned with my dad to see what was left of my one-bedroom apartment along the historic St. Charles Avenue streetcar line. I’ve only seen my dad, a Louisianan born and raised, cry three times in my life. As we crossed Lake Pontchartrain and hit the parish line, tears streamed down both our cheeks.
Devastation surrounded us. Blue tarps signaled where roofs used to be. Mountains of debris covered street corners. High water marks etched the magnitude of destruction, sometimes 10 feet up a home’s exterior. And the smell. The smell could suffocate you.
My apartment building was spared from flooding, but a tree had crashed through the roof. Water seeped down the walls, feeding growths of thick black mold. My front door had been kicked in by my downstairs neighbor, a chef who stayed behind, looking for water. For 10 days he guarded the building from looters, sitting on the top of the staircase with a pistol.
My dad made the horrible mistake of opening my refrigerator to see if it was salvageable. It was not. I, unfortunately, had gone grocery shopping the night before I evacuated. Did you know that when a bag of spinach is left unrefrigerated for months it liquifies into black sludge?
We duct-taped it shut and dragged it to the curb, to sit beside every other refrigerator in the city. People started writing on them with Sharpies, things like “Thanks a lot, Katrina,” “Free beer and maggots” and several choice words for Saints owner Tom Benson, who was threatening to move the team to Texas. I was glad to see the city still had its sass.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
The next few months were some of the hardest of my life. Humvees full of National Guard soldiers patrolled the streets at night, rifles drawn, after the city’s evening curfew. Restaurants were shuttered. Schools and homes were abandoned. Only 20% of the housing in the entire city remained habitable. It was a war zone.
The city’s resources seemingly vanished — police, EMT, public transportation, city officials — so oftentimes, you were on your own if you got carjacked, robbed or assaulted.
The utter devastation hit me as I took a drive one afternoon. I saw, on the corner of Jackson and Magazine streets, a makeshift grave where the body of New Orleanian Vera Smith rested. Her body decayed for four days on the sidewalk after the storm’s landfall before neighbors covered her with dirt and a white sheet with a handwritten epitaph: “Here lies Vera. God help us.”
In those few months, I saw the ugliest side of what life can hand you. There’s what people saw on the news, then there’s what we lived — and they’re completely different, yet exactly the same.
The city’s population was cut in half, but more than 90% of undergraduates returned to Loyola in January 2006, I among them.
Today, when people ask me, I often say Katrina was the worst and best thing that ever happened to me. Without it, I never would have met my husband of 12 years, Stefan, a contractor for the Federal Emergency Management System.
After a year of dating, he told me he’d gotten a job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in his hometown of Dayton and asked me to come with him. The thought of leaving my beloved New Orleans ripped me apart. But I agreed and four years after Katrina, I arrived in Dayton a new person with new ink — a small fleur de lis tattoo on my foot, a symbol of New Orleans’ rebirth.
Dayton is no New Orleans, but it does have a sense of charm all its own. What I’ve found here is more than a great job (at the University of Dayton) or a place to live — it’s a community, a purpose and a new sense of home. New Orleans will always be a part of who I am, but Dayton has shown me that home is more than a sense of place — it can be where your story continues and where your heart finds calm.
Katrina, tragic as it was, somehow brought me the life I have now. It remains the line that divides my life into before and after. I sometimes think about that big question from the newspaper office that day. Instead, I ask myself what did I gain? The unexpected strength to find myself. The storm rewrote my story, forcing me to rebuild not just a life but an identity. But I am so happy the life I was able to rebuild led me to the city of Dayton. New Orleans will always be stitched into the fabric of who I am. But for now, I’m home.
Nicole L. Craw graduated in 2007 with a journalism degree from Loyola University New Orleans. The staff of her college newspaper, The Maroon, earned a Pacemaker award in 2006 for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. She is the former editor of the Dayton City Paper and is currently managing editor of the University of Dayton Magazine. She lives in Beavercreek with her husband and two children.
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