Day of Wrath and Doom Impending

My Notepad window is presently only half-maximized. Behind this familiar and stolid contrast of black-on-white, there swirls a turmoil of vivid yellows, reds, and purples: an animated satellite view of hurricane Katrina, as it bears down on my ancestral southeast Louisiana and the city of New Orleans itself. Barring any unforeseen weakening, when Katrina slams into the southern parishes of Louisiana it will rank among the four most powerful hurricanes ever to strike the United States. Being below sea level, New Orleans practically floods whenever a carouser on Bourbon Street spills his last bit of drink into the gutter, and the city is only ever drained of rainwater through the action of electric pumping stations. Those stations will lose power very soon into the storm, and they will no doubt become inundated along with the rest of the city once the drains overflow. Even the most sober analysts expect the storm surge to crest the levees, Lake Pontchartrain to overstep its bounds, and New Orleans to become a brackish sea thoroughly polluted by industrial and biological waste.

And that's to say nothing of the wind.

Having but recently moved from LaPlace, Louisiana to Brunswick, Maine, I am physically far removed from the devastation that will soon ensue. Emotionally, however, I am scattered all over the map, in more senses than one. The city with which I've lived most of my life will very shortly endure a tremendous blow that may incapacitate it for months on end. The homes and livelihoods of dozens of my friends and family members will soon come under dire threat. The house in which I grew up, and which is still inhabited by my father and sister, will cease to be if the Lake shifts so much as a mile. My father's business as an inspector of real estate is predicated upon the existence of real estate to inspect. My cats can't swim for long.

All my life I've heard talk of The Big One -- the one that's destined to level New Orleans and drastically reshape the coastlines, population density, and cultural vitality of Louisiana. Well, on a long enough timeline, just about any prophecy is likely to be confirmed, and New Orleans' time is now up.

The effect that all this has on the psyche of a New Orleanian is not to provoke surprise or panic, but rather to confirm in our minds that we were right after all: we really are going to be flattened by Nature. It is perversely satisfying to observe in real-time as the mathematical probability of utter destruction approaches unity. Some small part of me cannot help but gloat at the fact that we doomsayers were right all along. Is this how Cassandra felt, when all of her terrible visions came to pass even against her utmost wishes otherwise? Was she, too, so rudely torn between laughing and weeping?

I've just minimized Notepad and refreshed the satellite imagery. The outer bands of Katrina are now lashing the state. I cannot tolerate staring at this bright abstraction of destruction for very long; the visions that it provokes in my head are undoubtedly worse than any damage a mere terrestrial storm might inflict. But I can't bring myself to close the browser, either; instead I merely shift Notepad over a bit, and obscure the map.

There is a sense in which the things that we humans construct are possessive of life; or if not life, then at least a pulse, which any sentiency may detect with ease. We imbue each of our artifacts with a quality that persists well beyond the life of the artisan; our ruins and remnants speak for us even when our own collective memory has faded, and it is for this reason that we value the permanent products of a culture nearly as much as the living culture itself. If New Orleans is laid waste, a great many cultural products will die along with dozens or (dare I say?) hundreds of people. I shall feel this loss keenly indeed.

(And to think that only two days ago, I had planned to lament the death of MMORPGs in a similar fashion!)

Comments

Certis cheered me up quite a bit with this:

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Having once been a resident of Louisiana (3 times over - Baton Rouge, Hammond, and Shreveport), and being a child of the gulf coast, I am keenly tuned to the fate of New Orleans. My wife and I both feel an ache at the thought of loss of life, but also the thought of a reshaped New Orleans, an epic loss of history and culture. I fear the worse, but find myself supposing that any minute now the storm will change track, or diminish in intensity, or just not manage that much devastation after all. I can only hope that it is all hyperbole and sensationalism, and that tomorrow we'll be surprised that we made such a fuss over Katrina. But I look at the tight formation, the crisply formed eye wall, and the unfailing track of the storm, and I wonder what will become of the big easy.

My thoughts to any left in the path of the storm. Evacuate. Find shelter. Stay safe.

And to think Florida has another storm in queue.

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As someone who grew up along the Gulf Coast, when I first heard about the hurricane changing directions, my first thought was "Well...yeah, it's hurricane season...", and went on with what I was doing. I've been working 16 hour days and haven't had much contact with the outside world via tv or internet...so it was only today that I realized Katrina had become a category five.

Listening to the doomsayers on the tv has me very worried about my friends and family in the area...as well as the friends and family of all of the rest of the gweejers. The Duck's dad said that the traffic getting out of Nawlins is so bad it's taking 8 hours to get to Baton Rouge. Holy Crap!

I know we have folks living there, those of you evacuating, please let me know if you need somewhere to go. The place is stacked to the corners with soap and lotion, and the whole place smells like vanilla cookies...but it's dry. Hugs to everyone affected.

Lobo, I hope your father, sister, and tribe of cats managed to evacuate safely? In the other thread, you mentioned they were still stuck on the highway. I wouldn't want to be in traffic when the Apocalypse comes.

My dad and sister are now in Lafayette, LA, so they should be fine. The cats are probably all wondering why there are bowls of food stacked upon bookshelves right now.

I have to admit that I'm a little preoccupied by the sense of impending doom as well. Hopefully the city - and its inhabitants - will survive. I would miss it dearly. I found myself watching CNN for hours on end today for the first time in nearly four years. All we can do is hope at this point. A 400 mile-wide finger of doom is something you just have to endure.

Dear God. I haven't been following the news, as I'm typically content, in what could probably be described most accurately as callous indifference, to ignore the afflictions of human beings outside my own narrow slice of reality. I now find myself glued to the news. Lobo, I'm glad to hear your father and sister are safe. My thoughts are with you and everyone else preparing to face the affects of this monster.

I'm from New Orleans as well, my family had a beach house over in Pass Christian in 1969. I remember going to check on it after Camile (I was 5) and the total destruction made quite an impression. The city got very lucky then.

I always wanted to take my wife to the Garden District and show her where I grew up, doesn't look like there will be one to show her. Kinda depressing. N.O. was in a always in a state of elegant decay, and was a very, very strange place to grow up. By kindergarden I knew what a drag queen was, and would not blink to step over passed out drunks and avoid puddles of vomit when we would go shopping in the Quarter early in the morning. "Wait until they are done hosing the drunks off the street", which they would literally do, was a common phrase in my house. Certain stores had pictures of naked people with little black bars over their midsections, and that was perfectly normal to me as a child. I'll bet growing up in Kansas was not like that.

That stuff, and the constant fear of crime (my uncle shot a man dead breaking into his house, and my father fired 5 rounds from an M-1 through our front door as someone had picked the lock and was trying to rock the chain out of the wall, our car was stolen twice, I was mugged at least 3 times walking to school) made for an interesting childhood.

Ah well, we always knew we had it comming it was when, not if.

Glad to hear your family made it out Lobo, lets see what happens next.

The Fly wrote:

Dear God. I haven't been following the news, as I'm typically content, in what could probably be described most accurately as callous indifference, to ignore the afflictions of human beings outside my own narrow slice of reality. I now find myself glued to the news. Lobo, I'm glad to hear your father and sister are safe. My thoughts are with you and everyone else preparing to face the affects of this monster.

I'm with you, this is the first I've read of Katrina that I actually bothered to understand. Off to Google News!

Good read as always, Lobo. I've been worrying/thinking a lot about Katrina and the city in her path. I hear it's back down to a category 4...no picnic, but hopefully not the nightmare scenario people were predicting.

Looks like the storm weakened slightly and veered to the east just before coming ashore. New Orleans will be damaged, but it will not suffer the thirty-foot floodwaters that had been feared. It seems New Orleans has dodged yet another bullet.

Yup, looks like the city narrowly dodged unspeakable disaster (would've made Andrew's levelling of the pandhandle look like pocket change in comparison). My entire extended family on my mom's side (as well as my mom) all live on the West Bank, and I was very worried about their homes. Frankly, I'm still worried about their homes. They all left the area on Saturday, so they're safe, aside from one of my uncles and his son, who are in the NOPD and are onsite trying to keep order.

I've been glued to the weather news on the hurricane all weekend, we're very lucky that the storm weakened overnight and veered slightly east of its previous course. Wow.

Lobo wrote:

It seems New Orleans has dodged yet another bullet.

Somebody living in the year 2314 will no doubt uncover an electronic archive of this thread, reach the end, and assume that everything worked out and we all lived happily ever after. So, let the record show that New Orleans did indeed get unreservedly clobbered, contrary to initial post-storm impressions.

Let the record also show, my friend, that you are akin to Nostradamus in your ability to forsee the future.

Lobo, 12 hours prior to the landing of Hurricane Katrina wrote:

...the city is only ever drained of rainwater through the action of electric pumping stations. Those stations will lose power very soon into the storm, and they will no doubt become inundated along with the rest of the city once the drains overflow. Even the most sober analysts expect the storm surge to crest the levees, Lake Pontchartrain to overstep its bounds, and New Orleans to become a brackish sea thoroughly polluted by industrial and biological waste.