The Storm That’s Always Happening to Everyone

The problem was not that I made the wrong decisions. It was that I took too long to decide.

—George W. Bush, in response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Those of us who have babies and know where to go pack diapers and formula and Cheerios and condoms and cans of tuna into a leather bag we buy off the back of a man’s truck on Canal Street. Some of us don’t worry. Two years ago we had multiwall hurricane panels installed and put aside money for things like this, because frankly, it has happened before. Our fathers tell us stories about Betsy in 1965, how the levees hugging the industrial canal didn’t do what they were supposed to and people died. Now, 40 years later, the walls we built and tried to make stronger still collapse.

On the bus ride to the Superdome babies are crying and some people smell like the swamp. An older man in soiled clothes is moving his lips but no words come out and we have to tell our sons to stop staring. Many of us who are older stay in our houses. We can’t leave what’s taken so long to make, so we stack up all of what matters and use a ladder stool to climb up to the highest point in our homes to place photos of our grandchildren at their birthday parties on a particleboard shelf in the closet. One of us, a widow with no children in the state, falls on her way up, and it takes three weeks for a man on a small, green motorboat to find her floating.

Many of us have cars and televisions that we use to find the best route out of here. We speed to Walmart and fill up our gas tanks and then gasoline jugs with more gas because the news channels all say that we should. We buy what cans of meat are left and we buy bottles of water. Our mothers-in-law grow worried and beg us to buy more because there won’t be any left soon.

Some of us with stubborn parents have to leave them alone in the city. We say goodbye and our mothers don’t do a very good job looking calm. We drive to the Gulf Coast until we get to Waynesboro, Mississippi. Even there they are out of gas and out of food to eat. One of us has a father who takes an urgent phone call on the ride up. The man on the phone works for the city of New Orleans and asks him if the company he works for can loan city officials their trucks. They have prepared body bags but need a place to store them once they’re filled. This happens two days before the storm makes landfall.

Some of us are journalists who leave our homes in Minnesota to go to New Orleans and tell the world about what we see. We look at the camera and tell it how strong the winds are. The bumper of a Toyota flies by and hits one of the cameramen on the head. Our hair blows fast in the wind and we go back to the naval base where the networks we work for have reserved a space for us to stay.

If we are poor and young and don’t have time to grab food before it runs out, we try to take advantage of the emptiness of the city. Our mothers are hungry and the store down the street still has some food and beer inside. We take a brick left over from someone’s garden border two blocks away and throw it through the window of the store. We grab beef jerky and vodka and Cheez-Its and we climb up on the counter to reach the television so that we can sell it or watch it later. It is wide and we have to carry less food in order to bring it back down the block. Some of us take things from people we don...