On My Former Storm Hubris

Where I grew up in Louisiana, I had to show some respect for hurricanes, but little fear. The fifty or so miles north from New Orleans to my family’s house was a crucial buffer, enough to make a twelve-year-old see a hurricane as more an annoyance than a danger—I might miss The Rockford Files, but I probably wouldn’t have to slosh through muck, moving the household gods to higher ground.

Of course, that outlook changed when I moved to New Orleans itself years later. It didn’t change enough, though. I suffered from a sort of hurricane hubris. I was one of those who thought that the city had a sort of mojo—it might suffer glancing damage, but the storms would always veer off at the last minute. In my experience, they always seemed to. I knew the history of the city—it wasn’t like Betsy had hit in the Dark Ages. But I just put on the historical blinders and went about my day.

I still respected the storms—I’ve never been one of those hurricane-party sorts. I didn’t want my car to be flooded, or to have to worry about my pets, or to lose electricity or be stuck in the house for a couple of days. So I always evacuated. But, let’s face it, evacuating was comparatively easy for me, with family nearby in a generally safe zone. I’d just leave for a few days, come back, check around my windows for signs of water seepage, and clean out my freezer. The neighbors without a car who didn’t know anyone outside Mid-City—they were the ones who actually had to worry about a storm.

So on the Thursday night before Katrina, I was out celebrating the graduation of a friend from the Ph.D. program, drinking too many margaritas. When discussion turned to Katrina, it was dismissed almost immediately. We felt sorry for the Floridians who would be taking the blow again.

The next day, tired at work, I fended off calls from my roommate, telling her that we would keep our eyes on the storm’s track, but that it wasn’t time to panic yet. I thought she was overreacting. If it showed any signs of heading our way, we would just go to my mother’s house. The new forecasts were a concern, but we had plenty of time to prepare.

Even on Saturday morning, I was calm. Okay, we should leave the city, but we still had time. After I got gas and supplies, I might go to my karate class. Then I would need to shower, of course. And actually, there had been talk among some of my friends of a picnic, so I might want to stop by that before leaving the city.

In the face of my blasé calm, she was growing more nervous. In the end, I skipped karate to board up the windows, since the landlord said he was too busy. I was following my philosophy—prepare but don’t panic.

We left town for my step-uncle’s place at around three in the afternoon. He had a pool house we could stay in, and his property was even further north than my mother’s house, by about twenty minutes. Based on past experience, I thought we would be driving well into the night, but we were there in three hours. It was just another sign that everything was running smoothly.

It was just over three days later when my Pollyanna side crumbed. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Being trapped by fallen trees, lying with my face against the tile floor in an attempt to cool off, actually having to work out a system to ration our water—these events were a bit startling, and I promise that I will write about them later, but none of them fazed me. The breakdown came when we finally got to a place where we could hear the news. When we reached a hotel that had room for us, checked in, turned on the television, and heard the announcement that New Orleans would be closed for at least two months, I realized that I wasn’t going to be driving back into the city the next week, my biggest problem revising syllabi to make up for lost time. I realized that things had changed for many, many people. And I thought about the fact that I was one of the lucky ones, no matter how distraught I felt, and about how sad that was—that, in one day, more or less, we had all gone through such a drastic, surreal shift that our scale of misfortune would have to be recalibrated, and displacement with some measure of control would have to be considered a fairly good state of personal affairs.

I still had the Pollyanna fragments, though. For example, at that moment I would not have considered the possibility that over a month later I would be obsessively watching footage of the city, finding the roof of my house on satellite maps, drinking bourbon and brooding and wondering what was going to happen next. Katrina and subsequent events have required that I reexamine my basic ways of living and learn to deal with uncertainty in less self-destructive ways, which in itself is not a bad thing.

However, I don’t think we should reduce disasters to our personal laboratories for self-growth. In the last two years, several people have mentioned the recently ubiquitous saw about the Chinese character for crisis being formed by the characters for danger and opportunity. On the one hand, the message behind the assertion has that tone of mature acceptance that strikes a chord somewhere in my core, probably from too many adolescent afternoons watching Kung Fu reruns. On the other, it has the preachy tone that makes my pre-adolescent self want to shout, “You’re not the boss of me!”

And now I learn, thanks to University of Pennsylvania Sinologist Victor Hair, not only that the adage is a misrepresentation of the meaning of the individual characters, but also that it is based on a misunderstanding of the way terms are constructed in Chinese. While my adolescent Kung Fu watcher feels let down, my pre-adolescent mutineer exults.

It’s a recurring dilemma, convincing those two to get along. In the end, though, if I left them in the woods and waited to see who would walk out, the adolescent would probably lose. He would still vaguely believe in a mystic ability to turn aside the tempest. The pre-adolescent knows where it’s at. Sometimes, you should just take one look, and then run like hell.