Memoir: Hard living in the Big Easy

Journalist Julia Reed, a contributing editor at Vogue and Newsweek, went to New Orleans in 1991 to cover the re-election of former (and currently incarcerated) Gov. Edwin Edwards. Seduced by the city’s sauntering pace, its rich flavors and exotic atmosphere, she was never entirely able to leave again. After almost 15 years of living like a vagabond on her reporter’s schedule, she got married and bought a house in the historic Garden District. Four weeks after she moved in, Hurricane Katrina struck. In “The House on First Street,” she writes about her frontline encounters in Katrina’s aftermath, showcasing the out-of-towners who came to pitch in and the locals, especially the restaurateurs, who got things back up and running in the absence of leadership. In this excerpt, she writes about why New Orleanians have a particular penchant for dangerous situations.

Like many people in New Orleans, I had not paid a whole lot of attention to the increasing likelihood that Katrina was heading our way. I was, as usual, far more focused on the house: There was the refreshing fact that my new team of outside painters, the hilarious Joe Wallis and his right-hand man, Freddy, was doing an excellent job, and the enduring fact that Eddie’s team was not. (On the Friday before Katrina’s arrival, his outdoor guys had laid the stones for the front walk — but at the wrong elevation, a fitting, for them, swan song, which meant it was no longer possible to open the front gate.)

Also, we had already been through one hurricane (Cindy, who arrived in early July was upgraded from a tropical storm to a hurricane after the fact), and evacuated for another — but only as far as the downtown Marriott. Even before we checked in, it was clear that Dennis would bypass New Orleans and bear down on Pensacola instead, but we had paid in advance (the rule during hurricane season) and I was eager to try out the hotel’s heavily promoted new down bedding. It did not disappoint — our weekend on Canal Street was the closest thing to a holiday we’d had since the renovation began.

As pleasant as that particular “evacuation” turned out to be, I remember thinking: There is no way this city can keep beating these odds. Just one season earlier, the Florida Panhandle and the Alabama coast had been pounded with no less than four catastrophic storms — Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne — and now Dennis was dealing another blow. In the years since I’d first arrived in New Orleans, we had dodged the bulk of Andrew’s heavy artillery, and Opal and Georges had missed us altogether. Since then, the warmer waters in the Gulf had made hurricanes not just more plentiful but a lot more powerful. My father, a successful but prudent gambler, had warned me long ago that the house always wins. In this case the house was nature and there was no way our luck could hold.

Video   Related video: New Orleans trivia Dec. 3: TODAY’s Kathie Lee Gifford and Harry Connick, Jr. test viewers on their New Orleans knowledge while author Julia Reed helps. Today show

As moments of clarity go, it was a brief one. It had taken me more than twenty years to decide to commit to a city — the daily imagining of its destruction (not to mention the destruction of a house into which we’d just sunk pretty much everything we’d ever had) was hardly a recipe for sanity. For years the nightmare scenario of “the big one,” a Category 4 or 5 storm barreling straight up the Mississippi from the Gulf, had been played out in series after series in the newspaper and on television, with lurid graphics showing the “bowl” that is New Orleans completely awash in floodwater and petrochemicals — “a massive tomb,” they’d always say, containing dead by the tens of thousands. Most of us watched with a half-­wary eye and went on about our business, having already made the necessary bargain that living in New Orleans requires: the decision that the city’s ample charms outweighed the peril. And anyway, what could we do about it?

Certainly no one at any level of government was doing much. Over the years, millions had been squandered on disaster models and, most recently, on a simulated Category 5 hurricane named Pam, but at the start of every season, the only truly serious discussion involved the evacuation traffic flow plan that, invariably, had been botched the year before. Politicians could get impassioned about the traffic because voters got extremely impassioned about being stuck in it. It’s a whole lot harder to summon outrage about something that hasn’t happened yet, so basic stuff, like coming up with the means to evacuate those unable to leave on their own (almost 80,000 households in pre-­Katrina New Orleans were without a car) was never addressed. Nor did anyone bother to check the only structures that lay between us and certain inundation — the levees and floodwalls — even though residents whose homes backed up to the 17th Street Canal (and which, therefore, are no longer in existence) had been reporting standing water in their backyards for more than a year.

On a national level, three months prior to Katrina, the United States House and Senate, including every single one of Louisiana’s representatives, had signed off on an obscene highway bill whose 6,000-­plus pork projects cost $24 billion — more than enough to pay for both the wetlands restoration and Category 5 levees needed to protect New Orleans and its port, the country’s leading gateway for coffee, rubber, and imported steel.

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