The Hamori Story
Hickory, North Carolina, September 9, 2005
If I could be Póci Rerrich, the undisputed king of hyperbole, I would start my hurricane report, In Media Res, as follows:
“As I was desperately swimming across the fetid waters of Bayou St. John toward a rescue man holding out a bottle of cold water toward me, I had to push the bloated corpse of a grossly obese black woman out of my way. And just then -- I heard a scream ‘Watch out for the alligator behind you’…”
But, in reality, my New Orleans hurricane story is so simple and so fortunate that I feel a bit guilty that we suffered so little in comparison to those poor people whose struggles you watched on television. Annemarie and I would weather out the horrible storm at the second floor apartment of our rental property on Peniston Street, near the Garden District of uptown New Orleans on safe high ground with an open egress route from the blighted city.
Of course it was inconvenient not to have air conditioning, lights, refrigeration, television, etc. for a week. And with temperatures in the 90s (~ 35 C) we missed running water (we had to set up a latrine in the garden – something I have not used since my boy-scout days). We were abruptly cut off from the Internet and had to rely on pocket radios for news that only vaguely explained the devastating flood over 80% of the city. We kept worrying about the status of our ground-level main home close to the levies of Lake Pontchartrain that we locked up safely (?) and left before hurricane Katrina hit the city.
It was Monday afternoon when the strongest gusts hit us uptown. Howling winds, flying roof tiles, giant oak trees and telephone poles creaking and breaking, windows rattling – it was scary to observe all these from our second-floor bay window. In a few hours, however, it was over. The eye of the hurricane actually passed about 80 miles (130 km) west of us – so it was not the “worst case scenario” our newspapers had been so scared of. We had plenty of food (and beer and wine) in our uptown apartment, but ran out of drinking water after 3 days. Fortunately, right after the storm, the Rite-Aid convenience store at the nearby intersection of St. Charles and Louisiana Avenues was “opened up” (a.k.a. looted) so that and I could get bottled drinking water from there. (Annemarie was first horrified of this whole idea, but when I told her I saw some cat food at the store, she sent me back for some cans to feed the 3 cat refugees camping out in our garden!) Later we would solve the dishwashing- and bathing-water problem by climbing over the (wind-demolished) fence to our abandoned (rich) neighbor’s yard and took buckets of water from their fancy swimming pool. Of course, we would swim in the pool too, enjoying immensely the clean and cool water. It made me mad, though, when the some of the helicopters flying overhead nastily swirled fallen tree leaves on my freshly clean-scooped pool. In the first 4-5 days, there were hundreds of these noisy choppers flying about; though never helping anybody on the ground, just filming diligently the misery on the ground to feed the screens of the billions of TV screens around the world.
Friday, I had the naïve idea of using my bicycle to approach and check out our main home 12 miles away on the lakefront (Ted – I did remove the pedals’ foot braces!). I could get no further, however, than about 3 miles where a group of soldiers near the Superdome sternly stopped me and directed me to go immediately to the newly opened evacuation center at the Convention Hall. But, by that time, we already heard the rumors about the inhumane conditions both at the Superdome and the Convention Hall, and so I just pedaled back directly to our Uptown apartment haven.
By Monday, the 5th, it became obvious that we could not get back to our lakefront house, and that the city authorities were desperately chasing everybody out of town (with threats of drinking-water withholding or even physical force) so we decided to leave for our daughter’s (Isabelle Hamori Eustice) home near Hickory, North Carolina. After 950 miles (1500 km) that took us 15 hours to cover we arrived to their house and were very happy to see Isabelle, her husband Ben, Annamarie (5) and Timothy (2) and Blacky their new puppy. Only after watching and reading the mass of news about the New Orleans catastrophe, did we finally realize that they (and all of our friends) had a good reason to worry about us during all that time.
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