There Was Nothing We Could Do, There Was Everything We Could Have Done

A Hurricane Katrina Story

My wife was busy cooking our last meal in our new house.

Bell peppers, onions, a little pinch of the required-by-proximity Cajun seasoning. It wasn’t a New Orleans meal per se — no crawfish, no shrimp — but we were in New Orleans making a chicken stir-fry concoction that would be our last meal as residents of the city. This would be the last meal in our new apartment; it was three weeks new. Three weeks ago new to us, and then three weeks later in a flood zone.

But this was before then. This was before the stacks of empty, rotten refrigerators, before every block had rows and rows of empty, unusable cars. Before people suffered in new, unimaginable ways.

This was my wife, Ashley, cooking for her parents. They were in from Atlanta, the weekend before Katrina became an unwelcome visitor. Millions of noses must have been scratching that Saturday before Katrina barged into our doors, letting us know that we had company coming, and that we better be ready.

We knew a hurricane was coming, but we didn’t know what it would do to our lives. So when I asked my wife to prepare, she scoffed a little, laughed a little, and belittled my concern.

I took her cue. Usually the storms just scare us, but never come to New Orleans. There was Dennis earlier that year and Ivan almost a full year before that.

With Ivan, I was on full alert. A Category Four coming, and I gathered my computer, my favorite books, my identification papers, clothes for all occasions, and even some notes to recollect memories and places, in case I was unable to come back. I even beat the traffic, skirting around the 12-hour traffic jams.

So as we sat and ate and laughed, I thought of before. How New Orleans usually is. How New Orleans is the luckiest. How it is the city of good times, and good food. How it is the poorest. How it is the most under-educated. How it is so difficult for many to leave. How it would be a disaster.

After our last meal, we talked about the earlier events of the day. My sister-in-law saw the French Quarter for the first time. She walked down Royal, looked at Bourbon, went by Jackson Square. We had beignets and cafe au lait and the classic New Orleans experience.

This was before the flooding, before the bodies floated in the muck, before the city’s problems became the world’s problems. This was when New Orleans was quaint and the humidity bearable because of the power that provided air-conditioning. This was leisurely browsing, not scrounging for food. This was our last day in New Orleans.

This time, so my wife wouldn’t think I was foolish, I only grabbed three sets of clothes in one suitcase for both of us, with half as many things as before. We did go to Grandma’s house, this time at 4 a.m., on a Sunday.

I weaved by the mounting contra-flow traffic and headed for a back way that would take us through small south Louisiana towns where the word “refugees” wasn’t yet a dirty word.

We urged my wife’s parents to head back as well, and they did, having had a satisfactory visit to a town known for accommodating its visitors.

But as they pulled out of a destination, we left a home. A home we had just started in, a home comfortable for us to unload our wedding presents, and to unload and unwind our lives together. Ten years later, it’s a home we only recognize in a hazy way — like a painting of a familiar landscape.

That night, safely in Shreveport, hours and hours north of New Orleans, I wrote this:

Sunday 8/28/05
10:50 PM
Shreveport, LA-Grandma’s House

I sit at the dining room table at my grandmother’s trying to avoid a sense of bewilderment. There is a hurricane of epic proportions perhaps the greatest in U.S. history hurtling towards New Orleans-projected to hit around 6 am in the morning. Ashley and I left hastily this morning at 4 am…We made it to S’port in 6 hours-a trip that normally takes 5. Not bad considering the 12 hour wait for some.

Most of today, we congratulat(ed) ourselves on the great time, and thank(ed) the Lord for letting us make it safely, compared to the many families who have no good or tangible way to get out of New Orleans. They are in the Superdome, perhaps awaiting the greatest natural catastrophe to hit the U.S. Many people have run these scenarios through their heads, and we play it off as not being able to happen here-not being able to happen in America. But as last year proved in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, etc., this could have tsunami-like destruction — an event that forever alters and changes your life.

Tomorrow and later this week, I may recall those and verify the truth of them, or reread them with facetiousness. It may not come true, but it just might.

The next day didn’t seem like a big deal, as far as hurricanes are concerned. We watched television and eventually the news anchors said New Orleans had “dodged a bullet.” We went to Kroger and bought bottled water and canned foods and other random snacks. It was Monday, August 29th and we would drive back to New Orleans the next day.

August 30 was different. Water had broken through the levees and I sat at my grandma’s house looking at my uncle’s fishing boat. I had never driven a boat in my life and this didn’t seem like the time to learn, but still, someone down there could use a boat. I didn’t do anything except put my textbooks away. They weren’t helpful at all.

And then I remembered my car. My car sat in the driveway, only one minute from the sno-ball stand and 12 minutes — when the roads were clear — from the Superdome, where a lot of people were stuck. Just 36 hours ago, my car could’ve helped somebody. Now it was just taking on water with 85 percent of the city.

There was nothing we could do; there was everything we could have done.

We wanted to help, but we felt helpless. After hearing about the levees breaking, we went outside to my uncle’s nearby pool. It was a hot day in north Louisiana and there was nothing for us to do and nowhere for us to be. There was nothing to do but wait.

Ashley and I dove into the pool and floated around, talking. “What if we don’t go back?” I said. “What do you mean?” she said. “I mean, what if we can’t go back?”

It slowly sunk in. Phone calls from family and friends offering places to stay. We traveled to Texas to visit some friends and their friends brought us clothes. We were on the Internet looking for work in various cities. People sent money to my grandmother’s house.

We couldn’t go back to New Orleans. Of the few people we knew, no one was left. They went to Baton Rouge or Mississippi or anywhere else. School was cancelled for the semester. The hospital where Ashley worked was completely flooded and still hasn’t reopened. We eventually went to Atlanta and lived with an aunt and got jobs a month after Hurricane Katrina. The only thing we knew to do was move on. We realized later we had some type of stress disorder and our coping was trying to do something that seemed right and responsible.

It’s hard to say anything about my Hurricane Katrina experience without mentioning my extreme privilege. That I had a car to get out of town. That we had friends and family to give us money. That we had fresh clothes on our bodies and warm food and a shower. That we weren’t on a rooftop or using the bathroom on convention center floors or that we weren’t crawling across a highway overpass. Or that we had stuff. Yes, we had stuff.

That November, we returned to the city for a few days, because our landlord told us our stuff was fine. Just my car was flooded, that the water had risen three feet, just to our front porch. My car was flooded, the same one that proved useless. We walked into a haunted house that was eerily the same. Just the flowers were dead. I hadn’t lived through a disaster, I had lived without all of my things for a few months.

Our house wasn’t a pile of trash. But it wasn’t our house. We had rented it. That last meal was our last meal and there were even dishes in the sink to prove it. Our house was a preserved reminder of people we no longer were or could be.

Josh Spilker lives in Nashville. His new book, Taco Jehovah, is being released soon. Learn more here.

Like what you just read? Please hit the ‘recommend’ button and check out the Human Parts bookstore for long-form writing from our contributors.