Hurricane Katrina: Big Broken Drive By

As I approached the city of New Orleans for my first time ever, listening to an old Neville Brothers CD, Yellow Moon, headed toward America's musical Holy Land, I started to cry. Alone in my VW Vanagon, I had the space to sob freely. I was finishing a 3,000 mile road trip which began in Northern California and approaching a city I'd yet to experience, but had always wanted to. How odd-still looming some 35 miles in the distance, it was already bringing me to tears.

The sheer Size Of It All was beginning to seep in. This was January 7, 2006. Four months had passed since Hurricane Katrina had razed the region. Yet every mile approaching the looming grey shell of a city was an abandoned landscape of increasing destruction -neon sign skeletons, their colored plastic skins blown away; boat-strewn lakeshores and fields; forests of trees stripped clean of their last speck of greenery. Many pine trunks were randomly severed at their thick middles, like brittle garden stakes overrun by some invasive, endless herd.

From the consistent southward compass points of the snapped timbers, it wasn't difficult to read the last prevailing direction of hard winds. This was striking to me, as I could clearly envision the hurricane coming from the direction they lay, up from the Gulf of Mexico, where increasingly warm waters had boiled the storm into its ferocious category 5 climax. Reading these snapped trees, I rendered a vision of the storm's huge spiraling arms, playing rotational havoc as they swept across the multi-state region, first long and hard one direction, then wrapping around the other way, to finish the insult. Tears still streaming, I confess a simultaneous thrill in witnessing such mind-bending evidence of natural's humbling power.