On the last Tuesday in October, I flew home to New Orleans for the second time since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita lashed and inundated the city. On the approach, the plane sailed above Lake Pontchartrain, whose calm waters appeared impossibly untouched by the storms, and it cut across the Mississippi River’s bends, around which barges pushed and containers waited in tidy rows to be emptied or filled, just like they always had. The pilot took a wide right turn and noted over the intercom, “Ladies and gentlemen: there’s downtown New Orleans to your left.” It didn’t occur to me until later that he would have said the same thing to a cabin of tourists; at the time it made sense for him to point out a hopeful, unflooded area to those of us whose stomachs wrenched at the thought of returning to our devastated city. But as my seat was on the right side of the plane, I saw what he didn’t mention: thousands of downed cypress trees turning fragile swampland into a game of pick-up sticks; aqua-blue FEMA tarps reflecting like swimming pools in the sun from nearly every rooftop of suburban Kenner; dump upon dump of maggot-clogged refrigerators, some hurled willy-nilly into heaps, others in formation. This didn’t look like our city. We were a cabin of tourists after all.

My husband, Mathieu de Schutter (SF94), and I took our first post-Katrina trip home exactly a month earlier, before we technically were allowed back into the city. Matt is a resident at Children’s Hospital, and a flash of his ID was convincing enough for the two peach-fuzzed National Guardsmen securing Earhart Boulevard. Before heading toward our house, which we had heard was dry and standing, we drove to one of my favorite blocks, in an area called Mid-City, to check on a triumvirate of New Orleans institutions: Angelo Brocato’s, an Italian ice cream parlor and bakery founded in 1905; Venezia, an Italian restaurant where almost nothing comes without red sauce; and Pho Tau Bay, a local Vietnamese chain that marked a refugee community’s breakthrough into New Orleans’ popular food culture when it opened along the high-profile strip last year. The flood’s unforgiving waters had marked the three businesses with brown, waist-high stripes. Brocato’s and Venezia’s vintage neon signs had smashed to the ground; we found Pho Tau Bay’s two blocks away. It was a full month after Katrina, but no one had begun cleaning yet. I have never heard a sound so startling as the silence that crashed down when we shut off the car motor. No kids, no streetcar, no electrical buzz, no birds. We couldn’t even hear the flies that darkened the ice cream parlor’s windows from the inside.

When people ask us about New Orleans, which happens less and less, the first question is always about our house. We’ve lived in New Orleans since 1999, when Matt entered medical school at Tulane University, and we committed to the city last April by purchasing a house two blocks from where we had rented for six years. We wanted to stay in the neighborhood, mostly because it’s at the start of the Mardi Gras parade route. The area turns into one big, feel-good, family-oriented block party for the two weeks preceding Mardi Gras; even when we don’t feel like watching the parades, we enjoy hearing the marching bands warm up, feeling the bass drums boom, watching families tromp along with empty bags they hope to fill with beads, doubloons, and penny toys. Our new house, by the way, endured the storms like a champ. We’ve had to replace some roofing tiles, and a whole wall of siding, and the ceiling in the living room, which sagged precariously when the house settled weeks afterward. A pecan tree fell in the backyard, crushing our fence (but thankfully not Matt’s skateboarding ramp), and the house’s foundation cracked in several places. All that can be fixed, though, especially given that we have a multi-talented neighbor whose six-pack lunches we abide when no professional bosses will.

Hearing the positive news about our house, most people stop asking questions and move onto the news of the day—that sickening earthquake in Pakistan, White House indictments, winter—which means we rarely get to mention anymore that, though our house is intact, our lives, and those of our fellow New Orleanians, are not. To begin with, we are moving to Philadelphia. Matt got a second residency position in anesthesia at the University of Pennsylvania once it looked certain that the program we had been banking on, at Tulane, had lost its appeal (the program, in fact, moved to Houston). We are the best-case scenario: we are alive, we have insurance and savings, and we had our cat with us when Katrina bore down. But that doesn’t help our friends, who are damaged, or the city we’re leaving behind, which needs us.

You see old people, as old as my grandparents, at The Home Depot buying new toilets and carrying two-by-fours. You talk to a co-worker who didn’t have insurance, and you know that no one will ever buy her another house. You read obituaries—too many of them—for people who died of heart attacks and strokes during their evacuations, deaths that don’t factor into the official hurricane death toll. You see homes that used to contain lives gone silent, smudged from the black waters, and spray-painted by inspectors warning “NO ENTRY.” The owners of one of them wrote back: “Mom Is Okay. We’ll Miss Everyone. God Bless.”

Four other Johnnies took a bigger hit than we did and are staying. Sarah Todd and David Olivier (both A94), and their two girls, Louise, 4, and June, 2, are renting a friend’s guest house while their own home is gutted and rebuilt. Billy Sothern and Nikki Page (both A98) are soggy but surviving. Billy’s father, a specialist in mold remediation, has become a local celebrity.

Fortunately there are light moments, every day. When I finally got in touch with our exterminator, we had a love-in over the phone, exchanging evacuation stories and well-wishes. Natural disasters remind you that people matter more than anything, and that’s entirely good. We have roommates now, friends whose apartment is too moldy to inhabit, and another friend stops by to take warm showers because his neighborhood doesn’t have natural gas yet. Our busy little household embraces us with the sweet illusion that the city is bustling again rather than barren. On top of that, they say the oysters are safe to eat, our water is potable even if it smells like a jacuzzi, and restaurants in our neighborhood are busier than ever with people who would have killed for a proper bowl of gumbo during their evacuations. The other day, my friend Cynthia and I took the walk we used to take once a week before the storms: through Uptown, across the levee, down the streetcar line, past Audubon Park, and back home. Neither of us mentioned the bundles of branches we had to hurdle, the smelly refrigerators we passed, how empty the park seemed, or how quiet it was on the streetcar tracks. Like in our past lives in New Orleans, we just felt lucky to be there.

By Sara Rohen, SF94

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