Our Hell in High Water

By James Nolan
Sunday, September 4, 2005; B01

BATON ROUGE

The real nightmare began last Wednesday morning, when the city cut off the water supply two days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Until then, I hadn't regretted the decision not to evacuate my second-story French Quarter apartment, even when the electricity flicked off in the middle of the storm, plunging the city into darkness and ending most outside communication.

I still had hope.

I'm not particularly brave, but I am a fifth-generation New Orleans native raised in a culture that knows how to deal with hurricanes. As a matter of fact, the first light I ever saw streamed from a generator at Hôtel Dieu, the hospital the Daughters of Charity had founded in the 19th century. I was born there during the unnamed hurricane that wiped out New Orleans in September 1947, and was rowed home to the Faubourg Tremé along a flooded Canal Street. So as clouds darkened on Sunday afternoon, generations of storm folklore -- sheer instinct by now -- sprang into action. I filled the bathtub with water, cut the wick on the hurricane lamp, froze water in plastic jugs to keep the refrigerator cool, secured the dilapidated wooden shutters on the front gallery, stocked up on batteries, food and bottled drinking water, and got out the portable radio and the plug-in white Princess phone. Then I opened a bottle of wine. By the time my friends José and Claudia arrived to weather the storm with me, I'd cooked a three-course meal, which we topped off with a bottle of Spanish cognac.

"Here's to Katrina," we toasted, "the Russian spy," even as the TV broadcast its unrelenting instructions to evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.