Before I had even rubbed the sleep from my eyes the next morning, I was aware of the smell of swamps and moss and the fecund smell of things growing. The morning started early, before we had time to gulp instant coffee or eat a granola bar. The citizens of Angie came with chronically undertreated medical conditions that predated the storm: decayed teeth, poor nutrition, and diabetes in the young and the elderly. That morning a man came biking into town. He was so exhausted that the bike was swaying side to side as he rode. His hair was matted with thorns. He looked completely out of it.
“Biked from way down south,” was all he said, out of breath. He collapsed on a couch. He held out an arm, and I whistled at a huge septic wound. “Doctor, a few days ago this was just a bug bite, believe it or not,” he said. In the heat, without proper water or sanitation, simple bug bites were turning into a major medical issue. The similarities between these people and the kids I treated on the van were striking. I thought how tragedy always hits the poor the hardest and how misfortune multiplies when left untreated.
Later that day an elderly Cajun man appeared. He had a cloud of yellowing white hair above a liver-spotted face. He began telling me about his fishing that morning in the local swamp. “Fish are all spooked by the storm. Threw the line out and felt a tug. Turned out to be an alligator,” he said.
“What did you do?” I asked. He looked at me as if that were the silliest question he had ever heard.
“Hit that sucker on the head. Then I took it home, and the wife and I ate it. Best meal we had all week.” I was quiet as I took his blood pressure. His breath whistled. “Asthma,” he said after a while. “Ran out of my puffer.”
The next day a troop of national guardsmen showed up. “We were given orders to come protect your team,” one of the men told me. I told him I wasn’t sure we needed protecting. “We’ve been trained to keep order,” he said, shifting his rifle awkwardly. The troop unpacked boxes of MREs, meal replacements, carrying them into the fire station. Famished, we crowded around. Without refrigeration or clean water, we hadn’t wanted to eat or drink anything local. Besides, food was in short supply, and the last thing we wanted to do was take it away from the townspeople.
“Check this out,” Mark said, reading a label. “This puppy has over three thousand calories.”
“How did they get that many calories in one meal?” I asked, disbelieving. “That’s enough calories for an entire day.”
The guardsman laughed, peeling back his own lid. “Lots of cheese and pasta. And cookies. They made them for soldiers who are working all day.”
I opened one and tasted it. It was ravioli. Before I knew it, I had eaten the entire dish. Great, I thought. Three of these a day, and they will roll me home.
“Have you heard about the locals eating alligators?” I asked the man. He was digging into a grayish stew.
“Sure,” he said, gulping. “They’re eating whatever they can get. I would too. There’s no food down here, besides what they can forage.” He took a sip from his bottled water.
“We’ve been sharing our food with the kids,” he said quietly.
He squinted up at the hot sun. “I sure wish they would send real help soon. These people are hurting.”
“You’re here,” Mark said, opening his meal.
“Yeah, but they need people to help fix their roofs and the electricity and get the water running. None of that is stuff we’re trained to do.” He hefted his rifle. “This is what I’m trained to do, and trust me, I don’t want to.”
The days moved at lightning, crackling speed. We worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day in Angie. Once we had Angie under control we drove our van into nearby towns, expanding our coverage area to include Bogalusa and Pine. In the town of Pine a police officer came gasping in, and sat down in a waiting chair. “I think I had a heart attack during the storm,” he said.
I was shocked. “Why do you think that? Do you have any pain right now?” I said, reaching for my stethoscope.
“Pain in my chest,” he gasped. “And it’s been worse the last few days. Right now I can barely breathe it hurts so bad.”
I turned to yell at the others, “Anyone got any nitro?” As I turned, the police officer collapsed, nearly falling out of his chair. In seconds we had the paddles out and were administering CPR. Then he was sent by ambulance on to Bogalusa, where he was stabilized.
After about a week of our trip, we moved our temporary sleeping quarters to the empty beds at the LSU Bogalusa Medical Center. It was a spooky setting. The emergency room was functioning at a skeleton level. The rest of the hospital was abandoned and empty, with IV bags left dangling from hooks. I wondered what had happened to all the patients. Had their families simply taken them? I thought about the months our twins, hooked to respirators, were in the neonatal unit. I wondered how they would have fared if we had been here, during the storm, and the electricity had gone out. We took over the third floor as our temporary sleeping quarters, choosing rooms at random along the echoing hallways. Just looking at my plain hospital bed, capped with white sheets, made me feel depressed. This would be my home for another two and a half weeks. Though we had been in the area for only a week, it felt like months.
To lighten the mood, the team wrote our room numbers on the dry-erase board in the nurses’ station. Soon the board was covered with extra comments. Next to Catherine’s room someone had written that she needed four-point restraints. Michelle Wang’s notes warned she had bird flu. Mine made reference to a bad case of food poisoning I was recovering from. Desperate for something different from the canned meals, I had gone into the first restaurant to reopen in Bogalusa, even though Mark had warned me it was a bad idea. He was right. I got violently sick from tainted food or dirty water. Despite the calorie-heavy army meals, I was dropping weight like crazy.
It had been several weeks since the storm, but we still had only sporadic cell phone coverage. The only places that had electricity were those approved as priority by the military, such as the hospital emergency room. The citizens still had no power to heat water for cleaning, cooking, or boiling drinking water. They were living in darkness at night, with no fans to cool their days. Weeks after the storm, and there were still no Internet connections. Illnesses were rampant. I wondered just what our government was doing. People were getting sicker. How long would they be expected to live under collapsed roofs, with no sanitation or ways to get clean? I longed to open my laptop and communicate with Amy or call her on my cell phone. I was allotted only two minutes every other day to call her on our clunky satellite phone.
The sense of dislocation was profound. I felt I was in another country, another world. Volunteers were now flooding the towns and cities, bringing trucks filled with donated clothing. Empty lots took on the appearance of bazaars, with folding tables piled high with everything from Pampers to candleholders. Like the National Guard, the church missions and volunteers brought good intentions, but they weren’t able to provide the essentials that the citizens really needed. So many used clothes were being brought in that the surplus was piled into high mountains and left to rot in the sun. Mountains of clothes, I thought, and the citizens still couldn’t cook food or flush their toilets. “What is wrong with our system?” I blurted out to Mark as we tended lines of people with completely preventable food poisonings and other illnesses. “Help should be here by now.”
Toward the end of our first week in Bogalusa, a volunteer told us to go check out this family he’d heard was living on an isolated farm outside town. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be people on farms outside town who would need our help.
When we pulled down the drive to the farm, two kids emerged from an old red pickup truck parked in the front yard. The small house had been crushed by the storm. Around it was a halo of mossy green trees. There were two children, a boy and a girl, about seven or eight. The father came out, and from his tired face I knew not to ask too many questions. The mother looked as if she was in a shocked daze. I caught a brief bu
t strong distinct odor of decay on the warm breeze.
The children were lean with work, their eyes calm with experience. Before the storm their lives had probably been happy and whole. They probably had favorite animals on the farm and pets they cared about. As a child I had spent many weeks on farms, both that of my father’s family and that of my mother’s Mexican family in Las Cruces. For me the memories of the farm came back in smells: the smell of hot cotton fields and the sweat of the men laboring beside us, their sweat clean and pure; the smell of my mother, her lavender soap; and the warm skin smell of my sister, Stephanie, as we took turns stepping in the way of our mother’s hot washcloth after a day spent picking cotton or playing outdoors. The life of a farm child was hard, with work from sunup to sundown, but it was also a life lived in bright tastes and experiences.
But this storm had ravaged these children. They were covered in excoriated bug bites, scratched so hard that they bled. Mark and I began cleaning and treating their wounds. Mark talked to the parents about going into the makeshift tent city. At least there they would have food and water and medical care. It was clear from their response that they didn’t want to leave their farm. I realized if they left, they probably would not return. They might end up one of the thousands left completely homeless by Katrina.
“What are you doing for water?” Mark asked.
The mother looked off in the distance and didn’t answer. The little boy piped up. “We ran out of water, sir.”
What that meant on a farm I hadn’t considered. I noticed then how quiet the farm was. Birds sang in the grass, and there was the hum of insects, but that was it. There was no lowing of cows, no bleating of sheep. I had spent enough time on farms to know how noisy they were. This farm was quiet. Dead quiet. The father rubbed his face with both hands, as if scrubbing it. The little boy looked at him forlornly.
“We tried to make the water last,” the boy told us, his eyes wide. “We had to be careful not to spill it. Every day we gave them each a drink, isn’t that right, Dad? We carried it in a cup. They each got one cup every morning.”
I smelled the decay again. I stared out in the fields. A barn stood empty. The silence was ominous. From afar I heard the screech of a crow.
“It wasn’t enough,” the father said abruptly.
“The sheep cried at us,” the boy said, his eyes as blue as the sky above him. “My sister and me brought them a drink every day, and they cried and cried.”
“What happened?” Mark asked, his voice low. He had crouched down to talk to them, and his wrists dangled between his knees.
“The water ran out. They died,” the boy said.
The little girl went and sat by the fence. The mother sat wearily next to her and started braiding her hair. I thought about what it must have been like for those children, carrying cups of water every day to give the animals a drink, realizing it was not enough, and watching them weaken and die one by one, until the field was no more than huddles of damp wool. I didn’t want to go out in the field and look. I knew that they had probably lost not just their entire income but dear and loved animal friends.
Mark and I had tears in our eyes. We talked to them again about staying in the tent city. The father didn’t want to leave. They had lost all their sheep, their home was ruined, they had no water, and no help was coming. He didn’t want the shame of living in a tent city and the finality it suggested: that there was no going back. Finally, though, he agreed to let his wife and kids go stay in the shelter. He would stay on the farm, seeing what he could do.
“We should check on them later,” Lorenzo said when the three of us got back in the van. It was the kind of thing you say when you know it isn’t going to happen.
“Amy?” I held the clunky satellite phone well away from any trees. I had exactly two minutes allotted for my call. “How are you holding up? How are the kids?” My questions came out in a rush. I saw her hair, the sides of her cheeks, the glasses she wore for distance. I saw her hand resting on my thigh in a restaurant. I saw her teeth, her lips, heard her laugh. I was desperately homesick.
“The kids miss you,” she said. Her voice sounded far away.
I listened hungrily to every word she said. This was the only time I was connected back to what was increasingly feeling like the real world. Katrina was another reality altogether; I could have been orbiting the moon. I had been here for only three weeks, and it felt like forever. Everything had changed around me, and I was engulfed by a new reality. The days of pulling cockroaches out of ears and dealing with terrible abuse on the van were now my norm. That was the reality I hungered to return to. My phone calls to my wife seemed like my only chance of rescue. There was a part of me that wanted Amy to order me home. I knew the rest of the team felt the same way. We had been traumatized, not just by the vast need for medical care but by what felt like complete government disorganization or even indifference.
“I’ve been thinking about my grandparents,” Amy said, startling me.
“What do you mean?” I asked. Static interfered.
“Everything they went through.”
“How so?”
“Well … I don’t know if I ever told you about my grandpa.”
“No, you didn’t.” I listened carefully.
“It was in the Depression. My grandmother had passed away not long after giving birth to her twins. So my grandpa had three kids, including the toddler they already had.” Her voice was distant. “Everyone tried to help. They brought covered plates; they pitched in with the child care. Some even offered to adopt the kids. But Grandpa wanted to keep his babies. But he had to work.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“At first he hired help. That didn’t work well at all. This was in a bad time, and he couldn’t afford help. No one wanted to deal with three little babies and a man who didn’t know what he was up against.”
“No kidding.” Just the sound of her voice was soothing.
“So my grandpa built a pen in the backyard. They even called it the cage. It was a sort of playpen before they had playpens. He made it out of chicken wire. He plopped those babies in there. Every now and then he moved it to a fresh spot of grass.”
She laughed. It was a tired laugh. I thought of Amy all alone with our three kids. They were also twins and a toddler. She had done her part.
“Amy, I don’t want you to have to build a cage,” I said.
“That’s good, because I don’t have any chicken wire.” And then she said what I wanted most to hear: “Randy, it’s time to come home.”
In Angie the mayor’s wife insisted on hand washing our clothes before we left. We had stayed nineteen days, but it felt like months, which had often been spent wearing the same clothes. She brought us our laundry in clean stacks, as stiff as boards and smelling like the sun. I walked the empty halls of the medical center. I stopped to take a photograph of the wallboard with our room numbers. My feet echoed on the stairs. Downstairs a group of bright-eyed people came toward me. They were from FEMA, and they were ready to take over. I heard their titles, “firefighter,” “paramedic,” “nurse.” It seemed like a good omen. Help was coming and with luck would keep coming.
On the drive back we stopped in a brew pub that had just opened. The team teased me about taking my chances with food poisoning again. But this time we all took the risk. The electricity was back on, and people could boil water. Anything, we joked, was better than those army meal replacements. Our spirits were high. We were going home.
The waitress who took our order looked curious. “Are you that medical team that’s been around?” she asked. Without a word she pulled up an empty chair and sat at our table. We waited, not knowing what to expect. Mark cleared his throat in a friendly way. In a flat, emotionless voice she started talking. “I was east of New Orleans when the floods came,” she said. “All I remember is being on the street when a huge wave just came riding down on me. It seemed twenty feet high. I got up to the top, spitting water. Everything was a swirl, a
nd I was riding by the tops of houses. I saw this tree.” She stopped. I felt she needed to tell this story, to make it a reality for us too. “It was the top of a tree. I grabbed ahold of it best I could. I was out there holding that tree for the whole day. The water was brown and cold. You wouldn’t believe how powerful it was, all cold on your legs and pulling so hard. It kept trying to pull me down. All these snakes were swimming by. I never saw so many snakes. Cottonmouths. They all were stirred up by the storm. Other animals came by too. There were bodies of dead dogs. Cows. This one little gray kitty was trying to swim, and she just went under, and I never saw her again. And there was this baby, I think. It was a little baby in a dressing gown. A real baby.”
She looked relieved as she talked. I thought about how beneficial it is to survivors to tell their stories, only if to see that someone else cares. She got up as if her story were finished. No one said anything. She tucked the notepad in her apron.
“What finally happened to you?” Lorenzo asked.
“I held on that tree all day. Evening came, and I thought I would die. I don’t remember the boat coming to rescue me. I guess they had to unpeel my fingers from the tree. The sun had burned my face so bad it made blisters, and when they pulled me into the boat, I fainted. That’s what they told me later. I woke up being carried into a shelter. Now I’m here.”
She walked away. In a moment she was back with our drinks, smiling. I drank a cold bottled Budweiser and ate my food when it came. I saw the waitress later, standing by the counter. She raised a hand to wave good-bye.
I was back home, but nothing felt the same. Nothing was the same. I picked up Charlotte and felt her featherlight bones against my body. Her wide rosy mouth turned toward mine for a kiss. Even her hair smelled different.
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