Returning to New Orleans: A Sentimental Journey

 “Gonna take a Sentimental Journey, Gonna set my heart at ease. Gonna make a Sentimental Journey, to renew old memories.” —Lyrics by Bud Green, Les Brown, and Ben Homer

As soon as we passed through Mobile, Alabama, on our way to New Orleans, my heart began to thump. As an Air Force brat, I had grown up all over the U.S. but despite living in Atlanta for many years, the place I still call “home” is The Big Easy.

Entering the city via I-10 from the East was more like entering the Twilight Zone than taking a sentimental journey. Though it’s been more than a year after Hurricane Katrina, it took us a few minutes to realize that the miles of upscale apartments and expensive homes in New Orleans East remain eerily empty. No cars move about. Scant reconstruction is in progress. The only indication that a major mall ever existed is a wounded Dillard’s that stands forlornly amid a vast concrete wasteland.

With direct hits from breaches in the Industrial Canal and multiple levees, the city didn’t have a chance. Eighty percent flooded. My brother and sister-in-law’s neighborhood stood under as much as twenty feet of water for days. When the water finally receded and they were able to return weeks later, black mold and mildew had permeated every wall and their grand piano was flipped upside down in the living room. Like most New Orleanians, they lost the treasures of a lifetime. They were fortunate to escape with their lives.

The terrible statistics—200,000 homes and 184,000 apartments destroyed, 1,531 (and counting) dead, many still missing—are unfathomable until you see it firsthand. Everything I had heard and read had convinced me that the Green Acres neighborhood where I lived as a teenager had escaped the worst. But it fared only slightly better than many areas. FEMA trailers still dot the yards, roofs remain covered with blue tarp. Trees and shrubs are non-existent. Black plastic covered the windows, staring back at me with vacant eyes. I broke down briefly, mourning for the home of my youth where my parents opened the doors to a gaggle of giggly teens every Friday night.