We know what we smell like, okay?\u00a0 Hours and hours under the sun or smothered by night heat have us sweating coffee, sweating Red Bull.\u00a0 The clench of old cigarette smoke.\u00a0 Fast food and soda breath.\u00a0 We are covered in pet hair or the sticky evidence of children\u2019s fingerprints.\u00a0 We ceased to smell like travelers awhile ago.\u00a0 Now we\u2019re full-fledged refugees.\u00a0 We can\u2019t wait to get into the shower and come out scented, can\u2019t wait to just sit with the towel wrapped around us, limbs spread wide to air out and cool.\u00a0 But before that we have to spread the scent through hugs and handshakes, the reintroduction of family members to our hosts.\u00a0 Or, for the lodgers, we have to shuffle to the counter, smile, hand over our credit cards, and act calm before they\u2019ll give us the keys.\u00a0 In the shelters in the northern part of the state and across the border in Arkansas, in the community centers, high school gyms, and mega-churches converted into camps, the line we\u2019ve been in since before we boarded the buses evolves and shifts.\u00a0 Lines for supplies, lines for food, lines for the constantly running, no-time-for-shame showers.\u00a0 There will be lines in our dreams.\u00a0 We\u2019ve all got to wait just a little while longer, of course, before anyone will let us relax.<\/p>\n
We explode wherever we\u2019ve landed.\u00a0 The suitcases spring open and the clothes\u2014warm, wrinkled, somehow moist\u2014tumble out, get put into piles around the room or laid under cots.\u00a0 In the guest bedrooms we stack our boxes of assorted belongings, the things we don\u2019t feel safe leaving in the car.\u00a0 The cat\u2019s litter box goes in a corner.\u00a0 Coax her out from behind the couch and show her where it is.\u00a0 The dog is in the front yard, sniffing at everything and spraying.\u00a0 The shared bathroom gets cluttered quickly, all the women\u2019s tools and bottles lined up in pairs or triplets, cords and plugs strung everywhere, waiting for their turn in the outlet.\u00a0 Our hosts push their food to the back and sides of the fridge, making room for ours.\u00a0 Some of us want to keep things equitable, so we label everything with magic markers.\u00a0 We know we are here by their mercy and fret over taking up too much space.\u00a0 The worry we have contained inside us about the storm starts to overflow and redirect into small panics about hospitality and cleanliness.\u00a0 In the shelters the rows of cots divide into little blocks, little neighborhoods, little family camps.\u00a0 All the borders are tested, overlapped by possessions and children and demands.<\/p>\n
Yet we find a way to settle in, find the beginnings of our new and hopefully temporary patterns.\u00a0 When possible, the lives that have been interrupted by this mass migration find a way to unpause.\u00a0 Young couples sneak off to make out or lock the doors to the remotest bathrooms and make love in the tub, hoping not to leave a trace.\u00a0 Men with unaffected deadlines make phone calls, plug in their laptops, answer e-mails, push money around electronically.\u00a0 The thieves and pickpockets get back to work.\u00a0 Mom takes the kids to the multiplex (they look and smell the same in every town) to see the last of the summer blockbusters.<\/p>\n
Yes, sure, we\u2019d love a drink.\u00a0 We pop open cold cans of beer, stir up pitchers of margaritas, decide how many ice cubes we\u2019d like in our scotch.\u00a0 The alcohol puts some of us prematurely to sleep, riles up others.\u00a0 With the stress and booze in our blood, not much is different from home: we get aggravated into arguments or find ourselves exhuming old memories.\u00a0 We laugh, if we can.\u00a0 The trash cans fill and rattle.\u00a0 The hotel halls are filled with people, unclaimed teenagers loose on disingenuous tours between the rooms, texting and chattering constantly.\u00a0 The vending machines empty quickly.\u00a0 We go four floors up or two floors down, searching for an ice machine that hasn\u2019t been sapped.\u00a0 The gears grind against nothing.\u00a0 We wait for the water to freeze and form, for the next batch to overturn inside the chamber.<\/p>\n
Cousins and uncles and nieces and brothers-in-law.\u00a0 Grandmas and old college roommates and family friends.\u00a0 These are the supergroups we\u2019ve assembled for long overdue reunions formed under unexpected circumstances.\u00a0 Some groups bring along strangers, stragglers.\u00a0 Lots of kids representing the Bywater bohemians find refuge with their friends\u2019 middle-class families.\u00a0 Their Depression-era costumes and freak-folk mannerisms seem so out of place now, sipping coffee from a Donald Duck mug in the wooded suburbs.\u00a0 Separated from the city, some of us for the first time, we are forced to acknowledge the different faces of America, all the strange ways a town can be arranged and operated.\u00a0 We all tell our stories, memories of last time, stopping short of saying, and if it happens again<\/em>\u2026 We are stunned by the nighttime silence of small towns, made uncomfortable or impressed by cities that have found a way to divide all of their differing classes from each other with invisible lines.\u00a0 We taste regional food, suffer other women\u2019s cooking, their odd ratios of spice and seasoning.\u00a0 Drifting through their grocery stores we can\u2019t find half of what we need for gumbo or jambalaya and deep inland we wonder, ain\u2019t you got no turkey necks?<\/p>\n Gustav is still taking his time, moving slow.\u00a0 We wait and wait for landfall, for the determination, for the result.\u00a0 We fear it, but we have to have it now.\u00a0 We can\u2019t take the uncertainty too much longer.<\/p>\n The television is on everywhere.\u00a0 The national press is torn between two temptations: stretch out the long foreplay of another possible disaster in New Orleans or give in to the immediate gratification of Sarah Palin.\u00a0 We\u2019ve all left, replaced by the famous faces of CNN and Fox News doing stand-ups in our neighborhoods, datelining weird prophecies from the tops of levees, filling in the rest of the country on what we\u2019ve all known for years.\u00a0 New Orleans has patched up the holes, but done little to reinforce anything.\u00a0 We\u2019ve waited for reports to be compiled, for budgets to be finalized, for lawsuits to settle.\u00a0 We\u2019ve seethed at the Corps of Engineers and watch them test and test and secretly loathe their own responsibility.\u00a0 We\u2019ve watched them miss deadline after deadline.\u00a0 We\u2019ve waited for someone higher up to demand more.\u00a0 But these are just minor blurbs against another potential direct hit.\u00a0 They don\u2019t make for good TV.\u00a0 Not as much as the images of empty streets, boarded up buildings, and the eccentric who have stayed behind.\u00a0 Not as much as that quirky brunette from Alaska and her daytime talk show life eating away at the tiny bit of gravitas that remains in presidential campaigns.\u00a0 We realize the people from the networks may as well be broadcasting from another country, that they understand nothing.\u00a0 We stream our local stations on the internet, imagine our favorites holed up in the studio, admiring their grandstanding grit.\u00a0 They know a little more, but not much.\u00a0 But at least they talk in a language we can understand.\u00a0 In the shelters its worse.\u00a0 The news comes in on small radios, then radiates through the crowd in rumors and garbled facts.\u00a0 The night before is restless, plans and scenarios criss-cross in fallible networks in our minds.\u00a0 At the bottom of it, there\u2019s just not telling, and that\u2019s what drives us impatiently mad.<\/p>\n Finally, Monday morning, it hits.\u00a0 Category 2 at landfall.\u00a0 The storm moves northwest through Louisiana on the city\u2019s western side.\u00a0 Another near miss.\u00a0 The storm eats up Baton Rouge and all the small towns to the west, turns out all the lights in the southern part of the state, and urges the gulf to rush up all along the coast for a quick skirmish, but by the evening Gustav is weak, downgraded, tagged and filed.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t know the extent of the wind damage, whether our roofs are intact, whether there is wild looting.\u00a0 But we know that the lake hasn\u2019t been sent into a frenzy, that the levees have held, that we will be able to go home soon.\u00a0 Most of us celebrate.\u00a0 We stand over grills and pat each other on the arms.\u00a0 We let loose in Mississippi karaoke bars, gone on High Life and AC\/DC.\u00a0 We let the kids jump on the hotel beds and order up movies on pay-per-view.<\/p>\n The mayor, the city council, the Jefferson Parish president, the National Guard, and the utilities companies all have differing opinions.\u00a0 The city is closed off by state troopers and local police.\u00a0 Any of the eager returnees are turned away.\u00a0 They have to take precautions, start clearing the major streets.\u00a0 They want power to be back on, mostly.\u00a0 They want the lights and the safety they bring.\u00a0 So we have to wait some more.\u00a0 Some of us are running out of money, can\u2019t afford another night away in the hotel, another day of eating three meals in restaurants.\u00a0 We drive around and around on the highways, looking for ways to sneak back into town.\u00a0 Some of us want to know badly how our street is.\u00a0 The online forums are jammed with requests.\u00a0 People who stayed behind are biking through the neighborhoods with camcorders and uploading the videos to Youtube.\u00a0 The asphalt is wet, dirty, crowded with fallen branches and glass.\u00a0 We groan when they don\u2019t turn down our street.\u00a0 We crane our heads as if we can see around the border of the frame, see through the video into unrecorded peripherals.\u00a0 The soundtrack is eerie: wet tires swishing and the rider breathless in the humidity.\u00a0 The city empty and exhausted after standing up to the winds.<\/p>\n We start getting in contact with people we know, people with advance passes (the gas station and grocery operators, the electricians and plumbers, the nurses and hoteliers) and assess the damage over the phone.\u00a0 The general consensus is that Those in Charge are being overcautious.\u00a0 Some of us take the news as a cue to pack up and hurry out.\u00a0 The city should be open before we get back.\u00a0 After another day of waiting the lines are forming on the interstate.\u00a0 Our numbers intimidate the mayor.\u00a0 There\u2019s too many of us out there idling in our cars, yelling at the cops, even abandoning vehicles and walking in.\u00a0 He throws up his hands and announces the free-for-all.\u00a0 They remove the cones, open up the lanes.\u00a0 Be careful, they say.\u00a0 All right, just be careful.<\/p>\n For those of us with the luxury there is a self-imposed wait of another day or two.\u00a0 Let the others deal with the traffic, no doubt as bad getting back in as it was getting out, maybe even worse if all the stoplights are dark.\u00a0 We\u2019re having fun, want another day with the family, want another day to transform the evacuation into a type of holiday\u2014the Hurrication\u2014to steal some joy from dark necessity.\u00a0 We want one more dinner, a few more drinks, one more night in that bed before the strain of being locked in the car again.\u00a0 We clean up after ourselves, launder our clothes, recharge the batteries.\u00a0 We write notes.<\/p>\n Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting us stay.\u00a0 Let\u2019s just hope we don\u2019t have to return the favor, that no one else ever has to face our annual threats and migrations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We know what we smell like, okay?\u00a0 Hours and hours under the sun or smothered by night heat have us sweating coffee, sweating Red Bull.\u00a0 The clench of old cigarette smoke.\u00a0 Fast food and soda breath.\u00a0 We are covered in …<\/p>\n