Hurricane evacuations were fun when I was a kid. I grew up in the ’80s and early ’90s in Luling (in the River Parishes), and for me and my sisters, hurricane evacuations meant no school and a trip to visit my uncle and cousins in Shreveport. We packed our important things like my parents told us to, which for me were my prized books and cassette tapes. It’s a strange thing to look at your possessions once a year, and imagine it all underwater. What would I save if I could? But back then I didn’t really think anything bad would happen. Nothing ever had, weather-wise. I would pack my precious items and enjoy the trip, dreading the time that the parish officials would give us the OK to come back to school.
August of 2005 was different. I was 29 then, I had a husband, three kids who were 6, 4 and 2, and I had just started my first semester back at the University of New Orleans after a long hiatus. Katrina was predicted to hit Florida at first, but then it took a sudden turn and the category 5 was headed straight for us. We had a day to pack everything that we didn’t want to see underwater, and move out of the target range.
My aunt had an unoccupied, unfurnished rental house in Pensacola that she said we could hunker down in. So, my then-husband, and my kids and I caravaned east with my parents and my youngest sister. I packed different things than I did when I was a teenager — school materials, medications and legal documents. The interstate was shut down, so we joined the traffic on Highway 90. As we drove by the beach in Biloxi, I smiled at the condos that my family used to rent over the summer when I was a kid, thinking about the times my cousins and I would run wild along the sand. In two days, those buildings would be gone.
What was usually a three-hour drive to Pensacola took all day. Cars were backed up for miles and we kept getting re-routed by road blocks. We’d left in the morning and got to Pensacola late in the afternoon. The rain had just started. Katrina was a monster that soaked the whole southeast, so even though we drove more than 200 miles, we still got rain and wind gusts. There’s video of my kids running through the wind in the backyard of that rental house, laughing, with their hair blowing all around. We didn’t know the nightmare that was happening back home, the rain and the winds and flood waters that were already driving people from their first floors to their attics.
The next morning, my dad packed up the seven six-gallon gas cans he’d brought and went in search for gasoline. Even outside of the area of impact, gas was hard to come by. As was, to our surprise, liquor. Gasoline and vodka tonics were necessary hurricane supplies and he had a hard time finding either. At long last, he found a liquor store that sold vodka, but no tonic. Really? No mixers? We were New Orleanians. Booze was our God given right. There was no Dorignac’s to pop into and fill our baskets. Where were we?
By the time he got back home, we were able to pull up news coverage about what was happening in New Orleans. The first image I saw was not the people stranded on roof tops, or the heartbreaking footage of people screaming for help at the Superdome, but an aerial shot of a leaning cell phone tower standing in a sea of brown water. Then the camera panned further to the west and I saw rooftops of businesses. It wasn’t until I saw the PJ’s Coffee sign jutting out of the water that I knew what I was looking at. It was close to the corner of Robert E. Lee Boulevard (now Allen Touissant Boulevard) and Paris Avenue. My husband and I had gone to that coffeeshop on countless dates. Now it was completely underwater. It was close to the UNO family housing where we’d lived for the first couple of years we were married. I wanted to control the camera and make sure my old home was OK. It’s funny that I thought about that first, but not about our current house in Luling. Later that night, we found out that our neighborhood had gotten wind damage, but that most of the New Orleans area was inundated, and people were trapped. I remember my mom trying to comfort us by saying, “It’s going to be OK. Help is coming for them, and we’ll rebuild.” But I thought about how long it took to fill one pothole in New Orleans, and I had my doubts. And the help that was coming for those people was not coming fast enough.
The kids and I ended up staying in Pensacola for four weeks. The neighborhood we were in was filled with kind neighbors who brought us food and furniture to borrow. I built blanket forts with the kids and we watched the movie “Madagascar” on a loop. Two weeks into our stay, we got the green light to return to St. Charles and St. Tammany parish, where my parents lived, to check on our houses. Officials warned that there was still no electricity, and that food and gas were scarce. My dad and husband decided to brave the ride back home to check on everything and would let us know when it was OK to come back. It was another two weeks after that when the rest of us were able to drive safely back home.
We had roof damage, but the house was livable and the electricity was back on. My husband had cleaned out and bleached the refrigerator. The Walmart down the highway from us was the only store open for miles and miles. So, a few days after we got back, our 4-bedroom house became the refugee camp for my family, my sister, her friend, one of our friends, my sister-in-law, my niece, my nephew and five cats. Everyone else’s homes had either been destroyed or were in neighborhoods that weren’t declared safe enough to return to.
I wouldn’t be returning to school that semester, and it took a while for my eldest to get back to her first-grade routine. I spent most of my time cooking, making sure the cats didn’t kill each other, and taking occasional trips out to New Orleans to help friends gut their houses. Twenty years later, the smell of mold still makes me think of rotten sheetrock, blackened refrigerators and boxes of drowned Christmas ornaments.
Trips to Walmart were strange. I stood in long lines because they only let in 10 people at a time. I remember steering my buggy through the frozen food section and there was a soldier in full fatigues with a sidearm, pushing his own basket that had exactly one container of yogurt in it.
The worst part of that whole experience was taking out the trash. Regular waste service hadn’t been restored yet. Instead, there was one enormous dumpster at the end of my street that I drove the trash to every day. There was one time, I don’t remember why, I skipped a couple of days. If I had to guess, I was probably avoiding it because the dumpster wasn’t emptied often and the stench of rot coming from it was overwhelming. But after a couple of days in the September heat, our trash was stinking so bad, I couldn’t avoid it anymore. I set the couple of foul bags and box of discarded food on the hood of my car and drove down the street.
When I say the dumpster was big, let me put it this way — I’m six feet tall and the lip of the dumpster was a head higher than me. I tossed the bags up and over into the heap. Then I picked up the box, which I really didn’t want to do because there were maggots inside. Sweat poured down my face and into my eyes. I was hot and agitated. I didn’t want to fling the box up because it was flimsy and I was afraid that it would break open. So, I lifted it carefully to the opening of the dumpster and suddenly a wasp flew out and dove towards my face.
I had a choice. I could continue to lift the box and get stung or drop the box and have maggots fall into my face. In that split second, I decided to get stung. The wasp attacked my cheek and I hoisted the box into the trash.
I don’t remember crying until then. I’m sure I did. It had been five weeks since Katrina had hit, and I can’t imagine that I hadn’t broken down crying at some point. But in that moment when I cradled my stinging cheek in the heat with the smell of decay all around me, I remember bawling and thinking, “I can’t take this anymore. When will it go back to normal?”
Twenty years later I can say that it never has. Not fully. There are people and whole neighborhoods that have never come back to New Orleans. Every time I see footage of a city wiped out by a hurricane, an earthquake or wildfires I know that the survivors will be dealing with the aftermath of the destruction long after the news coverage has ended. I no longer pack for hurricane evacuations with the excitement of a vacation, and I have a pretty good idea of what my things will look like if they all end up underwater.
Hurricane Katrina was the tragedy that took more than 1,800 people. My family and I were lucky that we had the information and the resources to leave before it struck, and that we were able to come back to minimal damage. It was also the tragedy that taught me that sometimes bad things happen and they change the world you know. It’s important to survive, to stay nimble and pivot with the changes, and to know that all things, even bad times, eventually end.
I thought about that when I was out at the dumpster, crying, and wishing that everything would go back to normal. An old line came to me, one that I’d heard before, but had never held meaning for me until that day, “This too shall pass.”
Since that then, I have never taken regular garbage pickup for granted. Vodka tonics are plentiful. Though changed my city is alive again with poetry, smiling neighbors, and jazz funerals — ones that sing loudly about death, change and life. Storms come, but this too shall pass. This too shall pass.
About the Author
Genevieve Rheams writes LGTBQ+ romance, comedy, literature, and personal essays. She received her MFA in Fiction from the University of New Orleans, teaches English at Loyola University, and is a writing coach. Her debut novel “We Will Plant Birds of Paradise” will be released in September 2025. She delights in having conversations with her three adult children and going for absurdly long walks. She lives with her wife in her hometown of New Orleans with their two cats and a dog. As you read this, she is most likely out of coffee and litter.
