Painful anniversaries and picking up the pieces
It seems like one lesson you have to learn, in order to be a good and decent person, is that it's worth it to be gentle with people, because everyone has these traumas that you don't know about, but that can consume them in an invisible way. And as time goes on, you get better, but for awhile all you can think about is this One Big Terrible Thing. You'll forget about it for a few hours, then it comes whirling back to you. For years, I'd get terrified every time there was a thunderstorm. While at the coast, I'd obsess about tsunamis, imagining what the piles of town would look like.
The other lesson you have to learn is how to move on, how to not scab up and harden into a ball of anxiety. But sometimes, you still remember.
Originally published Aug. 29, 2010
Today is five years since Hurricane Katrina. We all have these sad, quiet anniversaries in our lives, the ones that mean something to us but not necessarily the people around us. The day you broke up with someone you once thought you'd be with forever, say, or the day a parent died. This is one of those days, not just for me but lots of people.
Here, Aug. 29 doesn't mean anything in particular. Oregon is a long, long way — geographically, culturally and mentally — from the Gulf Coast. But down there, still, today, everything is either pre-K or post-K.
I can't describe the scope of it in this column — how you could look out and see nothing but ruin and know that it stretched across state lines, how far it went inland, how slowly things would be fixed. And everything needed to be fixed.
Five years ago, I was in an apartment in Kentucky, making a road trip out of our evacuation. We had been watching CNN and the Weather Channel obsessively for days, but when we woke up this particular morning, the news was good at first.
The storm had hooked east at the last minute, and it looked as though New Orleans had been spared the brunt, except for the poor Ninth Ward, which flooded all the time with ordinary storms. For days, we'd heard that the city would be under 40 feet of water, then, when we woke up, the TV told us it wasn't. We were giddy.
But around noon, they started to report water rising in the city. The anchors made their concerned faces as they spoke via telephone to panicked workers at Memorial Hospital, across the street from an apartment I'd lived in. They didn't know why the water was rising. We didn't know why.
The next few days are kind of a blur. I ended up in Ohio, in an unimaginably luxurious home outside Dayton, where I watched Fox News (the host family's choice) catatonically. I also spent a good deal of time curled up, crying, slowly wrapping my mind around this ... thing, this situation.
I studied satellite photos, trying to figure out what had happened to our apartment. I read the missing-people boards. I wondered whether the people I knew evacuated, where they were. No one's cell phone worked. Nothing worked.
It became clear that I would not go home, so I flew to meet my parents in Portland. I spent the term at the University of Oregon, returning for a visit in early October to see what was left of the rental house, then returning permanently Dec. 31 to finish my senior year, the one I'd imagined very differently than it turned out.
It was so strange being in the city post-Katrina. Everyone was fragile, unstable, prone to breaking down in tears over something inconsequential, perhaps when you got your fifth flat tire in as many months or got to the grocery store and they still didn't stock whatever basic thing you'd set out to get.
The normal things that you expect out of life were totally absent, things like, "I can turn on my tap, and water that I can drink will come out," or "I can drive down a major thoroughfare and not have to swerve to avoid a boat," or "I can go to the store and buy some toilet paper."
The cars that people had left parked on medians to avoid the flood looked like ghosts, all gray mud and mold blooms on the upholstery. When you drove in the city, every building that was flooded had oily black waterlines. Sometimes they would be a few feet off the ground, and sometimes they towered over your head. It was hard not to picture the water with this constant reminder.
The worst, though, was being inside the houses that had flooded. Everything was where it shouldn't be —a chair would relocate from the den to an upstairs hallway — and people would sort through the mud and detritus to try to find anything that could be cleaned or salvaged. It was heartbreaking. A lot of stuff is just stuff, it's replaceable, but pictures and the piano your grandmother brought over from Ireland —that is not just stuff, and you cannot go get new ones.
It was a bit like walking around in a city full of people who had just been dumped by a lover, people suffering from deep but invisible wounds, and you didn't know, when you encountered someone, just how bad his or her situation was.
You didn't know if they, like me, were one of the relatively unscathed or if their grandfather had drowned in his wheelchair in an old folks' home, or if they and their five family members were cooped up in a trailer designed for two people. The guilt at not suffering these things was huge — I wondered why I was spared and others had such horrible things to grapple with.
I can't speak to or for anyone's experience, but mine and my situation was one of the best you could ask for. My parents did not live in the city, so childhood pictures were intact. I didn't have to struggle with insurance to fix my house. My room was on the third floor, well above the five feet of water in the house, so most of my stuff was OK. The books and bedclothes that got ruined from a broken window were cheap and unspecial.
But it is a hard lesson to absorb, at 21, that things can change instantly and dramatically. You are not in control. Just because things are OK and normal today does not mean they will be next week. Of all the things that seemed uncertain — employment, relationships, health — I had to add "cities" to the list.
There were small beauties here and there to be had. A shuttered restaurant would open, and we could have the dish we had been dying for, that we thought we might never eat again. Mardi Gras rolled through town, triumphant like never before, because all of us could celebrate still being there, together. People were very kind and gentle to each other.
I called my old editor, Dan Davis, at the Hattiesburg American to ask about how the recovery was coming on the Mississippi coast.
The land and the people, he said, are still scarred.
But, he pointed out, there is something good there, something useful.
"Right after the storm ... there was this feeling of, 'My God, how do you recover from something like this?' I guess we're so resilient that we're able to recover, and that's the positive message, I think, that came out of Katrina, was how resilient people really are ..."
He paused and mentioned that he lost his house in the storm.
"You just move on. You pick up the pieces, put together what you can and learn from it, and you become stronger because of it, I think."
So here, five years later, is to resiliency, to fixing things one step at a time when the bottom drops out, and here is to being kinder and gentler with others than strictly necessary because we all have these days.
K. Williams Brown is the entertainment reporter for the Statesman Journal. She will return to frivolity next week.
The other lesson you have to learn is how to move on, how to not scab up and harden into a ball of anxiety. But sometimes, you still remember.
Originally published Aug. 29, 2010
Today is five years since Hurricane Katrina. We all have these sad, quiet anniversaries in our lives, the ones that mean something to us but not necessarily the people around us. The day you broke up with someone you once thought you'd be with forever, say, or the day a parent died. This is one of those days, not just for me but lots of people.
Here, Aug. 29 doesn't mean anything in particular. Oregon is a long, long way — geographically, culturally and mentally — from the Gulf Coast. But down there, still, today, everything is either pre-K or post-K.
I can't describe the scope of it in this column — how you could look out and see nothing but ruin and know that it stretched across state lines, how far it went inland, how slowly things would be fixed. And everything needed to be fixed.
Five years ago, I was in an apartment in Kentucky, making a road trip out of our evacuation. We had been watching CNN and the Weather Channel obsessively for days, but when we woke up this particular morning, the news was good at first.
The storm had hooked east at the last minute, and it looked as though New Orleans had been spared the brunt, except for the poor Ninth Ward, which flooded all the time with ordinary storms. For days, we'd heard that the city would be under 40 feet of water, then, when we woke up, the TV told us it wasn't. We were giddy.
But around noon, they started to report water rising in the city. The anchors made their concerned faces as they spoke via telephone to panicked workers at Memorial Hospital, across the street from an apartment I'd lived in. They didn't know why the water was rising. We didn't know why.
The next few days are kind of a blur. I ended up in Ohio, in an unimaginably luxurious home outside Dayton, where I watched Fox News (the host family's choice) catatonically. I also spent a good deal of time curled up, crying, slowly wrapping my mind around this ... thing, this situation.
I studied satellite photos, trying to figure out what had happened to our apartment. I read the missing-people boards. I wondered whether the people I knew evacuated, where they were. No one's cell phone worked. Nothing worked.
It became clear that I would not go home, so I flew to meet my parents in Portland. I spent the term at the University of Oregon, returning for a visit in early October to see what was left of the rental house, then returning permanently Dec. 31 to finish my senior year, the one I'd imagined very differently than it turned out.
It was so strange being in the city post-Katrina. Everyone was fragile, unstable, prone to breaking down in tears over something inconsequential, perhaps when you got your fifth flat tire in as many months or got to the grocery store and they still didn't stock whatever basic thing you'd set out to get.
The normal things that you expect out of life were totally absent, things like, "I can turn on my tap, and water that I can drink will come out," or "I can drive down a major thoroughfare and not have to swerve to avoid a boat," or "I can go to the store and buy some toilet paper."
The cars that people had left parked on medians to avoid the flood looked like ghosts, all gray mud and mold blooms on the upholstery. When you drove in the city, every building that was flooded had oily black waterlines. Sometimes they would be a few feet off the ground, and sometimes they towered over your head. It was hard not to picture the water with this constant reminder.
The worst, though, was being inside the houses that had flooded. Everything was where it shouldn't be —a chair would relocate from the den to an upstairs hallway — and people would sort through the mud and detritus to try to find anything that could be cleaned or salvaged. It was heartbreaking. A lot of stuff is just stuff, it's replaceable, but pictures and the piano your grandmother brought over from Ireland —that is not just stuff, and you cannot go get new ones.
It was a bit like walking around in a city full of people who had just been dumped by a lover, people suffering from deep but invisible wounds, and you didn't know, when you encountered someone, just how bad his or her situation was.
You didn't know if they, like me, were one of the relatively unscathed or if their grandfather had drowned in his wheelchair in an old folks' home, or if they and their five family members were cooped up in a trailer designed for two people. The guilt at not suffering these things was huge — I wondered why I was spared and others had such horrible things to grapple with.
I can't speak to or for anyone's experience, but mine and my situation was one of the best you could ask for. My parents did not live in the city, so childhood pictures were intact. I didn't have to struggle with insurance to fix my house. My room was on the third floor, well above the five feet of water in the house, so most of my stuff was OK. The books and bedclothes that got ruined from a broken window were cheap and unspecial.
But it is a hard lesson to absorb, at 21, that things can change instantly and dramatically. You are not in control. Just because things are OK and normal today does not mean they will be next week. Of all the things that seemed uncertain — employment, relationships, health — I had to add "cities" to the list.
There were small beauties here and there to be had. A shuttered restaurant would open, and we could have the dish we had been dying for, that we thought we might never eat again. Mardi Gras rolled through town, triumphant like never before, because all of us could celebrate still being there, together. People were very kind and gentle to each other.
I called my old editor, Dan Davis, at the Hattiesburg American to ask about how the recovery was coming on the Mississippi coast.
The land and the people, he said, are still scarred.
But, he pointed out, there is something good there, something useful.
"Right after the storm ... there was this feeling of, 'My God, how do you recover from something like this?' I guess we're so resilient that we're able to recover, and that's the positive message, I think, that came out of Katrina, was how resilient people really are ..."
He paused and mentioned that he lost his house in the storm.
"You just move on. You pick up the pieces, put together what you can and learn from it, and you become stronger because of it, I think."
So here, five years later, is to resiliency, to fixing things one step at a time when the bottom drops out, and here is to being kinder and gentler with others than strictly necessary because we all have these days.
K. Williams Brown is the entertainment reporter for the Statesman Journal. She will return to frivolity next week.