A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World by David Gessner

Author:David Gessner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Torrey House Press

THE BIRDS OF BRITISH PETROLEUM

We are flying into the land of blue roofs. In this place of renewed wreckage, the view from above is vivid and startling. Down below the roofs, half of them cracked open and covered with bright blue tarps, look like a board game of disaster.

Nina and I have not come to New Orleans to do a postmortem on Hurricane Ida, but to attend the wedding of a former student of ours. We planned the trip months ago and had no idea we would fly into the aftermath of an assault.

And an assault it was. Ida was both an echo of the past and sign of the future. With a Category 5 taking aim at Louisiana on the exact same day that the state’s most famous storm hit sixteen years before, the word Katrina was on everyone’s lips. But what had come roaring up out of the Gulf with 150-mile-an-hour winds was as much harbinger as reminder.

For the city of New Orleans itself, Ida, just six miles an hour short of being only the fifth Category 5 storm to make landfall in the United States, might not have even been the Big One. But it was certainly that for the residents of Grand Isle, where the storm made landfall, and for those who lived in the swath of land and towns to the west of the city all the way up to Baton Rouge. Only a slight swerve in the path at the last minute spared the city of New Orleans an even more violent assault.

It was plenty bad, of course. Second only to Katrina as far as overall damage. The ninth named storm, fourth hurricane, and second major hurricane of the 2021 hurricane season. Ida came on fast, originating from a tropical wave in the Caribbean on August 23. Six days later on August 29, the sixteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Ida made landfall near Port Fourchon, Louisiana, devastating both that industrial port and the beach town of Grand Isle. After ripping through the state of Louisiana, Ida weakened steadily over land, becoming a tropical depression on August 30 as it turned toward the northeast, where it would have a few more lethal surprises in store.

Down below is the city, and I can’t help but remember the rapid devolving of civilized behavior during Katrina, the stripping away of the thin veneer once power, shelter, and food grew short. Not just the headline-grabbing stories from the Superdome, but the Danziger Bridge shootings, where cops shot and killed two Black men, wounding four others, while later claiming falsely that they were just returning fire from the men.

There are those who have argued that it doesn’t always go that way, and I agree. It’s not just a cliché: disaster really can rally people, bring out the best in them, bring communities together. To a certain point. But the strain starts to show quickly. I thought of the looting in my own town after Florence or in Mantoloking on the Jersey Shore after Sandy.

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