Jason Berry

Jason Berry

with Charles Henry Rowell

ROWELL: It is extraordinary to be able to visit you at your home here in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Before we came to your home, we drove through the area called Lakeview, and I was surprised to see so much devastation there. Our drive down from Baton Rouge also revealed to us a lot of destruction as soon as we started approaching New Orleans. But it is another experience to enter your home where there is order and tranquility—an overwhelming experience in contrast to what we just saw in some parts of the city. Will you talk about the physical and emotional impact of the hurricane on you and your family?

BERRY: We were fortunate that the house did not flood. And that's the line of demarcation in most people's lives here today, the degree of damage and devastation that one has to deal with, or not, as the case may be. As I say, I was lucky. One neighbor took about two feet of water. My house is raised so none of the flooding got inside, though the yard was trashed. You can actually see the water line on the fence; the garage was a science project for quite a stretch, though it's finally clean now. Insurance covered most of the damage. Our losses were mild compared to people in the deeply flooded neighborhoods.

My wife, my mother, and I went to my brother's house in Covington, Louisiana, about thirty miles across Lake Pontchartrain. We evacuated there, as we had in the past, to ride out the storm, thinking as most people did that we would come back in a few days. I did not pack much— a few days' clothing, just one laptop of the two we have. And so there were six of us there, Lamar and Ellen and their son Zachary, Melanie and me and my mother Mary Frances. My two daughters from my first marriage went with their mother to Abbeville, Cajun country, where they have family. We were in close touch by cell phone all the way until the hurricane actually hit that Monday morning. Then I lost contact with my kids for several days, which was upsetting. But I knew they were in a safe place, and I heard on the radio that there had been no power outages in that part of the state. I knew where they were with family out there. We spent five days in Covington. The tree damage was so heavy that the road out was impassable. We were trapped.

ROWELL: It seems as if you were going into another area that had been affected by the hurricane. This is moving away from the Gulf Coast, yes?

BERRY: That's right. Covington is north of Lake Pontchartrain. So you're going north toward I-55 that heads up eventually to Jackson, Mississippi. The area across the lake is called the North Shore and includes towns like Mandeville, Pontchatoula, and Hammond. When I was a kid we referred to it, generically, as "across the lake." Now people call New Orleans "the south shore."

I'm trying to think of a single word to describe the hurricane. Terrifying might be too strong, but the wind was an awesome thing to behold. The winds from Katrina were so powerful that these enormous trees were being uprooted, as if this cosmic giant was pulling teeth out of the jaw of the earth. I saw these enormous trees coming out, being uprooted and then pounded down on the ground as if someone was flailing the earth. I've never seen anything like that. The bay window shattered, it happened when I was sitting there and I jumped back. We had to get a tarpaulin to keep the wind and the water from pouring into the living room. After the storm passed that afternoon, there were...