In the Land of Dreamy Diaspora

Maurice: "You hear we be going on the metric system because of that Hurricane Katrina?"

Boudreaux: "No, you don't tell me!"

Maurice: "Yes, we are. Already we got a half leader in the White House." ~ heard in the Crescent Bar, Hammond, Louisiana

* * *

The Warning

"It is high time you got out of there," L. A. Norma said, from Los Angeles. I could hear her Camel Cigarette smoke over the telephone. "Don't you know Hurricane Katrina's turned towards New Orleans and grown to a category five!"

Katrina is only the fifth category-five hurricane on record in American waters. It hit New Orleans at a glancing blow as a force four. We would have survived in good shape had the levees not given way. The City's levees were thought able to withstand a category-three storm. Flood control improvements were under way, and the effort might not have saved us, but we should all understand that before August 29, 2005, the day Katrina hit, the Bush administration cut by forty percent the budget for upgrading those levees.

Norma heard we were in the National Hurricane Center's predicted landfall cone days earlier. She promptly fled by jet plane comfortably nibbling on peanuts and Vienna sausages. I figured the storm was still destined for a second Florida visit. Besides I was still paying for last year's evacuation for Hurricane Ivan.

I picked up the remote and turned on the tv. Mayor Nagin washed into focus standing beside suburban Parish leaders. They all said, "It is time to get out of Dodge," curiously Western words for such quintessentially south Louisiana politicians. None of them said how this was to be done without a car. I don't even have a driver's license.

I phoned Amtrak and got no answer. Online I found no train service available in any direction from New Orleans. Much the same airline information came from a nice voiced lady at Louis Armstrong International. "All flights are canceled or over-booked," she said, "and the airport itself will close pretty soon."

* * *

Escape

We followed bumper-to-bumper traffic over roads that washed out to Sea hours after we passed. I escaped with Melanie, a writer with a vision who teaches English at Fredrick Douglas High. She owned a small red truck and an insane cat that sat catatonic inside a cage upon my lap for the eight hours it took for the normally one-hour trip to Lake Pontchartrain's North Shore.

We stopped once to move our hand luggage and grocery bags from the truck's bed to a dry Lincoln Continental captained by George of Tommy's flowers, on rue Rampart. I used the opportunity to piss in the wind - a metaphoric situation seldom experienced literally.

We arrived in Hammond, with the first rain squalls and the first of many bottles of champagne. Shelter was the home of our host and savior, David, a former monk from the nearby abbey. We lived there without electricity and under a six p.m. till dawn curfew for most of that first week.

In the mornings, over battery-powered radio, we heard increasingly bleak news from the United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans, fifteen stations (including "Halleluiah 107") now relocated to Baton Rouge and simulcasting over WWL-AM 870, New Orleans' most powerful radio station. We drank like a hurricane party for two weeks. Then the radio spoke of not going home at all, at least not for who-knows-how-long. George split with his dog, Panda, for his Daughter's home in Florida.

* * *

Realization

With George's departure the reality of our situation struck. We were not having an extended hurricane party; we were displaced souls in need of greater direction than champagne and a fallen monk.

I moved on to Lafayette, home of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (affectionately known as "U La La"), and the home of old friends from the days when we did time for the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

Life is always good in Lafayette, a prosperous oil town of 190,000, with a pronounced (some say mispronounced) French culture and budding tourist industry. Untouched by the storm, an exile community of 40,000 New Orleanians has been taking shallow root here - both poorly in the Cajun Dome and elegantly at "Second-Saturday's Art Walk," a monthly coordinated gallery opening where salesmen from New Orleans' posh Arthur Roger's Gallery, and artists from RHINO (Right Here In New Orleans) Louisiana Arts and Crafts Gallery greeted each other with hugs, cheers and boudin.

Don Marshall, director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Foundation, chatted with author Rick Bragg and RHINO's anodized aluminum sculptor Cathy Cooper-Stratton. All in air-conditioned comfort as mosquito-free as a Swamp can be.

Back home things got better. Then worse. Without water pressure Sax Fifth Avenue fell to the looter's torch, and the despair in the Louisiana Superdome, and the Morial Convention Center were gut wrenching.

In Lafayette, outside the Jefferson Street Market, an art and craft market, Peter, the steel drummer from New Orleans' Spotted Cat sat curbside smoking cigarettes and lamenting he, too, knew what it means to miss New Orleans.

* * *

Plenty of Time to Point Fingers

All the City, Parish, State and National politicos wagged their heads and sagely said there would be plenty of time to point fingers later. Then they immediately pointed at each other. Then they all pointed at themselves, which is to say, they agreed none of them were to blame for losing The City That Care Forgot.

Not the Karl Rove smear factory, of course, and not L. A. Norma. Rove's army of spin doctors started immediately on Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco and soon their venom filled television's empty talking heads and spilled out into homes across America.

Norma took the traditional position blaming the media itself, that old tried-and-true whipping boy Americans so love to suspect of controlling their very thoughts. (Funny they never think of turning it off.) "The news media's passing the blame for FEMA's slow response to Nagin and Blanco is like blaming Martin Luther King for segregation," she screamed from Los Angeles.

Editor's note: A gathering at Bacco the Sunday before the storm celebrated LEJ's sixty-second birthday with the last ten-cent martini lunch, for a while. Melanie Plesh photographed the party. You may view her images and shed a tear knowing what's coming next. Watch while listening to the haunting song, Main Street Blues - (mp3), by the Red Stick Ramblers. THE LAST TEN-CENTER