This is what I call a Flashback

 

                                      Me, visiting my house after Katrina

For me, this summer—2012, seven years after Katrina, is a summer of healing. For the next few weeks I’m going to post some of the Katrina-related writing I’ve done over the years in order to symbolically purge this material from my mind, much as I’m also purging my remaining anger and fear through meditation and therapy.

This particular piece was my attempt to describe my Flashbacks, an aspect of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, terrible experiences that felt like bad acid trips in which something terrifying was chasing me. When I was finally—6 years after the disaster, able to turn around and look my pursuer in the eye, I saw it was a wave of murky-colored debris named “Everything is Destroyed Already.”

Once I was able to look at and name the thing, my flashbacks began to subside.

This is what I call a Flashback
by Donna Maria Bonner

The thing chasing me is called Everything is Destroyed Already.

For the longest time I didn’t know its name. I simply knew it hovered over me, ready to choke me, drown out my cries.

Never to be heard. Never to be answered…just like the others who died in my city, in my neighborhood…within miles of where I floated safely.

I crouch on the ground; I make myself small, as the thing forms over me, right behind me.

I see the ground shattering like glass under me, the bottom ready to fall out, because everything is destroyed already.

There is nothing for me to do but cover myself, roll into a ball, hide in my apartment, because the thing is breaking over me like a wave that will obliterate all trace of me, because everything is destroyed already.

Destruction transcends time.

The stakes are so high because I don’t want the pain to start again.

I feel no control outside the sphere of my body.

The only control I can imagine is to become a part of the destruction, to hurt others so my pain will be shared and I will not have to face this alone.

Everything is destroyed already is what I was thinking standing on the roof of my friend’s French Quarter building, looking out at my flooded city in the direction of my flooded neighborhood and home.

Everything is destroyed already is what I was thinking as I watched the same six Coast Guard helicopters desperately race from wet land to dry, helping those they could escape the post-apocalyptic landscape of my lovely New Orleans at her nadir.

“Thank God,” I thought, “My mother isn’t alive to see this.”

Everything is destroyed already is what I was thinking when I saw the body of the boy—a teenager still, stuffed into a grocery cart on Esplanade Avenue, one of the lovelier, oak lined promenades in the city, a gunshot wound sullying his chest, a look of surprise stamped on his face. 

Who shot him? Who cares?

We didn’t have time to stop or look closely at his truth.

And what good would stopping have done anyway, because, for him, everything was destroyed already.

This is what I feel like when I use the word “Flashback.”

Believe it or not, before Katrina, I used to be a nice girl. I used to never be afraid.

The Boy in the Shopping Cart

The Boy in the Shopping Cart

by Donnamaria Bonner

Hi All! It's been 2 full years since I've posted here in Katrina Reverb! Today, July 14, 2012, after a year's worth of healing meditation, I've found that I'm recovering memories of the disaster long repressed. So, I've written this story of healing. Please enjoy! 

All My Best, Donna

I guess this story has to start with the boy, although it didn’t begin with him. Lots of other things happened first and lots more happened after. But I guess, in my heart, I’m hoping it all might end with him. Now, that is, that I’ve started to remember.

He was lying there in that shopping cart, sneaker-clad feet splayed out the end, head perched near the front where a child might sit or you might deposit a carton of milk on your way to the checkout counter.

I don’t remember him well, not most of the time anyway. He fades in and out—sometimes more or less real. For about 5 years I didn’t remember him at all. I think every time I started to remember, I grabbed a bottle or a pipe or, better yet, I let myself fade out, put my mind to sleep and let my spirit float out of my body and up to the clouds. Not thinking, not thinking; not feeling either.

John and I were walking down Esplanade. It was the day after the storm. We didn’t yet know about the levee breaks. It seems funny now to say that we were out “checking for damage” because what we meant by “damage” was leaky roofs and trees downed by wind. We didn’t yet know we’d encounter dead boys stuffed in grocery baskets. We were totally unaware of what we were dealing with.

What I remember is red and white colored sneakers with red and white clothes matching those sneakers. The clothes weren’t expensive or fancy but everything matched. He’d dressed with care. Somehow that in particular touched me. 

We New Orleanians, we’re spiffy dressers.

The hole in his chest—or I should say gunshot wound—was small, tiny even, and, as I remember, it sat on the right side of his chest, only a small smattering of blood and a tiny tear marred his otherwise clean shirt.

Not too long after we saw him, I left my body for the first time. By that time, John and I were standing on Canal Street—the city’s main thoroughfare, looking at the ruins. We were holding hands—like the happy couple we were, but even John’s strong grip couldn’t keep me on the ground. I floated up, up, up, above the debris in the streets, above the cops gathering at the foot of the river. I floated away from the dry downtown where we stood, above the flooded neighborhoods where the living and the dead floated in the water.

That was how I found out about the levee breaks. I knew, but didn’t really let myself understand, that things would never be the same again.  

Like the boy, we hadn’t dodged this bullet. Instead, it had hit us at the heart. There might not be much blood but, like the boy, our insides were eviscerated.

“Save yourself. Save yourself.”

It was as if the angels sang these words to me as I floated with them in the sky. It was as if god were whispering in my ear.

“Save yourself. Think about the pain tomorrow.”

When my spirit plopped back down into my body, I was surprised to find I had super powers. I could see further and move faster. I could sense danger coming from behind. My mind was like a razor, cutting through the chaos to find those methods that would take me through this hell to the other side alive.

I turned to John.

“We’ve got to get back to the house,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered quickly, the look on his face mirroring all I felt.   

We headed back to Royal Street in the un-flooded French Quarter where we were sheltering in an empty apartment on the second floor of a building owned by John’s parents.

We didn’t discuss the boy that day or any time during the disaster.

After we escaped the city, John and I each told as many people as would listen but no one seemed to believe us and pretty soon we learned to shut up.

Eventually I learned to put the boy out of my head, employing a special type of forgetfulness I’ve only otherwise encountered in rape victims and soldiers.

John never forgot what we’d seen, but even so he and I didn’t discuss the boy together until seven years after the disaster, when I stopped picking up bottles and pipes and finally started to remember.

After Katrina, after we fled the city and landed in a FEMA motel in Texas, I just sat on the air conditioning unit, staring out the window of this room that was now my home. My actual home was under water four times my height. My actual possessions floated in filth.

I smoked cigarette after cigarette, blowing smoke out of the tiny opening allowed by the big panel window that covered one wall of the room. Inside me, grief churned and anger bubbled, but on the outside I was still—completely still. I don’t even think I blinked. I wanted to be just like the boy in the shopping cart. I didn’t want anyone to ever be able to hurt me again.

The New Orleanians we met in the FEMA motel, those who hadn’t stayed in the city for the disaster, seemed so innocent and naïve, even in their loss and pain. They wondered if their homes were still safe, if the city would recover. I looked at them with pity.

I also looked at them with envy. They still had hope while I’d left mine behind with the boy in the basket.

After we moved out of the FEMA motel and into a small apartment in Texas, I found I had no desire to find a job or in any way interact with others.  

I’d been laid off from my teaching position in New Orleans, via mail forwarded from the address of my flooded home to the newly rented apartment in Texas. Within 2 months, I received another letter letting me know my health insurance had been cancelled.

The material I’m trained to teach is specialized, so there weren’t many positions for me in Texas. But, in truth, it wasn’t that that kept me from moving forward. It was like I could no longer focus on the mundane things that make up every day life.  

Although I wasn’t consciously remembering the dead boy during that time, my focus was nonetheless always turned back towards that place on Esplanade Avenue where I’d seen him.

John was bad off too. Once we’d gotten the apartment and bought some furniture, he spent most of his time in bed, not moving, staring at the wall or the television, always—it seemed—turned away from me, while once he’d spoiled me with his full attention.

When the FEMA money ran out, we lived on our savings. Then, we took money out of my retirement account. I planned to kill myself when the money ran out.

Three years after the disaster, John and I broke up and he moved back to New Orleans and lived with his parents. He started doing cocaine and heroin. I lived alone and didn’t let myself think.

When we’d gotten to Texas after the disaster, I’d told a reporter about the boy, sure my story would cause outrage. When I watched the news that night, I’d been edited out of his feel-good, let’s-help-the-poor-Katrina-folks story. I called the reporter and left messages but he never called me back.

A few months later, I told John’s parents about the boy and they told me I’d imagined it.

“Nothing like that,” John’s stepmother Anne had said, “could happen so near our house, right in our neighborhood.”

Yeah, that’s right, I thought, nothing bad can ever happen in a rich neighborhood, not even during a disaster.

Well, maybe she was right. At least her house hadn’t been destroyed by the floods—not like those in my neighborhood.

There were other bodies, bodies at the Convention Center along the river that the entire nation saw on television. Bodies in the Superdome too. How proud the city and the nation were when these landmarks reopened within months of the disaster. I felt like throwing up.

“Dance on their graves,” I thought, “you dumb ass mother fuckers. I’ll die before I live in denial like you.”

What scary promises are born of pain, no?

Of course, in truth, I too was living in denial. Even as I cursed the reopening of these landmarks from the safety of my Texas apartment, I was stuffing the memory of that boy deep into my subconscious, keeping him at bay, thinking this might stop him from haunting me.

How could I be so naïve? How could I commerce in such great denial?

I tried to kill myself 4 years after the disaster. I drank two bottles of wine and, for the first time, allowed myself to sob uncontrollably for my lost home—the same beautiful place where I’d grown up and, in the years before Katrina, cared for my Mom during the extended illness that lead to her death.

When I finished sobbing, I calmly lay in bed and, with a little leftover wine, swallowed a handful of orange-colored Valium I’d stolen from a neighbor.

Unfortunately, like everything I tried at the time, it didn’t work.

Even without remembering the boy, I hurt more than I could stand.

When did the boy start to come back to me? When did his image start popping up unbidden at all hours and times of day, as I washed dishes or walked to the store?

It was the strangest thing that brought him back to me.

Six years after the disaster, I was on the phone with a friend from Egypt who manages a curio store in the French Quarter. I was still in Texas and Haffez, my Egyptian friend, was in New Orleans minding his store.

Haffez had been a journalist in Egypt and he’d left ten years earlier because of threats from the Mubarik regime. I’d called to congratulate him on the fall of the government.

“But isn’t it a problem, Haffez,” I asked, “that the military is taking over?”

“No,” he said with a joyful certainty born of the optimism of the hour, “the Egyptian military is one with the people.”

“It’s not like here,” he continued, “where the military didn’t even show up after Katrina and then, when they did show up, they left the bodies to rot in the streets.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking of Egypt anymore.

I was on Esplanade Avenue with the boy.

Without letting myself think too deeply, I blurted out, “We never talk about the bodies, do we Hafeez? None of us ever mentions them.”

But Hafeez, quite naturally, didn’t want to discuss the bodies in this time of joy. Instead, he ignored my distress and kept talking about Egypt. Finally, I also let the boy drift from my mind.

After all, I hadn’t bidden the boy. I didn’t want him around anyway.

A few days later, I told my therapist about the boy but even as I spoke the memory to her, I felt as if I were making it up, to earn her attention or garner her sympathy.  

This couldn’t be true, I thought, this can’t be true. If this had really happened, we’d talk about it. Wouldn’t we?

Within about a month, without even trying, I forget the boy again.

Sometimes, I have dreams I can’t remember.

I wake up scratching, big red welts running up and down my arms like rivers and streams cut into my flesh by my fingernails.

Even after I wake, the itching is like torture.  

Right now, as I type these words, I feel that itching coming on.

But I refuse to stop typing. The boy is too important.

His eyes looked straight at me, unblinking, clouded over by the hazy film of death. His skin was dark but his eyes were light blue. He was probably in his twenties. He reminded me of one of my favorite students.

Who shot him? Why? Does it even matter?

He didn’t ask me for anything. He didn’t even ask me to remember him.

Of course, he also didn’t ask to find his final resting place in a shopping cart on Esplanade Avenue, but he did.

And, although sometimes I’d like to blame him for haunting me, deep in my heart, I knew it wasn’t his fault that, once I’d seen him, I couldn’t let him go.  

“Why hadn’t I saved him?”

That was the question that haunted me.

What a stupid question, of course. He’d been dead when I’d met him. How could I have saved him? Still, why didn’t I?

Why didn’t I save them all, all of New Orleans’ dead, all of my people who perished while no one noticed? Why hadn’t I taught my students to swim rather than to think? Surviving, after all, was much more important than any thoughts.

The other night I started truly remembering the boy in the shopping cart.  

Seven years have passed since I saw him on Esplanade Avenue, well, to be precise, 6 years and 11 months.

I’ve recently given up my bottles and pipes and everything has become much more raw again, as it was in the days immediately after the disaster.

I was talking to John on the phone. He is living in New Orleans. I am still in Texas.

About a year ago, he finished a residential rehab program. He is, I think, doing pretty well and has a full time job in a lawyer’s office.

I was bitching about how hard it is being sober.

As he shared with me methods he employs to stay sober, I suddenly interrupted him.

“You didn’t see the boy,” I blurted into the phone, “That’s why it’s easier for you. You didn’t see the body.”

Where the hell did that come from?  

“Yes I did,” he said, “you mean the body on Esplanade, in the shopping cart. I saw him.”

“You did.” I said, stunned. We’d never discussed this before, not anyway that I could remember.

“He was real?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “we both saw him. We were together, walking down Esplanade towards the river. We told people about it after we got out but nobody wanted to listen.”

“It was real?” I asked again.

“It was real.” He said.  

A feeling of relief flooded my body. I hadn’t made him up.

Then, everything inside me tightened and I felt one of my spells coming on. The fear bubbled. The anger surged.

“He was real,” I pronounced to the heavens and myself.

The next day, I woke with the boy floating above me, a tiny figure in a shopping cart, floating as if on Alladin’s carpet near the ceiling of my apartment while I paced the floor below.

I went outside on to my porch and looked up at the sky. The clouds were big and white and fluffy like pillows. The sun shone out golden from behind those great big pillows.   

The boy in the cart will never see this again, I thought, unless he can see the clouds from the other side now.

I smiled just a little. Tears began to run down my face.  

I brought my hands to my face in prayer position and kissed them up to the heavens, to the boy, to the sky.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said to the boy floating above me.

I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t lying. He was real.

I can’t process him out of my head. I can’t ever forget him because he is part of me now. But I can let him live in the heavens as well as in my memory. I can do him the honor of remembering him without a bottle or a pipe.  

And, now that I can see him clearly and remember him as flesh and blood, I can also tell him how very sorry I am for him and for our city.

One of my greatest fears since Katrina, the thought that enters my head when I have one of my spells is: SOMETHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME & NO ONE IS GOING TO NOTICE.  

To the boy in the shopping cart, I just want to say: I NOTICED.

Copyright Donna Maria Bonner, 2012

No Door in New Orleans closes properly.

No one who has lived here can deny this truth.

All the houses sink into the swampy land, one with the environment.

All the doors buckle and warp in the humidity and rain.

This can make one feel either trapped or free.

THE OIL SPILL

IF ANYONE IS OUT THERE READING THIS, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO POST RE THE OIL SPILL!

ALSO, I FOR ONE WOULD LIKE TO HEAR ABOUT VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO KNOW NOTHING ABOUT OIL...CLEANING ANIMALS, WHATEVER.

WHY IS OUR HOME ALWAYS UNDER ATTACK? SHOULD WE CRY, SCREAM, OR BOTH?

BEST,
DONNA

When Things Fall Apart

This week I was going to begin posting some of my short stories here on Katrina Reverb. However, as Peanut and I took our morning stroll on this slightly dreary Sunday in Austin, I had my Walkman tuned to the National Public Radio program “On the Media” and heard an interview with reporter Sheri Fink about her Pulitzer Prize winning, Katrina disaster-related article “The Deadly Choices at Memorial.”

Fink’s story concerns events at Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans during the days following the levee breaks, events that included charges that patients deemed too frail to airlift from the devastation may have been euthanized. If you’d like to read Fink’s troubling account, visit www.propublica.org I think you’ll also be drawn to the site’s “Ongoing Investigations” section where unexplained deaths that occurred in the city during the chaos are chronicled. Thank you propublica.org for sticking with these difficult stories.

I’m not going to attempt to comment on the legality or morality of the actions of others during the disaster. I feel loath to pass judgment on decisions victims make in life threatening circumstances. Nonetheless, the Propublica articles took me back to the difficulties I’ve experienced as a writer and educator trying to convey the desperation we in the city felt and the other-worldliness of being trapped in a disaster that, for many days, no one on the outside seemed, at least from our vantage point, to notice. What I’d like to do in this entry is describe the mental state created in individuals who are left to face disaster on their own.

When big things you trust fail, you realize that anything can fail and you start looking around wondering where the next failure will occur. After all, you want to be ready so the next strike doesn’t knock you off your feet.

Before the disaster, if someone had asked me whether New Orleans could be destroyed by a hurricane, I would have answered, “Unfortunately yes.” However, if someone had asked me if the levees that protected our city could fail, I would have answered something along the lines of, “Good God, I hope not!” or “Dear Lord, I never thought of that!” Further, if someone had asked me if I thought the U.S. government might fail to respond if a U.S. city were caught in a web of destruction, I would have answered with a resounding “NO.” No matter what problems I had with our federal government prior to the disaster, I did trust that the appropriate officials and departments would respond to citizens’ imminent, life and death needs.

As I like to say to people in my adopted city, “Fellow Austinites, do you ever stare toward west Austin and think about what would happen if the Mansfield Damn collapsed, the city lost essential services, we had no news from the outside, and government officials at every level failed to provide relief?” They tend to look at me in stunned silence. Unfortunately, many also avoid conversation with me after that. No one likes to be reminded of vulnerabilities.

As the levees failed, even we who were safe in the dry French Quarter, began to wonder where the next collapse would occur and when the water would reach us. This concern was not unrealistic as flooding was then spreading across the city from the original 53 levee breaks as water levels equalized between Lake Pontchartrain and the streets. We watched fires burn in the distance. We heard rumors that fire departments and police had run out of supplies and fuel. We knew that most of the city was inaccessible without a boat. Every day of the disaster, I awoke expecting the National Guard to drive triumphantly into the city and offer relief. Every day, I was disappointed.

I remember scanning the horizon from the roof of the Royal Street building where I sheltered, wondering what might have happened in the outside world to cause the disaster to be ignored. “Do you think terrorists attacked Atlanta, Los Angeles, or New York while Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast? That could throw our nation into total chaos,” I commented to Frank who stood beside me. At that point, I honestly believed our government may have fallen while our city faced destruction! That was the only explanation I could find for the fact that we were suffering alone.

I also remember stepping out of my car in Houston, Texas, after we fled the city, and being completely taken aback by the fact that, although New Orleanians were then fighting for their lives, life in Houston—less than a day’s drive away—was completely normal. People were jogging and walking their dogs! Finding myself on a normal Houston Street while my city struggled for survival was one of the most surreal experiences of my life.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that no matter what an individual experienced in the city during the disaster, she or he also experienced mind-numbing fear in a context in which little help was offered. In a situation like this, you have to be the agent of your own survival. You fear everything and you fear nothing. You know you may make mistakes in your efforts to survive, but all you can do is your best because there is no help for you. This experience of being alone and endangered is in and of itself incredibly traumatizing.

For anyone who has lived through a situation like this, the memories are haunting. For anyone who has not, the reality of this experience is hard to fathom. It is, after all, difficult to imagine a world in which all the infrastructural support that constantly surrounds a person suddenly disappears. To do this is to picture a world unhinged. As soldiers say, you don’t really know how you’ll react in extreme circumstances until you are on the inside, so please do not judge we who have been there too harshly.

But, in truth, some times we survivors are harder on ourselves than anyone else is. Survival is a glorious thing and those who come through difficulties should be honored. But survival can also be an ugly business leaving one with survivors’ guilt. My own survivors’ guilt centers on the fact that I escaped the city while others still suffered in the streets. In reality, I was not set up to help the thousands who suffered more than I did. But, nonetheless, having a taste of what they experienced let me know how badly they needed help and how little anyone did.

Maybe, I think as I toss and turn in my bed at night, I could have opened the doors of the Royal Street building for use by the displaced. Maybe I should have thrown people into the hatchback of my car as I drove out of the city. But I didn’t. Instead, I thought about my own survival and that of those nearest me.

I wish I could talk about this with other people but I believe there’s been a sort of societal-level denial about what happened in New Orleans. The experience was too terrible, too beyond the scope of things that are supposed to happen in an industrialized, wealthy nation like the U.S. For non-New Orleanians to discuss the disaster is on some level to open themselves up to the realization that their communities may also be vulnerable. For New Orleanians who evacuated for the disaster, especially those who have returned to live in the city, the discussion provokes the memory of the terrible and needless suffering that occurred on their streets. And for those of us who were there, fear, anger, and guilt surround our experiences and we have been offered little societal or professional help to guide us through our grief and trauma.

The disaster was the site of much in the way of heroic action. Fishermen from southwest Louisiana snuck into the city to rescue individuals when the government failed to respond. People around the nation took in those of us made homeless by the floods. New Orleanians helped New Orleanians. But on some level, for our entire nation, the disaster was a failure. We as a nation, and I include myself in this, failed to keep our government accountable for its citizens’ safety. Perhaps because we have been so ashamed of this failure, we’ve also as a society swept the disaster under the rug, as if to say, “Hey, don’t look at that. That’s not how we usually act.”

This has been a convoluted blog entry and I realize that, even here, I may have failed to convey my ideas. To be honest, this is stuff I’m still working on in therapy to give myself some kind of understanding of the tragedy, what it has done to me, and how I might proceed to find healing. Nonetheless, what I think I’m trying to say here is that everything that happened in the city during the disaster needs to be understood as occurring in extremis—in situations most people have little context to understand. In order to think about life during a disaster, you need to be able to think outside of the box of the blessed normality that defines most of our days! Then, maybe, you will have some idea of what it felt like to be there and, maybe, if there is more empathy and understanding, we and our nation can better heal. All My Best, Donna

PS: As many of you know or may have realized, I am new to blogging. I’m trying to figure out how to access various features. I’m particularly interested in learning how to make the blog appear to searches engines, how to make it easier for folks to follow the blog, and in general, how to make Katrina Reverb more accessible. I’m doing the research but if anyone can offer any tips, please email them to katrinareverb@gmail.com

Also, I beg of you kind readers to please leave comments on the blog! I can’t tell you how encouraging your remarks are to me! And to all who have already left comments on these pages, I thank you for making a connection and hope you’ll do so again.

Finally, The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center just came out with Facts for Features: Hurricane Katrina Impact -- an easy-to-read 1-pager of basic statistics on the immediate impact of Katrina and the floods. Follow the link (if I've done this correctly and the link works!) or cut and paste the following address:

http://www.gnocdc.org/Factsforfeatures/HurricaneKatrinaImpact/index.html

Even for those of us who know the situation, reading these stats can be mind-blowing.

I Dissociated

I dissociated during the disaster. For the longest time, I referred to this as my “Out of Body Experience,” but I didn’t speak of it with many people. I did try to write about it but even then it proved difficult to find words to convey the ineffable state I entered when my body realized New Orleans had become a dangerous place.

It happened Monday afternoon, maybe 12 hours after Katrina passed. With sunlight streaming down and peaceful blue skies above, Frank and I left the Royal Street building where we’d sheltered and took a walk through the Quarter to see how folks had fared.

When we first hit the streets, you could feel camaraderie in the air. People were relieved the storm had passed and so little damage had been done. Sure, some roofs were leaking, some trees were down in parks, and folks told us of a building on Toulouse Street—I think—that had lost its chimney. But, in general, people seemed happy, helping one another or cleaning the streets in front of their buildings. No one in the Quarter, including us, yet knew that the levees had failed.

When we hit Esplanade Avenue, the boundary between the Quarter and the neighborhoods known as the Marigny and the Bywater, I felt a sudden shift in mood. There weren’t many people on the streets and those we saw looked nervous. A police cruiser drove by, the only car on the street, and as I stared at the uniformed men inside, I saw wide-eyed shock on their faces.

As Frank and I walked toward the river (the Mississippi, that is), we encountered an elderly man standing motionless in the center of the street. He was balding and shirtless, wearing khaki shorts and clean white sneakers. His face, like his potbelly below, was pointing straight downriver. As we passed the man, we heard him mumbling,

There are bodies in the Bywater, bodies in the Bywater, you know.

We ignored the man. He freaked us out. We didn’t stop to check on him. We just kept moving.

We walked along the River to Canal Street, New Orleans’ main thoroughfare, and that was when it happened. Here is how I’ve written of it in my unpublished memoir of Katrina:

Frank and I joined a crowd gathered at the foot of Canal. As we approached, I could smell nervous perspiration—the heavy odor of fear. I peered around the people and looked out on to Canal. Big objects like industrial fans had been dashed to the ground and lay splayed next to broken power lines. Wet draperies flapped like flags from the broken windows of the high-rise hotels. Display windows had shattered at the Canal Place Mall. Carefully dressed Brooks Brothers mannequins stood covered in glass, their fall sweaters still jauntily tied about their necks, their button downs only slightly wet.

Like the mannequins, the crowd was still. As we stared at the damage, Frank squeezed my damp hand. Then, something strange happened. My perspective shifted.

All at once, I could see everything, as if I were floating above the city. I peered below me and saw New Orleanians wandering through the debris, confused looking cops gathering on Canal Street. I glanced further and saw houses filled with water and bodies floating in the water.

All the while, the people in the French Quarter continued to blithely clean up.

This was truly a magical experience. It was as if my fear had revealed a superpower I hadn’t known I possessed. I was flying above everything. I could see everything. I could conquer all this!

I opened myself up to my new vision. This time, I realized, New Orleans hadn’t dodged another bullet. This time we were in trouble.

We have to get inside, I thought. We have to get back to the building. It’s not safe out here. Keep your cool and get home, my vision told me, and you will survive.

Then, my perspective suddenly returned to the ground. I turned to Frank next to me and smiled. He smiled back. We stood like that for a few minutes, just staring at each other, holding hands, and smiling big dumb smiles until I found myself wondering if Frank had had a vision too.

“I think we should get back to the Royal Street building,” Frank said, “there’s nothing we can do out here.”

“You’re right,” I answered, “it’s dangerous.”

And, with that, we turned and walked toward the Quarter.

Recently, I’ve been reading books about trauma recommended to me by my therapist in Austin. In The Body Bears the Burdon: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease (2001, NY: The Haworth Medical Press), Robert C. Scaer, MD, discusses the chemicals that were probably floating around my brain as I floated above the city. One of the most startling things I learned from Scaer is that the eyes of a person under stress can actually see more! Scaer writes:

The eyes diverge at the moment of trauma…This response is as automatic as the stretch reflex, and serves to maximize the field of vision in the situation of threat or danger. (2001: 49)

The books I’ve been reading also tell me that my Out of Body Experience may be the origin of some of the PTSD symptoms I’ve experienced.

Since the disaster, when presented with a stressful but normal situation—like the oh-so-necessary-looking for a job, I often freeze, feeling unable to sit down and write letters or fill out forms. Before Katrina, I’d always been a go-getter, never afraid of rejection or new situations, so my freeze response has surprised me.

Now, I wonder if this response may be due to the fact that, during my ultimate experience of survival, I came through with flying colors because I hid inside a building, flying under everybody’s radar until my friends and I could get out of the city.

As my neighbor, who I’ll call J, a youthful 26 year old Iraq veteran with a Purple Heart and PTSD, recently said to me,

The Body is an amazing thing. It gives you what you need to survive but then it’s like it doesn’t know how to turn it off once you’re back in normal life.

Lucky for me, I’m finding that as I come to understand more about my disaster experiences, it’s becoming easier for me to again participate successfully in life. Recently, with hard work, therapy, and thought, I’m becoming more resilient, more able to face normal challenges. But healing is a journey and I’m still on that journey. I strive for even greater healing in the future.

But what I’m left wondering is whether any of you reading this blog have had or heard of similar dissociative experiences, occurring during Katrina or some other traumatic circumstance. I know it’s hard to discuss things like this. It may make us feel vulnerable or we may fear people’s reactions. But I, for one, am tired of that fear and hope this blog can be a safe place for discussion. So, please, share your experiences and ideas. I’d like to know that I’m not alone!!! Best, Donna

A Taste of Disaster

Ironically, I sheltered during the disaster in a dreamy mansion on Royal Street, in the heart of the French Quarter, a property owned by my boyfriend’s wealthy father and stepmother. My boyfriend Frank managed the property and we took over an empty furnished apartment and sheltered there with his elderly mother Peggy and my dog Peanut. What we went through was a far cry from what I would have experienced if I’d stayed at my home in NO East but it was troubling nonetheless.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall near daybreak on Monday, August 29^th, 2005. The 53 levee breaks / failures that destroyed 80% of New Orleans (including my neighborhood) began early Monday morning but we in the French Quarter, which remained dry, had no understanding of what was happening around us until Monday afternoon. What you have below represents the moment I knew we needed to flee the city.

Early Tuesday afternoon, a bunch of young, tough-looking white guys—the kind of guys you’d expect to see working security at a Pantera concert—took over a boutique hotel a few doors down from us. They were shirtless, sporting dark colored shorts lined with pockets and sturdy-looking work boots. Three of the seven guys were strapping, shiny guns in holsters at their chests or along their legs. I watched from the balcony of the Royal Street building as they built a debris barricade at the corner of Royal and St. Phillip Streets, not far from C.C.’s Coffee House.

“Hey, what are you doing? What if emergency vehicles need to get through?” yelled a caretaker from a Bed and Breakfast across the street. Ah, the ironies of experiencing the apocalypse in a high-end tourist district.

One of the tough guys eyed the caretaker.

“Mister, don’t worry,” he yelled back, “we’re gonna protect you from the niggers. They’re shooting off guns down on Rampart Avenue. They’re looting the stores.”

“What about emergency vehicles?” the man yelled in return.

“What emergency vehicles?” another of the guys answered, “Don’t you get it yet, man? Nobody is coming to help us. We have to help ourselves.” He laughed.

“Fuck you,” yelled the caretaker, “I don’t want your protection.”

During the length of the argument, I tried to send telepathic messages to the caretaker. I stared over at him, trying to think as loudly as possible:

“Mister, get inside. Can’t you see these guys have guns? They’re playing out their Mad Max Beyond the Superdome fantasies and I don’t want to have to run in the street and to give you first aid after they’ve shot you. Don’t do this to me, Mister. Get back inside.”

Finally, my messages seemed to get through and the caretaker shuffled back inside the B&B as the guys continued building their barricade. I still sat on the balcony, trying to fly under the radar.

A few minutes later, I looked down and recognized a girl walking down Royal Street. I couldn’t remember her name but I’d met her at the Rose Nicaud Coffee House in the nearby neighborhood of Marigny. She was wearing a beautiful 1950s, green checkered, cinch-waist dress with a matching headband holding back thick curls. Downtown New Orleans girls have such impeccable taste in clothes even during disasters.

“Hey,” I yelled down, catching the girl’s eye, “You ok?”

She looked up at me and I remember thinking that her eyes looked feral. As she stopped to talk, she leaned against the two by four she held in her right hand. That was when I noticed that the back of her dress was coated in sweat and the wood she held was encrusted with nails.

“I’m ok,” she yelled up to me, “but the police just told me we’re on our own.”

“We’re on our own?” I yelled back.

“Yeah,” she answered, “Somebody tried to break into my place last night and I went to report it and the police told me they had bigger problems to deal with. They said we’re on our own now.”

Oh My God, I thought, the guys with the guns were right. We are on our own and no one is coming to help. What, I wondered, could have happened to the rest of the nation that a disaster like this could be ignored? Was this really the apocalypse? Had our government failed while our city filled with water?

The girl and I talked a while, exchanging rumors about conditions in the city. I threw her a bottle of water. Then she walked away toward St. Anne Street where she planned to stay with friends.

After she left, I continued watching the street from the balcony. I spotted two young black men down the block, each pushing a shopping cart. As they got closer, I saw that one basket was filled with ice, the other with chips. My heart started beating faster. The crazy guys were now standing proudly beside their barricade.

Please God, I prayed, don’t let the crazy guys shoot the black guys. I ran inside and started searching for materials I could use as bandaging in case anybody got hurt. I fixed on the big floor to ceiling curtains in the front room and then ran back outside to see what was happening.

That was when I knew we had to find a way out of the city. I didn’t want to be in a position in which I had to choose between my safety and the necessity of helping someone who’d been shot.

Amazingly, the toughies with the guns ignored the two black men walking down the street. Instead, the caretaker from the B&B surprised me by coming back outside and yelling at them.

“Hey, where’d you get that stuff?” the caretaker said gesturing toward the baskets, “Did you steal it?”

The two young men ignored him and continued walking. Finally, when they’d passed our part of the street, one of them looked back and yelled.

“Mister,” he said with concern in his voice, “We got this stuff at the Robert’s Grocery over on St. Claude. Things are getting crazy. You better get you some food before there’s nothing left.”

The next day Frank, Peggy, Peanut, and I fled the city. Frank and I ran up the car ramp of the high-rise lot where I’d parked my little red Hyundai Accent before the storm. We traversed nine floors without getting winded. Talk about an adrenaline rush. When we started the car, I remember feeling invisible, like Wonder Woman.

We convoyed out of the city in my Hyundai followed by friends in a jeep. As we drove away from the Quarter, we worried that there might be no dry route out of our city. After all, if we could easily drive out via the Crescent City Connection—the big bridge spanning the Mississippi River, wouldn’t help have already arrived? But, luckily, we hugged the river and crossed the bridge without anything blocking our way. A few other vehicles joined us on the bridge, while pedestrians strolled across, all of us making our way out of disaster.

And that was when it hit me! If we could make it out of the city this easily, surely the combined forces of the U.S. government could have entered at any time. They could have driven in across that bridge just as we’d driven out, and launched rescue boats where the flooding began. They could have set up emergency relief stations along the river. The federal government could have helped. They’d simply chosen not to.

I don’t think I have any words to explain how much that realization hurt me. Prior to the disaster, I don’t think I’d realized how much faith I placed in government. I’d truly believed that, in the case of a true disaster—one in which people’s lives were endangered, the government and the people of our nation would come together to help. Now, I realized, at least when it came to my city’s suffering, this was not true.

So, readers, this is just a little taste of how it felt to be in the city for the disaster. I tell these stories to purge them from my soul. I tell them to banish the anger and guilt. I also tell them because they are part, not just of my city’s history, but also of the American story. Many New Orleanians have had at least some chance to tell their stories of the disaster but so often few have listened. I hope as I continue to tell my story on this blog and offer my reflections on the disaster, others will come forward to discuss their experiences as well as offer questions and comments. Post stories and ideas in the comments section here or email me at katrinareverb@gmail.com

See you next week! Donna