We had flown into New Orleans on the Wednesday before the hurricane, intending to stay for 9 days, flying back to Washington DC and then onto London on the Friday-week coming. On the Friday we went on a swamp tour near the mouth of the Pearl River. We took it easy in the afternoon, before heading out in the evening to Bourbon Street. We had heard about these rum punch concoctions they served in a bar called Pat O’Brien’s called a Hurricane. Missing the irony, we consumed a couple, agreed they were worth they hype and proceeded to watch 3 or 4 live bands, mostly ordinary. Meanwhile I smoked a huge cigar. We ended up in a bar out of the French quarter called the Circle Bar watching a fabulous brass/rock band until about 3am. For those of you familiar, it was much like the Pineapple in Brisbane.
Almost every bar in the States appears to have a TV, generally switched to gridiron or baseball. In New Orleans I had noticed a few were on the weather channel and so, with sound off, I had been tracking Katrina’s progress for a couple of days. If you had asked us on the Friday night we would have said that Katrina, having damaged Florida was a Cat 1 (small) hurricane, turning to large rain depression.
Saturday morning was ugly, for me in particular. Around midday we were hungry enough to eat, but not ready to go out, so Gillian went to the local pizza place, called Slice, and got a couple of large slices. On return she told me that they would be closing that day to allow people to leave New Orleans in the face of the oncoming hurricane. Startled, we turned the TV on and saw Katrina was now Cat 5 (big ‘n ugly) and headed for New Orleans. Through the afternoon we considered our options. Gillian wasn’t keen on leaving; this was the nice relaxing bit of our holiday after being on the go in New York and Washington. My own recollection of cyclones was that even if you weathered the storm, there was the aftermath. The TV was telling people to fill their bath and sink with water. We tried to find out about ways out of town. The trains were shut, as were Greyhound and the other bus companies. If those guys were closing down, I really wanted to leave.
We went out for a walk about 4pm and ran into the hotel manager. John was from San Francisco, not the South but all the same we figured he was a local and would have some ideas on the stay or go question and means to get out of town if we wanted to go. He said the best thing to do was wait until Sunday morning, see what the storm does overnight and discuss again at breakfast.
That afternoon we went for a long walk around the Garden District, admiring some nice old houses. As we proceeded down Magazine Street, the sight of wooden boarding going up on shop windows and chalkboards outside cafes saying ‘Katrina Go Away!’ spoiled the mood. At dinner we were edgy and decided to try to stay calm and discuss with John at breakfast. He would know what to do. We packed up before we went to bed.
The breakfast conference started a bit later than I expected, John having been out on a late date the night before. He said that leaving was up to us, though he was keen to go himself. The only other guest in the hotel was a stand up comic named Will. He had played a gig to 9 people the night before. His home was in San Francisco and he was keen to be gone. John had room in his car for one only and offered Will a lift. For us he tried to ring a few people he knew in the car hire business and found them either closed or out of cars. At this point, I started to worry in a very bad way, a feeling that really didn’t pass for about the next 70 hours. John mentioned the delivery van, though he would have to ring the owner of the Creole Gardens (our hotel) to see if he would mind us borrowing it.
The owner’s name was Andrew; he was in Fredericksburg, Virginia. On the phone he gave me some details about the van. I was responsible for whatever happened to it. Fine. It was an automatic, 3-speed transmission. No worries. It was in safety mode, which meant that it was stuck in 2nd gear, couldn’t go any faster than about 35 miles an hour. Ok. It doesn’t have air conditioning. By this stage I was so bloody pleased to have an escape hatch I didn’t care.
With the offer of the van firmly on the table Gillian and I had one last conversation about leaving. We had been listening to the cook, Annie, all morning deploring people for what she called running. ‘You can’t run from God. I put my faith in God. All those people running, where are they runnin’ to?’ She had lots more to say about it all. On questioning it seemed to me that she didn’t actually have a car. While all this went on the maintenance man at the Gardens was watering the plants. I wondered if there were some deck chairs he could rearrange.
The Creole Gardens was a lovely place, but it was made of wood. John’s assertion that it had been there since 1849 seemed no recommendation in the face of a Cat 5 storm and into one of the large hotels downtown, like the Hilton or the Ramada. I thought they would be strong enough for the storm but we were still left with the issue of being stranded in a hurricane-torn New Orleans. There was a suggestion of waiting until later in the day but the thought of the traffic was getting on my nerves, so we just jumped in the van and drove. John and Will were going to head off in John’s car. John thought they were going to leave at about 3pm.
We’d gone about 100 metres when I realised the handbrake was on, and that I couldn’t find it. Eventually I found it as a pedal. This with driving on the other side of the road didn’t help Gillian’s nerves. We were following rough directions from John (We had said goodbye to all the Gardens with a lot of good lucks and little jokes about seeing each other in a couple of days) to get onto Highway 61 and bear westwards to Baton Rouge. There are 2 main roads out of New Orleans heading west – the Interstate 10 and Highway 61. Listening to the radio it seemed that although the I-10 had eastbound lanes turned over to west traffic (contra flow they called it) it was pretty bad. Somebody in a press conference said that Highway 61 wasn’t too bad. As we got towards the Highway the limitations of the van were making themselves known. We were horned at by all and sundry as we puttered along at 35mph, I was looking in the wrong directions, seeking out rear view mirrors that weren’t there and nearly hit someone while we changed lanes. Then we got to Highway 61. A bloody carpark, bumper to bumper, jam-packed, thousands of cars queued in 3 lanes going nowhere. Not nowhere fast, just nowhere. In the next 12 hours were to go 40 miles. In the next 3 hours I reckon we moved somewhere between 2 and 3 miles, barely got out of the city limits before they started putting sandbags across the Highway.
All the while it was hot. We listened to the radio, which I think was a university station. We had hit the road at 10am, around 12 the radio people signed off, said they were leaving the city. They switched the station over to the weather channel and for the rest of the day we listened to endless press conferences. We listened to the mayor as he kept saying that evacuation was now mandatory, to people in helicopters saying that they didn’t have any good news about the roads, that they were all jammed. One announcement was of particular concern.
They said that at some line on Highway 61 they were going to close the highway and start sandbagging the highway. We didn’t know where this line was, how far we might be from it and if they would really turn back traffic that had spent 6 hours getting to that point. For me that was our second victory of the day after getting the van itself, crossing that line. We passed the airport about 4pm. We tried to ring airlines in some desperate hope, but we couldn’t speak to a human, only automated response machines.
People in cars around us seemed calm, some cars even had loud music playing like they were driving to a party. As the afternoon wore on we saw couple of cars with their bonnets up, one car ahead had pulled over to jump start another car. Gillian and I made an effort to keep our spirits up, pretending it was one of our road trips. We played the alphabet game, I sang, we both made jokes. All the while it hot and sticky. There wasn’t much breeze; we drank the water I filled up with before leaving. We ate the little food we had. In the long silences we both had visions of being stuck in the van, on the highway, as the storm arrived at 6am the next day. We had some conversations about the wisdom of getting on the road. We were doubtful – maybe we should have checked into a hotel. One report had the Hilton manager saying it was business as usual – they were serving dinner as normal and then moving the guests to secure rooms low down in the building and then upstairs later when the expected flooding arrived. It sounded pretty good sitting in the van moving a 3mph with a 5mph cat 5 Hurricane on the way.
We passed a few gas stations along the way. They were all pretty busy. We had left the Creole Gardens with three quarters of a tank. Around 5.30pm I decided that the next station we saw open would be the one to stop at. Sod’s Law that every one we saw was closed. The traffic crawled on, inching along. It was getting darker and starting to spit with rain. Finally, an hour after I started to get worried, but didn’t say anything to Gillian, we saw a station filled with cars. We pulled in. There were cars parked, but not filling up – the station was closed. The owners were boarding up the windows; they shouted that there were four stations about a mile down the side road. I was getting back in the van when a pickup pulled in – I told the driver that the station was closed and told him where to find the one that was open. He swung out and we followed him.
As we headed down the open road, a revelation. All the hopping in out of neutral in the traffic had worked magic on the van – we popped into third and got up to 50 miles an hour. Buoyed by the sensation of actually going somewhere (although in the wrong direction) we started to feel good. The gas station appeared, as did 3 others on the other side of the road and a bit farther on. There was a queue of about 5 cars, and the guy we had followed returned my favour and said they were going to the other side of the road for gas where there was no queue. We gave up our spot in the queue and followed, foolishly. The station on the other side of the highway was closed and by the time we got back to the first station we were about 15 cars back.
By now it was raining and dark. We were out of food and hadn’t eaten since breakfast. It was about 7pm. I was starting to feel weary and needed caffeine. Gillian went to the station to get supplies. She was gone about half an hour. In that time I moved forward 4 spaces, watched people block up the driveway, cars push in, heard the Louisiana cops turning up, trying to direct people about and give up, driving off. The queue got longer behind me. The phone rang. Gillian was out of the shop, but couldn’t recognise the van in the dark. She had gone back to the forecourt to ring me. She climbed in the van, wet, with a bag full of junk food and some coke. It was all they had. They had only let 2 people into the shop at a time, the queue was horrendous, the shopkeeper was refusing to sell alcohol and a couple of drunk guys were starting to get really angry.
I asked Gillian how she was feeling. People started yelling behind us in the dark, really angry, arguing about a spot in the queue or something. The rain fell, we sweated in the van. Gillian broke down crying and said that she wanted to go home. I could feel a lump in my throat building up. I had been worried sick for hours, I didn’t know if we were ever going to get fuel, get off the forecourt, find shelter, get out of the way of the storm. Despair didn’t feel too far away. I asked Gillian to hold it together. It think it’s the first time that I ever told her not to cry. She stopped very quickly and we reverted to sitting quietly, sweating in the van, waiting for things to happen and hoping the hurricane would just clear off.
Eventually we got a spot at the petrol pump. Hoorah. The pump was a self-pay, it wanted me to swipe my credit card first. I swiped 3 times and it didn’t work, the pump shut itself off. I wandered around the forecourt, despairingly looking for some help. It appeared the only people who worked there were in the shop, letting in 2 at time, safe behind a half hour queue of angry people. I walked back to the pump and it had reactivated itself. I swiped my card in the non-intuitive upside down direction. Success. I filled the tank. I looked around the guy next to me was smoking while filling his car. I was about to burst a vessel delivering abuse when I noticed there were lots of people smoking while pumping gas. Oh my God. We left quickly, breathing a sigh of relief.
We got back to Highway 61, the van having reverted to second gear hell. We started going through the outskirts of Baton Rouge, passing about 5 gas stations, all open, not packed. We were encouraged, the stores of BR were open, things weren’t boarded up – had we reached safety? We decided to start looking for a place to stay.
In the UK and in Australia, motels and hotels have big signs that you can see from the road that tell you whether or not they have vacancies. Not in the US. We must have pulled into half a dozen places, Gillian getting out and asking if they had a room for the night. No. No. No.
We passed through Baton Rouge, by passing most of the city, following Highway 61. The Dylan song from his first album intuded into my brain occassionaly. We decided to head north through Mississippi, rather than heading west towards Texas. Why, I’m not sure, though I suspect I thought we had a better chance of finding accommodation north rather than west where everyone had been heading.
Eventually we found a place called the Scenic Highway motel. It was appalling. Gillian didn’t see the woman she asked for vacancies from. She was behind a boarded window. The woman said it was 25 dollars for 12 hours, no need for a licence plate. It wasn’t much – an understatement as it turned out – but it meant for the first time in 12 hours I could park the van and lie down.
The room was essentially a white box, no windows, thin flimsy wooden walls, brown sticky carpet, a shower we didn’t dare use, and a thin double bed, with spikes poking up. We turned on the TV, eager for news of the hurricane. They only had one channel, it was showing grainy black and white porn, it looked in bad taste. There was a knock at the door. It was the woman from the motel – apparently we were supposed to return the key once we were in the room. We turned off the light, I fell asleep first, though not quickly. Gillian lay awake for a while. I dreamt fitfully, waking on occasion recalling there was no lock on the petrol tank, wondering if the later arrivals at the motel we could hear were siphoning our petrol, stranding us.
The alarm went off at 6am, and I don’t think either of us have struggled less to get out of a bed. We emerged from our box of a motel room to good news. There was no weather, the sky was overcast and grey, but rain seemed not too close. I checked the van and the petrol was full. Disdaining showers we were on the road at 6.05am.
They day before we had listened to the university radio stations out of New Orleans. When they had shut down at lunchtime they had tuned the weather channel into the station and whatever dramas we had had, we hadn’t been starved for news. Today was different. I surfed around for a bit. The first 4 stations were telling me about salvation, quoting from the bible. Strange breakfast radio. We settled for country music in the end, interspersed with a ‘Morning Crew’ making too many gags about the hurricane.
We kept on north. As we headed up the highway, we passed a prison, which went some way to explaining the expected clientele of the Scenic Highway Motel. Overall we thought our position was much improved. We seemed to be away from the worst of the hurricane zone, the only real issue was finding a decent hotel. Our thinking was that since we were so much further on from New Orleans, spots would start to open up at hotels and motels. The van was still doing 35 miles an hour. As I drove on, I kept finding myself pushing the vehicle up to 40 miles an hour. The van wasn’t liking it and it was a real exercise in patience to make it slow down.
We reached Natchez just before 9am. We went through a repeat of the night before, stopping in at various motels and hotels and being turned away. By now the weather had started to get worse, it was raining steadily. This, and the succession of cars in front of us still looking for accommodation started us thinking we weren’t out of the woods yet. We pushed on north out of Natchez, thinking that Vicksburg, 60 miles on, might yield a place to stay.
As we headed through the outskirts of Natchez, we saw a sign pointing to the Natchez airport. The logic was that the airport might have a hotel. Being off the beaten track we figured it might not be full. After 15 minutes careering down a country lane, we discovered that the airport was green grass with a brick building. Heading back to the Highway we took a side road that I thought was going to run parallel to the highway. We followed this in ever worsening weather for about 20 minutes, each way. We had to head back along our route when we realised were on the verge of becoming truly lost. It would have been a pretty drive on any other day. Green trees leaned over the narrow winding road. That day it was a bad road to take. The trees were dropping branches, forcing me to slow down, swerve and drive through deep puddles.
Eventually we reach Highway 61 again. The rain was falling down at about a 45 degree angle by now, and the radio had yielded enough to tell us that Katrina was probably going to pass just to the east of New Orleans, but that afterwards it would probably go due north. Heading west may have been a good idea after all.
We headed down the highway. Rain was pouring around, the wind was up and cars were zooming past us heading for the north and out of harms way. For the umpteenth time I wished that we had a car going faster. Typical. 24 hours earlier we had been the most grateful people in the world to get our hands on any kind of transport, no matter how slow and here I was wishing for a faster vehicle. From where she sat Gillian couldn’t see the gauges. I noticed that the engine temperature was going up, maybe I had been pushing the engine too hard. Despite the closing weather, I knew that any speed, even 20 miles per hour was better than breaking down on the highway. I didn’t want to overly worry Gillian, a glance across and I could see she looked worried enough. I also noticed that the van was veering right, maybe running over a tree branch had buggered the wheel alignment.
About 10 miles north of Natchez I told Gillian about the overheating heating motor. She guessed that I had been sitting on that one for a bit. While we talked we passed a couple of driveways. I decided to turn back and pull into one. Turning the van around was difficult. It felt like the wheels weren’t responding to the steering wheel, like we were driving in mud. Maybe we had a flat tyre.
We drove up a long driveway, must have been 200 metres long. At the end was a collection of sheds, some looked like they had been converted in living quarters. Gillian stayed in the van and I walked into the shed. It was full farm machinery, none of it looking very new. There were piles of newspapers and books in boxes, odds and sods, all of it like any number farm sheds I’ve been into. I called out a few times, progressing to the end of the shed. No one about. I headed back to the van, thinking we would have to sort ourselves out.
I looked at the tyres, they were definitely squished out at the bottom, but nowhere near flat. I set about the van looking for a pump. There was nothing. Barely any tools, certainly no spare tyre and no pump. I was starting to despair when this enormous black guy appeared out of the shed. He was shouting at me, demanding to know who the hell we were. I tried to explain that the van was broken – he seemed to accept this, but he was mightily pissed off that we had come all the way up his drive.
I told him we needed help pumping up the tyres. He said fine, then slammed the garage door shut. I stood there in the rain, updated Gillian and then we waited. I was soaked. The doors came up ten minutes later, the guy had a compressor up and running. With his help I filled all the tyres. By this stage I wasn’t convinced that the tyres were the problem, and was acutely aware of the fact that pumping tyres wasn’t going to solve the battery not charging and the overheating engine. I thought perhaps that the car resting would at least cool the engine.
I must have apologised to the guy about the 3 times. He seemed to be a lot more sympathetic by the end. He asked me if we needed directions. He said that Vicksburg was 60 miles north, and Natchez was 10 miles back south. He advised us to head to Vicksburg. As we headed back down the drive I told Gillian that the battery was no longer charging. We headed back for Natchez, grunting and grinding to steer the van back onto the highway – clearly we didn’t have a tyre problem.
We struggled back down the highway. With the state of the weather and the car and being soaked to the skin I was starting to feel very low. The van was still drifting right, the gauges were ugly. We came to a camping ground and remembering that camping grounds in Australia usually had caravans. I wondered if a caravan would be OK in the storm. We pulled in, the front office was a log cabin. Inside the walls were wooden, with lots of photos on them, mostly of 2 clean cut Marines, some hunting photos of deer (that Gillian didn’t notice). Behind the desk was a large man, his daughter sat on a stool nearby. He said that they didn’t have caravans. He rang someone, told them that he had a couple of travellers from New Orleans in his office who needed shelter. He said to the person on the phone that we looked pretty done in. As soon as he said that, I felt twice as bad as before. He gave us directions to the convention centre in Natchez – he said it was only 7 miles back to town, couldn’t miss it. Thanking him for his help, but wondering if he couldn’t have been more helpful, we left. Before we set off I refilled the coolant on the van, thinking that may help the over heating issue.
When we got to a Shell garage it was time for another pit stop. The engine was overheating again. We pulled in and I turned the engine off, damn, attempted to restart the engine and no, the battery was now kaput. At the time I was mad with myself but in hindsight I had to let the engine cool. We went into the shop and asked if there was a mechanic about, we were broken down. The enormous girl behind the counter said, no, ain’t nobody about. I went back outside and started hunting about, asking if people could jump-start us. Meanwhile Gillian was asking for people’s help as well. Along the way she was nearly blown off her feet, the wind was so strong. There was a sheriff’s car on the forecourt, empty. Eventually Gillian had the brains to go back into the shop and ask where the sheriff was. Out the back, said the ignorant girl. By that stage I had found a jump-start saviour. The deputy sheriff came out and spoke to us; he could take to a shelter nearby.
We followed him back up the highway, to the north. After only half a mile he pulled off and we followed him to where a large octagonal church sat. I pulled into the car park, hopefully shutting off the van for the last time. Gillian’s parents were on the phone by this stage, and she was telling them that we were just getting into a shelter.
I leaned into the sheriffs car to say thanks and he leaned across and quietly said
‘This church is full a lot a African-Americans, but they’re real nice people and they’ll look after you just fine.’
He also gave me a phone for number for someone I could call to fix the van in the morning.
We unloaded the van and walked into the dark church. They had lost power. We ambled about, I was a bit disoriented, still keyed up from the drive and still half expecting to end up on the highway again. My first instinct was to set up in a corridor, away from all the folk already in the church. There was an even mix in there of black and white folk, all from New Orleans. There was no natural light coming into the centre of the church, it was dim in there, and quiet. We finally settled on a church pew at the front. I changed out of my wet clothes, hung them on a pew. Then I cried, fiercely. We both did, I think it was out of sheer relief of finally being safe, there was a bit of disappointment as well, that we hadn’t made it to a place out of the storm, that we hadn’t been able to carry on the honeymoon.
The rest of the story is fairly straightforward. We stayed there overnight, sleeping on the pews after watching Star Wars and Shrek with the kids. In the afternoon the storm outside reached its peak, rain pouring down, horizontally. The Sheriff was right about the people in the church. They were so so kind to us. There was more hot food on offer in the church than we could ever eat, some of it even vegetarian (macaroni cheese to Gillians delight). While there people spoke about other shelters they knew of or had heard about. It sounded like we were in one of the best ones imaginable.
The best of all was the young pastor, Mario coming around to speak to us. He was from Kentucky, his father had been a preacher and he said he could do nothing else even though it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He said that Mississippi was very different, the schools had only been desegregated 10 years ago. He went onto explain that the church land had previous been home to the local Ku Klux Klan. The Grand Wizard had been reborn as a Christian 10 years. He gave the land to the black pastor who seemed to be a real driving force in the community.
We met the head pastor in the morning. He had an almost military bearing about him, polo shirt tucked in to tight black jeans. He had a tight moustache and where he went, people looked at him inspired and waiting to be told what to do. He arranged for us to use his phone at home, there was no mobile coverage. It took forever to find somewhere to fly out of, eventually we called Trailfinders in London, it was the only company we could call and actually speak to a person. They booked us a flight from Shreveport, to Detroit, to Washington DC, for a big price. The travel insurance claim is still dragging on.
The pastor summoned his folk together when we asked for advice on getting a bus to Shreveport. It was announced that Fred would drive us. We were a bit overcome. Someone else had already fixed the van - the serpentine (cam) belt had fallen off when we drove over a puddle the day before. Seemingly it charges the battery, helps with steering and cools the engine. Aha. Mario stayed near us as we waited for Fred to come back. He explained that to him a ministry was helping people in trouble, not just Sunday nights.
The drive to Shreveport took 4 hours, a lot longer than we thought. Fred and his wife Pauline drove us. They were a great couple and I think along with Mario, they were the people we remember the most fondly for getting us out of trouble, apart from Andrew and John for lending us the van.
After a long flight from Shreveport, a run from one end of Detroit airport to another and a discussion about the Ashes with a Pakistani cabbie in Washington we crashed at the Harrington Hotel in downtown Washington DC at midnight on the Tuesday night, about 62 hours after we left the Creole Gardens. We were knackered but as we watched the news and saw the state of New Orleans and the Superdome we knew we had taken a good decision to leave and that we had been lucky. Or blessed, as Mario and Fred would say.
