In late summer 1965, I had just turned a shy, gawky 16 and was beginning my junior year at Francis T. Nichols High School in the far eastern reaches of the city of New Orleans, only blocks from the border with St. Bernard Parish. It was a new school for me and with about 4,000 students, much larger than any school I had ever attended.
We lived in one of New Orleans’ “shotgun” houses, where the rooms are lined one behind the other with no hallways; most are narrow but very long. Ours had high ceilings and huge sliding doors separating the rooms. The house was about a block from the Mississippi River and a few blocks from the Industrial Canal, a shipping route from the river to the Intracoastal Waterway about 5 miles to the west.
I tracked the meanderings of a hurricane called Betsy for several days and now the storm was making a beeline for New Orleans. With the ignorance that comes with inexperience, I was excited and looking forward to it hitting New Orleans and breaking up an endlessly boring summer.
Leaving school on the afternoon of the night Betsy was to hit, the wind had already begun to pick up. Both my parents worked, so it was my job to fill up the bathtub and every pot and pan in the house with water. We had heard on the radio that that was the thing to do because you never knew when you would have drinking water again. I grew nervous as the wind grew and the television chattered about shelter locations and how smart it would be to get out of low-lying areas.
I was concerned about my sister, three years older than I and newly married, who lived with her husband and his family in lower St. Bernard Parish, a rural area east of New Orleans with the Mississippi on one side and a massive, shallow body of water, Lake Borgne, on the other.
Night fell and the wind rose. As the power failed and we were plunged into darkness, the transistor radio turned ominous with reports of winds at the mouth of the Mississippi gusting to more than 160 miles an hour. Heavy damage was expected in New Orleans soon.
Although the house was shaking and I could hear debris striking the wood-frame exterior, what I remember most was the sound of the wind howling on the other side of the walls and the vision that sticks with me to this day of transformers lighting what had to be the blackest night anyone had ever seen when they arced and exploded in the driving rain.
The storm lasted through the night and was still blowing fairly hard at sun-up, but not so hard that we couldn’t get out. My father and I decided we’d go to his job across town. The damage we saw was unfathomable and remains with me to this day.
Most of what we saw, though, was wind damage, fallen trees and blown-down fences, with missing roofs and a few crumbled brick structures. It was the amount of the damage that was staggering. Not one structure seemed to have escaped harm. Ours suffered only minor damage, a few shingles blown off and some weatherboarding ripped from the outside walls.
It was later that we learned that the levee holding back the waters of the Industrial Canal had failed and that subdivisions abutting the levee in St. Bernard’s Arabi section had flooded to the eaves of the houses.
It was several nerve-racking days before we heard from my sister. She and her husband and his family survived the storm in lower St. Bernard, spending the night at the local high school. But their house that was in the late stages of construction had floated away in the storm surge and had to be destroyed.
Forty years is a long time, and I can’t remember when electricity was restored and schools reopened, but eventually those things happened. New Orleans returned to normal.
Betsy, while fading in people’s memory, remains part of mine. I am still mesmerized by hurricanes and follow them closely every summer and fall. After high school, I left New Orleans and only went back to visit. It wasn’t the hurricane; life just took me elsewhere.
My sister stayed in St. Bernard and raised three children who now have children of their own. They also remained in the area, at least until the day before Katrina.
For many people who have spent time in New Orleans, that most unusual of American cities, there is more than just a geographical and familial pull. There’s the cuisine and the patois, the architecture and music, the steamy summers and cool, misty winters. It’s the Big Easy and the city that care forgot. It’s New Orleans. There is no other. It’s possible that Katrina has changed all that, but I doubt it.
Now my sister and her husband have set up house in a motel in Birmingham, Ala., while her kids and their children are in Texas. They will go back to New Orleans, though probably without homes waiting for them.
They will have to start all over. Yet they are the lucky ones.
