Back Home in the Dome

Two weeks ago the New Orleans Saints came back home to the Superdome. After millions of dollars in renovations, the Superdome was back in action and it was time for a little bit of football. And what a game that was. For weeks prior to the Saints' first home game since Katrina, which marked the grand reopening of the Dome, New Orleanians spoke of the upcoming event with pride and a restored faith in the future of the city.

By game day, tickets were selling for $2000 a seat. I had lost hope of being able to go to the game, but in a gesture of pure southern hospitality, a very sweet waitress with whom I had made friends assured me that she would get me in to that game. She had been trying to get me a ticket for several days, asking everyone she knew, but by the day of the game we had still not had any luck. I had given up. I should have more faith than that. A couple of hours before the game, I received a call from Charlotte, my new friend. She had got me in the door. A ticket I still did not have, but a friend of hers at CNN had offered to sneak me in with a press pass.

When I reached the dome, it seemed that half the city had turned out for the game: if they weren't inside, they were outside hosting tailgate parties and cheering along with the crowd inside. And within minutes of the kickoff,

TOUCHDOWN!!

The shouts were deafening, and people started joking that the sheer energy put forth by the crowd would blow the roof off the dome for a second time. The Saints proceeded to play a phenomenal game against the Falcons, who did not score a single touchdown. By the end of the night, the Saints had won 23-3 and New Orleans had achieved a moral victory of its own.

Congratulations, New Orleans. The whole country was cheering for you on that night.

Well, maybe not Atlanta.

Welcome

"Welcome to the edge of America," a man says to me as we sit in the hotel bar. "Welcome to storyville." He was in the convention center a year ago after his home was flooded. The only possession he managed to save was his address book. An old boy scout, he kept a plastic bag in his pocket for just such an occasion. He is a photographer, but he didn't save his camera or his cell phone. He saved this old address book, or part of it. Part of the book showed signs of water damage and some pages had been stripped away, but a good portion of it was intact. He says he felt like someone who had just left a concentration camp. He had nothing in the world but this one book, and with those contacts he has traveled over 5000 miles.

"Welcome to Pompey," the same man said to a woman walking down St. Charles Ave last year. She turned to him, chest out, with a certain sexual liveliness and said, clearly and crisply, "This is not Pompey." Nothing in New Orleans is back to normal, almost everyone I have spoken to has emphasized that, and they want people to be aware of it. But New Orleans is not a dead city, and they want to make sure that people know that too.

"It wasn't America," someone told me the day I got here, referring to the days after Katrina hit. Many people here felt that way, it seems. One woman I spoke to, Jane, rode the storm out in Bay St. Louis. She still remembers the smell of the rotting bodies, and lifts her hand up to cover her nose as she speaks of it. By the time a mandatory evacuation had been called in Bay St. Louis, there was no gas left in the town. So she stayed. After several days, she managed to make it to Jackson, Mississippi with her 11 year old daughter. She got a hotel room, and asked her daughter if she wanted to go with her to a nearby Popeyes to pick up some food. Her daughter chose to stay in the hotel room and shave her legs.

Jane walked through a gas station in order to get to the Popeyes. The line was several miles long - not blocks, Jane emphasizes, miles. As she was passing through, one car tried to cut into the line - the driver got two bullets to the head for his trouble.

As I leave the bar, Jane turns to me and gives me a hug and makes the symbol of a cross on my forehead. A blessing, she says. She still has faith, somehow. Faith and hospitality, those are two things in abundant supply here in New Orleans. No matter the horrors that people here have faced, one thing they all say is "welcome."

Arriving in the Big Easy

I flew into New Orleans on a Delta plane that had seemingly been borrowed from a museum. Somehow, it felt appropriate. I had wondered if the destruction would be visible from the air: it wasn't from where I sat.

When I stepped out of the terminal, the air in New Orleans was hot, sticky, sweet - a typical southern morning. The cab I hired was falling apart. One of the seats had a large hole in it; it looked like it was close to disconnecting from the van completely. The cabbie was a black woman whom I guessed was in her fifties. She hummed a tune and sang under her breath. The van was littered with peanut butter crackers and bottles of water. Something wasn't right about her. It was eerie. She seemed unhinged.

I looked out the window, curious as to what I would see. You have to look closely in New Orleans to see the destruction in some areas, in others you can see 3000 square foot piles of splintered wood that were once houses. Even when things look alright, though, they're usually not. We passed one row of houses from the highway: everything looked normal, but the FEMA trailers in the driveway were a giveaway. The houses were unlivable.

My cab pulled up in front of a building. "I think this is it," said my cabbie. I told her that it wasn't. She insisted that it was, but after a brief argument in which I pointed out that the address didn't match the one that I had given her, she huffily started driving again. A few minutes later, she pulled up in front of another building. "This is it," she said again. This time, it took nearly ten minutes to convince her that the building we were parked in front of was not my hotel. For that matter, it wasn't a hotel at all.

T Minus 3 Days

Three days and counting, I will arrive in New Orleans. Three days and counting, I wonder: what will I see?

People ask me why I'm going: I quip that I like rubble. I then instantly feel guilty for making light of the destruction of a city.

People ask me what I expect: That's a much harder question to answer. The truth is I'm trying very hard not to have any expectations.

A year ago in Houston, I worked with several Katrina refugees. Their stories were vivid; their eyes spoke volumes. I expected to see anger, frustration, despair, fear, grief. They were internally displaced persons, and I expected them to be, well, emotionally displaced as well.

I worked with one family for several days. Their home had been flooded along with much of the city; the men in the family seemed to have washed away as well. Some had walked off long ago; one had walked away in the days leading up to the storm.

Little of what I saw conformed to my expectations. Yes, they were angry, uncertain about the future and afraid of what it might hold. But mostly they were tired. Unsurprised by the ordeal they had gone through or the lack of support they had received, the emotional toll was still easy to discern. When Rita came barreling in to town, I thought that that would be their breaking point. Of course, I have since learned to leave my expectations behind: they are often far from what I see.

With the anniversary of Katrina fast approaching, new storms are brewing in the gulf, and celebrations are being planned. Celebrations are not something I would have expected. I suppose that’s another set of expectations I ought to check at the door.