The Window of Hope

I sit here now on a hotel bed in Kinder, Louisiana, some two hundred miles to the west of home, staring out a large window at a large field. The room is chock-a-block with suitcases, a cooler, a large box of food supplies. My inflated mattress hugs the wall; sheets, blanket, and pillow are in a neat stack nearby. My father's twice-folded newspaper is placed next to the phone, under Mom's half-read paperback. A quick beep announces that my cell phone, on the floor near the bed, is thoroughly charged.

Four tweenage boys are playing a round of four-man football in the field, their longish, wet swim trunks clinging to their legs. They are barefoot, bare-chested, tossing a bright blue ball on a Thursday morning when they should be in school. Standing to get a better look, I see that one wears a necklace I recognize, even from this distance—I bought one two nights ago at the Couchatta Casino, located one grassy field away from the hotel. There, as my parents explored the binging, zinging Neverland of nickel slots, I shopped for evacuation souvenirs. For myself, I bought silver-and-turquoise earrings. I bought a ceramic bead on a cord bearing the name Zachary for my eleven-year-old, and a tom-tom for Joey, seven—gifts they never would have received at this time, from this place, for no reason whatsoever other than the fact that I miss their faces, had it not been for a storm named Katrina.

My sons, like the boys outside, should be in school. Instead they are 100 miles away from me. They are safe with their father and their two cats, his fiancée and her two cats, at their grandparents' country home. Meanwhile, I hunker down with my parents in a casino, located a brief drive away from the public library and Internet access, wondering how long I'm going to be here, and how best to handle custody issues during an extended evacuation. These are the things you don't think about when you prepare to evacuate. You don't think about these things because you think you'll be back in three days, just as always.

The Best Western is filled with others who reckoned on a three-day trip that has just entered Day Five. These days, we don't bother to ask Are you from New Orleans? Instead, we start conversations with What part of town are you from? The answers—Metairie, Gentilly, Harahan, Marrero—float and find one another as we fill our plates with biscuits and gravy, grits and pancakes from the complimentary breakfast buffet in the crowded lobby, as we sip coffee from Styrofoam cups. We have, in a matter of days, become a community of refugees wondering what we will do next, asking where we will go. The manager at the front desk gives everyone the same news: many of our rooms have been previously booked for Labor Day Weekend by people who want to pass the last holiday of the summer gambling.

When we're not hounding the front desk for information on the rooms we, for the moment, have, or calling other hotels in other locations about possible vacancies, we are gathered around the television. We watch, just as the rest of the nation watches, the City of New Orleans drown. We watch the looters and shake our heads, then look past the thieves for familiar landmarks. We see shots of the interstate where people gather, waiting for help. We know: that could have been us. One of the families here—a mother, her two grown sons and a daughter-in-law—is from the Lower Ninth Ward, an area whose devastation we are all aware of thanks to CNN and Fox News. Most of us are not from the city itself, as this dazed family is, but from Jefferson Parish. But to the people who work at the hotel, in the library, at the casino, to the people who serve free dinners in one church hall and distribute free clothing and...