Trendy But Casual

Slow

I'm up before the light this morning (the first of September here in New Zealand) to check on messages from TM. He stopped for a short break around 11 AM after seven and a half hours of driving. He'd only made it as far as Brookhaven in Mississippi, which usually is a two-hour drive from New Orleans, about 135 miles. 

At this rate, god knows when he'll arrive in St Louis - typically it's nine hours from Brookhaven, but it's sure to take much longer. I don't know how long he can drive by himself without total exhaustion setting in. I hope there's somewhere in southern Missouri he can stay. One Christmas, after we came off the road in Arkansas because of the snow and ice, we ended up in a Super-8 Motel just off the highway at Sikeston, I think. We got the last available room and had to park in a snowdrift. Good times!

Tom bumped into someone he works with at the rest stop in Brookhaven - James McLaren, who's the dean of Newcomb-Tulane College, en route to Oxford, MS with one of his daughters.

I've also heard from Paige up in Marksville; their house, Slowness, is packed with evacuees from Plaquemines Parish, a fruit-growing area across the river from New Orleans, well below sea level. The evacuees are all Levasseurs and Becnels, the family of Jennifer, Rodney's daughter-in-law, and their friends. Paige says she's cooking for twenty people so far, and expects more to arrive today. They're all planning to ride out at the storm at Scott and Lisa's place, because it's made of brick. Slowness made it through Hurricane Rita but we only got the outer bands of the storm that day. Gustav looks like much more trouble. The governor has placed all 64 parishes under a state of emergency. (We have parishes in Louisiana, not counties.)

The weather guru Mark Schleifstein predicts that electricity will be out for at least a week in New Orleans, and much longer elsewhere, if the storm maintains its present track. We'll get hurricane force winds and 10 to 15 inches of rain, at least, with the possibility of tornadoes. He says the city of Houma should expect a storm surge of 12 to 16 feet of water. The river levees will hold, he thinks, though the surge will overtop them at the lower end of the river. The entire West Bank will flood because of storm surge.

Buses taking evacuees without transport out of the city are running until 3 PM today (Sunday). People are allowed to bring their pets with them. This public-transport evacuation has already carried 15,000 people out. About half of city residents has already left, according to The New York Times. The East Bank of Jefferson Parish just got the mandatory evacuation call, for the first time in history. The curfew in New Orleans begins at dusk tonight.

The hurricane is Category 3, but getting more organized. The whole LA/MS coast is under hurricane warning. The storm surge flooding will start in about twelve hours, ahead of the first heavy bands of rain. According to the WDSU model, heavy rain will continue through Wednesday. (You can watch Margeret Orr's forecast.) Tulane's talk or re-opening on Thursday seems pretty optimistic at this point.

Update

It's a little after four AM on Sunday morning in New Orleans: TM is on his way to St Louis. This is the latest picture (by David Grunfeld) on the Times-Picayune site of traffic headed out of town on I-610.

Contraflow is about to be implemented, I think, which will make TM's trip west on I-10 then north on I-55 easier. Though last time it also meant we nearly ran out of gas, as we were driving on the other side of the road and couldn't get off the highway at all until well into Mississippi.

Tulane just sent around another e-mail, urging everyone to leave, and telling us the storm is tracking a little more to the east, and therefore closer to New Orleans. Making landfall just west of the city would be very bad news indeed: we'd be on the "dirty" side of the storm. All the Tulane high-ups have evacuated to Nashville. Last time it was Houston, but perhaps north seems a safer bet now.

The mayor says that Gustav will be worse than Katrina, though he may be trying to scare people out of town. Some people won't go, of course, because they don't want to go to a shelter, or they don't want to abandon their homes. I read that some of the men helping to rebuild the city are scared to get on the buses and go to official shelters, because they're illegal workers from Latin America, and think that Immigration will be waiting to nab them. A friend of ours is holing up, with his dog and (I suspect) a gun, in the house he's been renovating in the Lower Garden District. He and his wife have all their money invested in that house. He doesn't want to abandon it to the weather and/or the looters.

I was just thinking about a story my now-retired colleague, Dale Edmonds, and his wife, Margaret, told us a week or so ago. Recently they were in Fort Worth, Texas, for a high school reunion. (Dale won't mind me saying that it's a long time since he graduated from high school: he started teaching at Tulane the year I was born.) At the reunion, a man was talking about Katrina, comparing it with the recent floods up in Iowa. He said to Margaret that nobody up in Iowa was sitting on a roof holding up signs asking for help; people in Iowa helped themselves. Why did she think that was, he wanted to know?

Margaret said she managed to keep cool, though the answer he had in mind was quite transparent. She said: "All I know is, a lot of people died, and a lot of people NEEDED help." After that response, he didn't have any other questions.

I don't want the city to go through another Katrina. I don't know what will happen - to it, or to us. I don't want Louisiana to have to bear the brunt of another major hurricane, though it's selfish to wish it on another state, or another country. Things are still so fragile, three years after Katrina. We're not a rich state, or a particularly wealthy city. (People talk about someone being "Louisiana rich", which is not like being Florida or Texas rich.) It takes a long, long time to recover, psychically and physically and financially, from such a disaster.

We still have two days to wait.

Everyone Out

So now it's official: everyone has to leave New Orleans. I read an interview with someone in town for the Southern Decadence festival, saying they planned to stay though Monday drinking and carousing, but I guess that was before that silly person found out the airport was closing (and their hotel, and all the restaurants, and the city itself). 

T. Middy and I - in our separate locations - have been reading Mark Schleifstein's weather blog at the Times-Picayune site obsessively. I'm back in Auckland now, where it's sunny and crisp, a world away from the heat and tension of New Orleans. TM spent all day Saturday carrying things up from our lower floor, moving things away from windows, and covering as much as possible with plastic sheeting in case the wind takes out some of our windows or part of the roof. Last time we got five and a half feet of water downstairs, and some wind-blown rain damage upstairs. Insurance only covered the latter, of course.

Although we had the kind offer from Rodney and Paige to evacuate to Marksville again, going west into central Louisiana doesn't make much sense this time: TM plans to drive north to St Louis. Yesterday he called every hotel and motel along I-55 between NOLA and Memphis, unsurprisingly without luck. So he's going to set off in the middle of the night, hoping to clear Mississippi before things get too crazy on Sunday morning. It's about eleven hours, usually, from NOLA to STL, but the trip could take him much longer with so many evacuees on the road. Last time the three-and-a-half hour drive to Marksville took nearly fourteen hours, the day before Katrina. At least we could share the driving then.

Before I left, I filled the car up and bought water and food for TM's trip; on the way home from dropping me off at the airport, he bought the plastic sheeting, and batteries for our hurricane preparedness kit, ie the flashlight in the trunk.

There's too much to worry about this time. The storm is too big; New Orleans is on the wrong side of it; too many parishes in Louisiana look certain to get inundated. And then there's Hanna, waiting to follow Gustav into the gulf. Thanks for all the kind wishes. I hope TM has a safe drive, and that people get out of southern LA before the waters start rising, and that we all have homes to return to after Gustav blows through.

Watching, waiting

Gustav is a tropical storm right now, swirling in the Caribbean, but it looks as though it’s turning into a hurricane and headed for the Louisiana coast. It’s already caused plenty of trouble in Haiti and the Dominican Republic; more than twenty people have died. Now it’s about to career around Jamaica then surge into the Gulf of Mexico. It has to hit the Gulf Coast somewhere. Everyone here is jittery.

Bobby Jindal, the new governor, is on TV listing plans and strategies; Mayor Nagin has flown back early from the Democratic Party Convention in Denver. Buses and streetcars will stop running on Friday night. Tulane circulated information on the new rules: there’s no longer the infamous “shelter of last resort” in the Superdome, conference center, or elsewhere. Emergency shelters outside the city and transport to them will be ready, apparently, though not everyone will opt to evacuate, of course. Vertical evacuation – ie moving to a high floor of a hotel – is no longer permitted. If the city is evacuated, nobody will be allowed on campus apart from security and approved personnel. The airport will only admit people who’ve already bought tickets.

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of Katrina. At Wholefoods yesterday, everyone was talking about what they’re going to do. A woman at the check-out complained she’d had to cancel her baby’s birthday party on Saturday, just in case; two workers were talking about whether they’d head for “The H” again. Our landlord is coming by to board up the windows before he and his family drive up to Alexandria. I’m scheduled to fly back to New Zealand, leaving NOLA late afternoon to connect with the last flight of the evening from LAX. I’ll get to the airport early, to make sure I get on the plane.

This leaves T. Middy to face the prospect of evacuating alone, unfortunately. We’re doing some preparation around the house today and tomorrow. Now we know what it’s like to lose things, we’re more cautious, more pessimistic, and possibly more sentimental. We have to hope the hurricane will steer clear of us, the way Ivan did at the last minute in 04, though it has to hit somewhere, of course – Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida. Perhaps it’ll fizzle a little back into a tropical storm. But as we saw with Tropical Storm Fay in Florida earlier this month, that can mean major flooding too.

Just in: an e-mail from the Tulane president, Scott Cowen. The university is closing at noon on Friday. Campus residence halls will close Saturday at noon; any students still there on Saturday morning will be taken up to Jackson, Mississippi. Shuttle buses to the airport will run today and tomorrow until 1 AM. The university will re-open next Wednesday, though classes won’t resume until next Thursday.

Time to get out of town.

News update

As soon as I predict I'll see no more coverage of New Zealand Olympic athletes, I turn on the TV in New Orleans and see ... the Tall Ferns, our women's basketball team, in action. Though they WERE playing the US, of course. The actual sports coverage is squeezed in between interviews with Michael Phelps, interviews with the mother and coach of Michael Phelps, video montages of his Olympic glory, discussions of which cereal packet his face will adorn, and ads for an NBC-produced DVD called something like Michael Phelps Most Glorious Olympian Ever.

We've now won nine medals. Gold for Georgina and Caroline Evers-Swindell, rowing; Valerie Vili, shot put; and Tom Ashley, boardsailing. Silver for Hayden Roulston, cycling. Bronze for Mahe Drysdale, rowing; Nathan Twaddle and George Bridgewater, rowing; Sam Bewley, Hayden Roulston, Marc Ryan and Jesse Sergent, cycling; Bevan Docherty, triathlon; and Nick Willis, running, 1500m. Today New Zealand is at #17 on both medal tables.

Meanwhile I discover that in my absence T. Middy has not been keeping up with the news. He knew nothing of the dramatic chipmunk, the dramatic lemur, or the sneezing panda.

New Orleans is suffocatingly hot, by the way, and it rained pretty much all day yesterday. I stayed inside and lolled.

Changing Sides

I'm in LAX at the moment, waiting to get my flight to New Orleans: last night I crossed the Pacific for the fourth time this year (only five more to go!). Everyone in the Koru Club in Auckland Airport was watching one of the TVs, because the Olympic rowing finals were on. Too much tension and excitement, especially Mahe Drysdale's race; we were all shouting at the screen. And the photo-finish for the twins! It was New Zealand's best day ever at the Olympics, with five medals, including our first track & field gold since John Walker won the 1500 meters in Montreal. Plus the All Blacks beat the Springboks 19-0 in South Africa.

The best part of all is that my brother has to pay me five dollars, because he was insistent we wouldn't win a single gold medal and now we've won two. I rang him from the Koru Club, before I raced downstairs to board the plane, to remind him of the bet.

All this "we" talk must cease now I'm back in the land of my other citi.zenship. I must learn to love beach volleyball and basketball, the sports that are on the TV at the Red Carpet Club. I must learn not to check results on the Internet, but to watch everything unfold pretend-live during prime time on television.

According to the Guardian, New Zealand is now 14th in the medal table;The New York Times says 16th. This is because the NYT organizes the table according to total number of medals won, which puts the US in the lead, whereas the media in the UK, Australia and New Zealand rank by numbers of gold medals, which puts China first. (Australia ranks higher in the American chart, by the way, than the order-by-gold method.) I checked some other web sites: Die Zeit uses the gold ranking as well, as does Le Monde. 

It's been great being home for the first week of the Olympics, because sometimes the US coverage can feel relentlessly myopic. One year I sat through hours and hours of the opening ceremony waiting to see New Zealand walk in, only to have NBC cut away at the crucial moment to an interview with members of the so-called Dream Team. This year, T. Middy tells me, they cut away to a commercial. "And, as the Kiwis walk in, we'll take a break." Sorry, small country!

The one time I was moved to complain (characterizing the NBC sports nabobs as "jesters", as I recall) was in 96, I think, when the great Jamaican runner Merlene Ottey won silver in the 100 metres, and American runners won first and third. During the medal ceremony, the camera zoomed in on the two Americans alone, so you couldn't see Ottey at all. Classy!

T. Middy also tells me that the lead story on our local NBC news affiliate in New Orleans last night was ... Michael Phelps wins seventh gold. This was good news, I thought: it meant that nobody was getting shot in New Orleans for a change. But what a difference a day makes.

A Message from T. Middy

This picture was received today, along with a message: "Please respect our privacy."

Writing at Night

Mornings here at the Sargeson flat are the same every day – rain clattering onto the skylight, birds chattering, the hiss of buses along Princes Street. I turn on the heaters and the kettle and the computer. There are various high-maintenance procedures involving the loathed tooth splint, over which I will draw a pocked acrylic veil. Most of the time I'm not sure what day of the week it is.

And then the attempts at procrastination begin. At present this involves anything from "internet research" to calling to change seat assignments on upcoming flights to developing sudden interests in obscure Olympic sports. Though this one only works after lunch, when the TV coverage begins. (By the way, Bob Hillman, maybe I would stop criticizing the inclusion of beach volleyball if a) the competitors were not wearing swimsuits, though no swimming appears to be involved; and b) if songs by Gwen Stefani and Joan Jett were not blasted out at the venue during games in order to "get the crowd in the mood.")

Despite these efforts to muck about, I'm still managing to get a lot of work done. Right now I'm in the last month of reading for the anthology I'm editing, and making really good progress with my YA novel, which is due to Scholastic next week. Next week! On my birthday, actually. My editor at Scholastic does not realize that my birthday is traditionally devoted to lavish and expensive beautification rituals, followed by a slap-up dinner: this year we're going to August. I'll be back in New Orleans briefly, to watch five episodes of the new season of Project Runway, move offices (to the good side of the building, overlooking oak trees and lawns rather than the service road and air conditioning unit), interfere with various start-of-semester events, give Dinaw Mengestu, our visiting writer, my combo literary/disaster tour of the city, and coax T. Middy off the precipice.

Here I feel I’m reverting to my student self. The one that lived in the little room above the kitchen at Eden’s Cottage, York, early in 1986. Snow outside around the apple tree, dormer windows cracked open to let in fresh air because I wasn’t used to central heating yet. My contributions to furnishings: a small, dark bedside table I bought at a school fair, and stacks of library books on the floor. The red boom box I bought when I first arrived in York, softly playing – Red Rose Radio, a Pennines station, I think. I’d work into the quiet of the night, long after everyone else in the house was asleep. 

There wasn’t much traffic along Heslington Lane at night after the pubs were shut; campus and its creatures lay on the other side of the road, the colleges all facing the lake. I only spent one term in that room: that summer, I moved downstairs into the big room with the old black range and timbered ceilings and the latch door, and lived there for the next two years. The downstairs room was a great party room, and my friend Julia and I stuffed it full of rubbish, including two creaky red arm chairs bought at another school fair; we had to carry them along Heslington Lane, stopping numerous times on the narrow pavement to sit down in them and catch our breath, like spectators waiting for a parade.

But it was that first winter – when I escaped my dreary breeze-block room at Goodricke College and moved into Eden’s Cottage – that I started to feel at home in York, and in England, and started to get some serious work done at last.

Now I'm writing something quite different from an essay on Edith Wharton, say, but I still enjoy the quiet of night work. With all the rain, noise in the park has been more sporadic the last week or so. The time markers I can see from my window here in Auckland – sun and shadows, birds, council workers forking up rubbish, language students taking their breaks, teachers arriving and leaving for the day, buses dropping off Japanese school girls and their giant suitcases, cars parking and leaving – disappear. There's just me and the rain and the whirr of the heater. I didn't know that I still liked to work this way. I didn't realize, I guess, that nothing really changes.

Ball Season

This is another family post, FYI, because my niece looked so glamorous last night. She was off to the St Peter's College ball - held at the same venue, with exactly the same food, as the Avondale ball two weeks ago. Rebecca wore the dress she had made for that ball, with the key addition of a pair of my mother's evening gloves - the gloves are fifty years old, we think. This pic is dark, I know, but it's of my sister buttoning Rebecca into the gloves.

And this is her a little later, and with her escort, Cameron. He realized this week (after he'd asked her to the ball) that they were in the same class at kindergarten. She will object, no doubt, to these pictures, but I think they're cute. And I have a soft spot for St Peter's boys - well, one in particular.

More new pictures

Yesterday a reporter and photographer from The Aucklander, a free community paper delivered every Thursday with the New Zealand Herald, came around to take my photo. They're doing a piece on the ongoing problem of drinking in city parks. We found a nice smashed sign (one of the Alcohol Ban in the CBD notices, naturally) and, tucked into a tree, an empty bottle of Jim Beam. Much later, ie during the middle of the night, I was woken by guys shouting outside my window, hurling bottles into one of the art gallery's trash cans. I guess I could have leaned out the window and reminded them that it was not a recycling bin ... but I did not. At least they didn't leave them lying around on the lane, like everyone else does.

A different picture of me appeared in the western edition of yesterday's Aucklander; it's a happier piece about how I'm hard at work here in the Sargeson flat, and the photo shows me in the window, semi-smiling. The window's quite low, so I had to kneel on the floor. Maybe that's why I was only semi-smiling, or maybe it was because I knew, intuitively, the article would refer to my first novel as "Beauty Queen" rather than Queen of Beauty.

Meanwhile, on another continent, T. Middy is showing troubling signs of having been left home alone too long. We've been talking online via Adium, the symbol for which is a wild-eyed green duck. Despite allegedly being busy at work, TM found time to download and print a picture of the duck, enlarge it, cut it out, and pose for a computer shot with his new friend, looking eerily similar in expression.

This is why I have to go back to New Orleans next weekend for a quick visit, to restore sanity.