Our Sunday Drive

With Hurricane Ike now heading toward Texas rather than Louisiana, we can plan on staying home on the weekend ahead. Two weekends ago, we had to flee Gustav, and it was not a pleasant journey.

That Sunday, September 1, was a beautiful day for a drive. But not with one million or more other people on the road.

Still, my wife and I thought we might get away over the Labor Day weekend ahead of Hurricane Gustav. Even as the forecasters pinpointed the Louisiana coast as Gustav's target, I thought (hoped? prayed?) the storm might edge farther west, into Texas, and spare New Orleans much of anything more than heavy wind and rain. But Saturday's late forecast and the mayor's evacuation order persuaded me to struggle the plywood out of the shed and onto the picture window and get packed.

We left early Sunday morning, I in my car, with maps, suitcases, cooler and sacks of provisions, my wife Kathy in her station wagon with our older son, our two golden retrievers and one cat and our son's two cats. Despite the opening of all four lanes on some of the interstate highways out of New Orleans – that scheme called "contraflow" -- the roads were clogged with cars, pickup trucks, vans, and at least one aged, multi-colored stretch limousine, inching along, stopping, inching. Once in a lane, a vehicle stayed in a lane, unless it could force its way to the shoulder. The highways through Mississippi have few exits, and individual drivers or groupings of family or friends sometimes parked on the side of the road to let the engines cool or to eat, drink and relieve themselves with only a vehicle to give them some privacy.

I became reacquainted with U.S highways. As a boy, I often traveled through Illinois on U.S. 51 in the back seat of my father's 1940 Studebaker Champion to visit grandmothers. Yesterday, I was in the front seat, and out of the city, beyond Lake Pontchartrain, I led our little caravan onto U.S. 51 rather than take the badly clogged I-55 toward Jackson, I picked up U.S. 51 off I-12, and took it to McComb, then turned onto U.S. 98 to Hattiesburg. There, sad to say, I left the 1940s and took the I-59 entrance into the 2000s. A bad choice; the interstate was rush-hour packed all the way from Slidell, La. to Birmingham, our destination.

In one stretch, traffic was moving fairly well, in between the blockages, and we made about 40 miles in one of the many hours of our exodus. But throughout the rest of the trip to Birmingham, in both Mississippi and Alabama, I-59 was often so jammed. that we hop-scotched between it and the nearly parallel U.S. 11. We would have been better off staying on the old road, I think now. Despite the stop signs and occasional red lights, we seemed to make better time. The driving was less frustrating, anyway.

A Google directions search had told me that the distance to Birmingham was 340 miles and the driving time five hours and six minutes. We got on I-10 in downtown New Orleans at about 7:30 a.m. We pulled in under the motel portico in Birmingham at about 10:30 that night. A fellow who walked up to the reservations desk just after I, told me he had started from Kenner, a New Orleans suburb, at just about the same time. He had taken a somewhat different route, but without the romance of revisiting those two-lane U.S. highways.

I don't remember a radio in that Studebaker. But I have one in my car and kept it on New Orleans' WWL, a news-talk station, that gave us capitve evacuee listeners hour after hour of information.

News conferences by public officials from the governor and members of his crisis team to parish presidents and their crisis teams filled too much time. I had gotten up at 4 a.m., and the news conferences nearly put me back to sleep. Gov Bobby Jindal, with his rapid, clipped monotone delivery, was the worst. On television, he uses a signer so the deaf will be able to understand him. For those of us who hear, he should have an interpreter to complete the words and sentences he leaves unfinished and to articulate the words he swallows. Beyond that, he loves detail, and this listener nearly nodded off while he ticked off the exact number of first responders coming and from which other cities, the exact number of National Guard forces on duty, the exact number of helicopters deployed and from which bases. And on and on.

Jindal was scheduled to be a speaker at the G.O.P convention, I believe, but given the crisis, he probably will not. Too bad. The nation will miss wonk to the tenth power delivered like an airline stewardess mindlessly rushing through the emergency procedures. I am rather sorry, in fact, that he will not be vice president and never be heard from again.

Many of the same officials called in for interviews by the hosts (closing mantra: "Thank you so much for giving us your time; and the inevitable inane response: "No problem"). Each hour, we had top-of-the-hour CBS news blocks with cuts from the same news conferences and interviews, followed by five minutes of local news with -- guess.

WWL-TV's chief meteorologist gave updates from the National Hurricane Center, and he assumed that we who were on the road gave a fat millibar about the the latitude-longitude coordinates. ("Bring back Jindal," the droopy-eyed driver yelled at the radio.) Sandwiched in among all that was a steady diet of rants by my fellow travelers calling in to vent their frustration at being parked on Mississippi interstates and to recommend improvements to the genius who dreamed up contraflow.

And the cliches. The endless parade of cliches. In harm's way. Keeping a close eye. Not out of the woods yet. The very latest.

Why am I listening to this? I asked myself at one point. And I thought of the old joke about the guy beating himself on the head with a hammer who, when asked why he did it, explained that it felt so good when he stopped. Of course I knew why. I needed to know what was going on out there with that storm so threatening that it forced me from my home. No matter how boring it was, how soporific, how repetitive, I needed to have it.

Somewhere long ago I came across Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1861 essay "Bread and the Newspaper," which eloquently emphasizes the importance of news to the public, especially in crises. That came floating in to me somewhere between the meteorologist and the governor. "Everything else we can do without," Holmes wrote. "Only bread and the newspapers we must have." How much worse it would have been, fleeing from the unknown in that Studebaker without a radio.

We finally arrived at our destination, a Birmingham motel, along with hundreds of our neighbors, to judge from the Louisiana license plates in the parking lot and the trash the travelers had tossed in the parking lot.

Some sat around the pool watching their children splashing about, but from what I heard in the hallways, the rest of us spent hour after hour switching the television channels back and forth to CNN and MSNBC and The Weather Channel. We swore at the information we knew to be wrong, the mispronunciations, the cliches and the hype of "breaking news" and "the very latest." But we listened and watched.

And we had the map out, plotting what would turn out to be a much less grueling trip home.

A beginning

Having been mired in Civil War New Orleans for most of today, I thought I would start a blog in 21st century New Orleans.

Why? Exercise: to force myself to write something every day.

This is the start.

On the Road in Europe

While I was teaching in Innsbruck in the summer of 2006, I took advantage of a long weekend to rent a car and drive to Leiberstung, Germany, in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, the village of my Lorenz ancestors. On the way there, I took the route that the young woman in the Hertz office told me I must take, the scenic route over the Alps. On the return, I decided to travel south, along the Rhine, through France. It was a memorable trip, as I wrote at the time.

I got an idea for a new reality TV show on my way back to Innsbruck.

Ordinary drivers like me are put in cars in countries they have never been in before and whose languages they do not speak. They are provided cheap road maps and told to travel from one spot to another—say Leiberstung, Germany, to Innsbruck, Austria--using off-expressway routes wherever possible.

We viewers will watch them trying to read local direction signs while speeding along at 120 km/hr with a Mercedes a half a car length behind and, following the lead of the Mercedes, winding up on those expressways. We will sympathize with them as they get off the expressways to see a city and become hopelessly lost. We will hiss and boo as they travel miles in one direction only to decide that they have been going in the wrong direction. They may use a basic phrase book that includes “Where is…?” in the local language. Of course, they will not be able to understand the answers unless they come across someone on a bicycle or hanging laundry or filling a tank with gas at a service station, who will say (with a touch of superiority), “Do you speak English?”

We will delight in their mishaps in restaurants. When ordering a meal, they will never be quite sure what they are asking for. And when they nod their heads when the waiter asks a question, we will laugh hysterically, because we will know that he will return with a bottle of the most expensive wine or with a piece of meat that, a week or so ago, could have been part of a cow or rabbit or bottom-feeding fish, and whatever thick brown liquid it is slathered with resembles something that the diner saw earlier in the day bubbling in a roadside ditch.

If there were a show like that, I think I could be the first contestant.

On Saturday morning, just before boarding the ferry at Greffern to cross the Rhine from Germany to France, I decided that I ought to get gas. In one town, a portly gent said there was no gas station in his town, but he was sure the next town had one, or so I took him to say. I couldn’t find one there, however, and a fellow coming out of a tennis club told me, ach, nein, I would have to go to a town about 7 or 8 km. down the road, past the ferry, the Rhinfahre.

I could go on with the twists and turns. I did get gas. And I found my way to the ferry after taking one wrong turn and asking directions from a muscle-bound body-builder who gave me excruciatingly detailed and repeated directions in rapid-fire German. What I got from his hand motions was that I when I came to a point in the road when I could go either left or right, I should go left. I did, and I got on the ferry, and within just a few minutes it carried me and full load of others to France.

When I got off and followed the other drivers straight ahead, I saw a gas station off to my right at the first intersection. C'est la vie.

Road signs showing me the Rhine River route were in front of me, but I didn’t get a good look at them because the Citroen driver behind me honked as soon as the light changed. I wound up on the expressway on the way to Strasbourg. I still regret not driving through the French countryside. From what I saw on the horizon, it is dotted with exquisite little towns built around medieval churches.

From a distance, Strasbourg looked to be worth a stop.  But my turn off of the expressway put me in heavy traffic, and I could do little more than go with the others into the city. I wanted to experience coffee and pastry in an outdoor café, but there were no parking spaces, so I just kept turning right until I found the entrance to the expressway heading south.

When I get to Switzerland, I told myself, I will get off the expressway. But about two kilometers outside of Basel, the traffic stopped in the heat of the mid-day sun, moved half a car length or perhaps one or two lengths and stopped again, until a little more than an hour and half later I pulled to a stop in the shade of the customs station. A 30-something customs agent with an odd little wiggle of beard came up to the car. He waved away the passport I offered.

“Will you be traveling on Swiss highways?” he asked.

“I’m going to go to Liechtenstein,” I said. I had made that decision during the long wait.

“Then you will be traveling on Swiss highways. Thirty euro, please.”

I gave him a bill. He returned with a decal, which he put on the
windshield of the car, and my change: a coin that he said was 50 Swiss francs.

“How do I get to Liechtenstein?” I asked.

“Go toward Zurich and get off at Vraarroop,” he said, smiling.

“How?”

“Go toward Zurich and get off at Vraarroop.”

“Vraaroop” was not on the map. Not even a close approximation.

I had told myself not to complain to the customs officer but I had to say it—though with what I think was a smile. “Do you know how long we have been waiting to get here? How long the line is back there?”

“It is the city of Basel that has caused the delay, not the customs,” he said. “Not the Swiss customs.”

I smiled and waved goodbye and drove half a block and stopped. He was right. It was the city of Basel. Its traffic was clogged by its version of Boston’s Big Dig, and it took me another half hour or more to go just one more kilometer, where the highway opened ahead of me.

I had thought about stopping somewhere in France to have lunch, but had hesitated. What I had left of that long-ago 8 o’clock in the morning French class from a Hungarian refugee priest was little more than Je ne sais pas. I had no dictionary to help me distinguish between pate du foie gras and la plume de ma tante. And I was never quite sure how close one of those little towns might be to the highway, though, in hindsight, after that long wait outside of Basel, that distance would not have mattered.

Now that I was on the road to Vraarroop, however, I was hungry, and when I saw the ausfahrt for a rest stop with restaurant and rest rooms, I ausfahrted. And I lucked out—our reality show fans might think this a set-up—but a woman at the information booth inside spoke English, and with a cultured British accent. She patiently wrote the directions: follow the signs to Zurich, to Chur, then to Vaduz and Feldkirch. I did not ask about Vraarroop.

I picked up a Swiss cheese sandwich and a bottle of water in the shop across the way, and I was off again. I had some misgivings about turnoffs along the way, usually with a BMW or a Porsche on my bumper, but I kept going, and soon enough I was in the principality of Liechtenstein.

Where to stay? Without a guidebook to Liechtenstein, I picked a sign at random in Vaduz and wound my way up a hill to the Sylva Hotel. A notice on the door in German and English told me to knock on the door of the house behind, and when I did, a pleasant, well-fed woman a few years older than I told me the hotel was open but the restaurant was closed. She showed me a room: clean, well-appointed, and at a reasonable price. She quoted me Swiss francs, which Liechtensteiners also use, then translated into euros. It was nice to hear that some currency is valued lower than the dollar. A restaurant would be open within a walking distance of five minuten, or another, 10 minuten, she told me.

The one five minuten away was open, diners were eating on the patio, and the waiter, in his late teens or early 20s, seemed eager to use his English, so there would be no misunderstanding. I ordered—and got—a glass of a reasonably priced Liechtensteiner wine. He brought it in a cruet, and poured about half into a small wine glass. Later he came back and poured more. He had probably been a very good altar boy. I had a salad I put together at the salad bar and finished with a beer.

“No, not Liechtensteiner,” the waiter said when I asked about the beer. “We have no brewers here, I think.”

“But the wine?”

“Oh, yes. We have a very good winery.”

I left him the 50 Swiss franc coin.

After a good night’s sleep, at least until 5 a.m., when church bells summoned someone – Liechtensteiner monks? – to Mass, I was up and packed. And although the restaurant was closed, the hotel’s guests -- I and two women who had had the room next to mine -- had waiting for us a breakfast of coffee, rolls. jam, sliced ham and sliced Swiss cheese.
Then I was off to Feldkirch, just up the road from Vaduz in Austria, with a turn to see the sights along its car-width streets – the standard for streets in small European towns. From there, I angled onto the highway back to Innsbruck.

Next time I’m over that way, I want to spend more time in Switzerland, though preferably not in a line of traffic. And I’m going to carry a map so that I can find Vraarroop. The first trip was entirely too real.

Farewell, Old Friend

My old Volvo is gone now, victim
of the water that poured in from the lake
and rose in the yard when the levees broke.

It was two decades old, its paint a cracked
and faded gray, body dinged and crumpled
from outings of teens, with broken AC (but
plenty of heat; chilly Swedes saw to that)
and a long-dead horn and uncertain lights
and a floorboard hole on the driver’s side
covered with a duct-taped remnant of rug.
Still, it had gotten me to work and bar
and hardware store for many years, and if
it had faults, it was faithful, in its way.

And when the tow-truck driver hoisted it
to the bed of his truck and tied it down
a trickle of water from its exhaust
pooled in the street: final vestige of flood.
As the truck pulled away, for one last time
I stared at the mute pleas I had pasted
on the bumper: a veteran for Kerry
wanted the driver behind to hang up
his cell phone and drive and vote for Al Gore--
with car and its driver, lost causes, all.

Katrina +4

We on Informed Sources remembered Katrina in a program taped to be shown on August 28. That set me searching for pieces I had written during the two months of our exile from New Orleans at that time. I've posted two of them here.

Pensacola, September 5, 2005
Day 1

We are refugees, but we are safe.

And, thank God, we are much better off than most our fellow refugees: in a house with running water, a stove, a washer and dryer, a computer, telephone service and a pool (I am tempted to add, “none of which we looted from the neighborhood Wal-Mart,” but I’ll resist.)

“We” are my wife, Kathy, and I; son Bob; daughter Abby; her husband, Neil; and their five-week-old infant, Sullivan; Shadow, our faithful golden retriever; and six cats, four belonging to Kathy and me and two belonging to Neil and Abby. We are all bedding down in the Pensacola house of Neil’s mother and her husband and their anti-social, deaf dachshund who considers anything new on the floor a potential pee target. Daughter Mary fled to Dallas with a college friend and is staying at her parents’ house.

We know no more than anyone else who is following the New Orleans/Gulf Coast story on CNN and MSNBC, except that the anchors and reporters don’t seem to be concerned with pronunciations or geography. Back when I was a broadcast writer with UPI, for example, we always put a “pronouncer” on Biloxi (bih-luhk’-see). And we could trust that reporters knew something about the communities they were reporting on; none of the displaced New Orleanians in this house can understand why today’s tele-visions have not bothered, apparently, to look at a map of the city they are covering.

Complaining about such minor things, I guess, keeps us from sobbing about the uncertainty of our future.

We ask prayers for ourselves, but more for those hundreds of thousands who are less fortunate.

Day 2
I saw my house yesterday in a satellite photo posted by NOAA. It took some doing to find our section of town, but the photos are good (though some areas are hidden by cloud cover). My house is standing in some water, but I don’t believe there was enough to reach the first floor. I could not tell whether water had seeped into the two cars that I left in the driveway, but at least they were still there. And I saw no one partying in the backyard, so perhaps no one has yet found the beer in the minifridge in the shed.

Responding to my note on the reporting, our department chair’s husband, Hank Henley, a former newspaper reporter, wrote:
“My mind has also been boggled by the obvious lack of local knowledge displayed by the talking heads on CNN, Fox, etc. I guess I can forgive “Orleans County” and the “9th District” or even the “North Bank,” but yesterday I heard two whiz kids reporting from Christian Pass (mispronounced) and St. Louis Bay and began screaming at the television. I wonder why the national guys couldn’t hire or buddy with a local reporter just to get this stuff correct.”

Hank wrote later of seeing Geraldo Rivera standing in the spotlight with the city’s police superintendent and saying, “I am standing here with Chief E. Compass of the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Is this solely an opportunity for the reporters (if you can call some that) to get face time on the tube? Looking at the likes of Jeanne Meserve, Rita Cosby and some newschick named London, one would think so.

Day 3
We have been tortured by what we have seen on television and what more is to come that we don’t want to even imagine. From what I’ve been able to piece together, what water there was in our immediate neighborhood did not flood houses. But we and the neighbors whom we have been in touch with are worried about looting and, now, the burning.

I have also struggled with the conflicting emotions of seeing poor blacks the main actors in New Orleans. I despise the looters, and at one point I shouted, “Shoot the bastards!” at a screen that showed police standing by while looters sauntered out of a store with television sets. On the other hand, I can understand so much better how much the social, educational, economic structure of New Orleans is at fault. If you have not yet read it, pick up John Barry’s “Rising Tide,” the story of the 1927 flood. Conditions are no better now, and perhaps even worse. Will we learn any more from this than the residents of Mississippi and Louisiana learned from the 1927 flood?

Day 4
Here in Pensacola, we’ve been to the washer and dryer more than a few times with the two changes of clothes we brought under the assumption that we would be back by Tuesday or Wednesday(echoing from some recess of the mind is the old editor’s harrumph: Don’t ever assume, son…).

We’ve been making telephone calls to State Farm and Wells Fargo and all the other firms that hold our financial fate in their hands. All goes well until the voice on the other end of the line says something like “We are all so sorry for your loss,” and a sob rises in the throat before we can answer.

A Loyola vice president has established a blog where faculty and staff can let others know where they are. Students and alumni have set up other sites for making contacts. We are spread from coast to coast to coast and border to border.

We are told that the university administration is gathering in Shreveport to establish what one official called “Loyola in exile.” I gather we will be paid on a regular basis—those of us on contract, at least. Those who work for the auxiliary services that provide food and maintenance may not be as fortunate.

The university sustained little damage, but the city’s infrastructure is in such shambles that it may take months for basic services like water and electricity and telephone to be restored.

There will be no school this semester—a lagniappe sabbatical for faculty and staff. Students, however, are scrambling to get into universities around the country, and some have written to ask about the relative merits of those they are considering and what courses they might take. The university certainly must be liberal in evaluating transfer credits and waive the usual prohibitions on credit for major and common curriculum courses taken elsewhere.

In the email is a note from a Loyola colleague. She asks: “Did the Bush administration finally screw up so badly and so brazenly that they will be thrown out? I’m hoping for impeachment and a trial for war crimes and murder.”

I seem to recall that Bush was going to put Cheney in charge of government efforts. But he has been in some undisclosed location. http://michaelmoore.com has the best comment on their response to the disaster.

Day 5
Our hosts, Neil’s mother, Vicki, and her husband, Jon, have been gracious and more than tolerant of their guests of both two and four feet. But we worry about wearing out our welcome. One sign: the dachshund has become less hostile. But human nerves fray.

We are talking about going to Chicago to stay for a time with Kathy’s mother, and Mary told us she, too, would like to go there. Another daughter, Kate, and son Patrick live in the city also, and Kate says she may be able to get Mary a job with her firm, careerbuilder.com. Bob is even open to the idea of working in Chicago and perhaps going to graduate school there.

Who knows, but we may just all settle in as yankees again; blizzards don’t look so bad in comparison to hurricanes.

But maybe I’ll feel differently after a morning swim under the Florida sunshine in our host’s pool.

Day 6
I finally located my friend and colleague Maurice Brungardt, a professor of history. He lives on Front Street, at the end of Walnut, next to the Audubon Zoo. His house is on high ground, near the Mississippi River levee, so he does not need to worry about flooding. But the winds could be fierce and damaging.

He and his wife, Mariangela, left their Buick of a pre-energy-scare era in the garage and drove their Geo Metro to Jackson. When they found gas, they went on to Memphis, stayed the night with friends of friends, found more gas, and drove on to Kansas City to stay with a sister and her husband. In talking to him, I remembered our having lunch the week before, when we had talked about the hurricane in the Gulf and reassured each other that it was not going to hit New Orleans.

This afternoon I went to the Postal Service site and changed our address to that of Kathy’s mother’s house in Chicago.

The good news: Geico told me that shifting our address to Chicago brought our auto insurance down by $100 a month for the next six months.

Day 7
Tonight we went to dinner at the Pensacola Beach home of friends of longstanding of Neil and Abby. They were among the fortunate few after Hurricane Ivan last year; their house was damaged, mostly by water, but not destroyed. Along the way, however, we saw the devastation left by Ivan. Many skeletons of abandoned houses dot the beach. Trash is scattered in a wide swath. For sale signs attract no buyers.

Is that what we will find in New Orleans?

Day 8
From Fr. Ray Schroth, S.J., a one-time Loyola journalism professor comes this plea:

“I realize that this letter is for the most part too late to achieve its purpose. But my friend Peter Reichard, a New Orleans political writer who was my student friend and editor of the Loyola U New Orleans Maroon when I taught there, now safe in Chicago, left a message on my phone which I have just received.

”Peter asks me to write or call all my friends in journalism and impress upon you that ‘New Orleans has been hung out to dry by the Federal government.’ His own brother, who volunteered to stay behind and help, was now trapped in Charity Hospital with no help in sight. The situation is a ‘national shame,’ he said, and ‘FEMA is not doing squat!’ The ‘American can-do spirit,’ he said, has been forgotten. He fears that his brother might die. Meanwhile snipers are on the rooftops.

”I realize that you have already read many reports like that, and most likely the crisis has abated. But I also figure you should know of Peter’s trust in you. It reminds me of the great scene in the old black and white film, ‘Deadline USA,’ where the old immigrant woman, mother of a girl murdered by the mob, brings the incriminating evidence to Humphrey Bogart, courageous managing editor of “The Day,” which has been sold to its competitor and is in its last day of publication. Bogart asks Mrs. Schmidt why she did not bring this evidence to the police. She replies: ‘I no know police. I know you. I know newspaper.’”

The New York Times today published a story about the Times-Picayune’s efforts to continue publishing during the crisis. One person mentioned is Mary Chauvin, a copy editor, who got her education in journalism at Loyola and at The Maroon. The Times-Picayune is often criticized, but it has been doing an extraordinary and excellent job of reporting and publishing the news this week—even after its own building was flooded, its presses were under water, its employees and their families were in danger of losing their own lives. Today it published an open letter to George W. Bush. It deserves to be printed in full:

Editorial: Not Acceptable
The Times-Picayune Editorial Board

A day after a normally easy-going Mayor Ray Nagin blasted federal officials’ seeming indifference to the plight of New Orleanians who are stranded and dying, President Bush stood on the lawn of the White House and conceded the point: The federal government did not move quickly enough or forcefully enough to help those people hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina. “The results are not acceptable,” the president said before boarding a helicopter to go survey the storm’s damage.

It’s good to hear the president admit his administration’s shortcomings, and it’s even better to hear his promise to help all of us who are in need. But the sad truth remains that the federal government’s slow start has already proved fatal to some of the most vulnerable people in the New Orleans area. Water has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people. A lack of water to drink is exacting its toll on others.

“I don’t want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences,” the mayor said during a WWL radio interview Thursday. “Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don’t do another press conference until the resources are in this city.”

The mayor had obviously become fed up with federal bureaucrats’ use of future tense verbs. “Don’t tell me 40,000 people are coming here,” he said. “They’re not here. It’s too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.”

We applaud the mayor for giving voice to an entire city’s frustration. How could the most powerful and technologically advanced nation in the history of the world have responded so feebly to this crisis?

The president’s admission of his administration’s mistakes will mean nothing unless the promised help is deployed immediately. Each life is precious, and there isn’t a second chance to save a single one of them. No more talk of what’s going to happen. We only want to hear what is being done. The lives of our people depend on it.

Day 9
We leave for Chicago this morning. In a few hours we will load the car with cat cages and what little luggage we have, kiss daughter, son-in-law and grandson good-by, bid farewell to our hosts and be snarled at by the dachshund one last time.

-0-

Chicago, September 29, 2005

A rainstorm worthy of New Orleans broke over Chicago late yesterday afternoon, and by the time I had walked to the Chicago-State subway station from the Newberry Library I thought that, like Alexander Woollcott, I’d like nothing better than “to get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini.” But Fr. Kevin Wildes, president of Loyola University New Orleans. was in town to talk to our students who are enrolled at Loyola Chicago and to university alumni, faculty and staff who have taken refuge in the area, so I joined what I’d guess were about 150 or more people who came out to hear him speak.

His message: “We are alive—a little fractured—but we’ll be well,”

First, though, there’s the matter of power. While the campus stayed dry and buildings were largely undamaged by the hurricane, lights are still out and the elevators don’t run, but he’s badgered Entergy to the point at which “I think they have stopped taking my phone calls,” he said.

Housing for faculty, staff and students is another priority, and staff members are working at finding out who will need housing and who can give them a place to live. Wildes has also been talking to Tulane President Scott Cowen regularly, and one of things they have discussed is the possibility of setting up a cooperative K-12 “school” for children of faculty and staff who will not have their regular schools to go back to.

He reassured students and the few parents in the crowd that seniors would get the courses they need to graduate: “Walter [Harris, university provost] has assured me that we are going to be as flexible as possible in evaluating credits.” Graduation will take place in the spring, as scheduled. Admissions is out recruiting a new freshman class for next fall.

Turning to the alumni, Wildes said “we need help of all sorts,” and the relief fund that has been established is “a major way to keep the university together.” Alumna Shawn Donnelly, a major contributor to the university already, spoke up when he said that. “I’ll match every dollar you raise,” she said. Later, she told me, “It might make a dent in my piggy bank, but I want to do whatever I can for the university.”

Wildes characterized Loyola faculty, staff and students as “resolutely optimistic about our future,” and said many had been “heroic” in responding to the needs of others after the storm. He mentioned Reid Wick, who, with his wife, cared for patients in a hospital where she worked until all were forced to evacuate; now he is helping to raise money for out-of-work New Orleans musicians. He spoke of Bill Quigley, a law professor, who worked tirelessly with people who had been forced to take shelter in the Superdome. And he choked slightly when he told of getting an email with the subject line “What have you done to my son?” Wildes said he opened the message with some trepidation only to read a father’s report that, on returning home, his son had almost immediately volunteered to work with the Red Cross. “The transformation has been amazing,” the father wrote. When I talked to him afterwards, Wildes said he had cried when he read that.

“There are six-thousand stories, and then some, like that from Loyola people,” Wildes said. “The stories all show Loyola University acting out of its depth and character, and that gives me great hope for the future.”

Ahead, he sees what he referred to as a resurrection of Loyola. “New life—a transformation of old life,” he called it. And he said, “I want to go back and make it better than it was.”

He also wants the university community to consider “what we can do to contribute to a new life for that city, from reviving the arts to helping small business. We must be committed to helping the city.”

The event was held in the lobby of the university’s Crown Center for the Humanities, but it could have been a gathering in the Danna Center. I was greeted at the door by Kevin Corcoran, whom I taught in Communications Writing in the spring and who did some fine reporting for The Maroon. He had a tape recorder under his arm and told me he was covering Wildes’ visit for the campus radio station. I got a chance to say hello to three or four other students, most of them sophomores or entering freshmen.

Of the faculty, Ed Kvet had come in from Ohio, where he is living with his mother. Bill Barnett and Nick Capaldi of business were talking to Bill’s son, an alumnus who lives in Chicago [my four alumni/children now living there did not stop by, I’m sorry to say]. Bill had flown up from New Orleans. He lives in Harahan and stayed there, even during the storm. “I slept through it,” he told me. He’s been back and forth to campus often in the past few weeks.

Kate Adams came in and said that she has a brother who lives in Chicago who is not well, so she came here to spend time with him. There was also a young woman from Drama whom I did not know and whose name I have forgotten.

Stacy Ervin, a communications graduate of the class of 1989, is the president of the Chicago alumni chapter, and she did a professional job of introducing Fr. Wildes. I was also happy to talk with Tara Codr, another communications grad, who is from Omaha but now in Chicago, and with still another, Shawn Donnelly. A number of other graduates of ours said hello, but I’m sorry not to be able to remember all of their names.

Staff members meeting, greeting, compiling lists of names and handing out Loyola T-shirts were Chris Wiseman, Trish Moser and Keith Gramling.

When I left, the heavy rain had stopped, but I still had to sidestep the puddles on the sidewalk as I went back to the elevated station. “Just like home,” I thought.

As I crossed the street, a young woman with a familiar face was alongside me. She was, indeed, from Loyola New Orleans, she told me when I asked, and then we recognized each other. I had advised her on that Thursday or Friday before we all fled. We talked for a minute or two, and then she said she had to go.

“See you in January,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be there.

Subsequently, I wrote an article on Katrina's effects on Loyola and Spring Hill College, our sister Jesuit insitution in Mobile. At the time, I was in Chicago, working each day on research at the Newberry Library, which had generously offered carrels and the run of the library to scholars displaced by Katrina. I interviewed Kevin Corcoran in an Italian restaurant on Rush Street, not far from the library. I conducted the other interviews by cell phone in the marble-floored hallways of the library, outside the room housing the fellows' carrels.

The article, “Katrina Strikes and Southern Jesuit Colleges Survive,” can be found at http://www.marquette.edu/library/collections/archives/Conversations/No29_2006/29_lorenz.pdf

Ora et labora

Here in the maze of the fourth floor carrels,

the Newberry Library fellows, monks

of modern day, copy into laptops

the mute treasures they find in volumes brought

by clerks who appear and disappear,

their footsteps muffled by thick ribbed carpet.

As in the cloisters, no one speaks, and when

these monks pass in the narrow corridors

they say nothing to each other -- aloud,

with eyes, raised hand or slightest nod of head.

Still, they communicate from cell to cell.

No great “Eureka!” of discovery,

but in the padded nooks not far from me

one coughs; one sneezes; one blows her nose;

another clears his throat; and someone farts.

Oh, holy Benedict! was it the same

through the ages in Monte Cassino?

Abby's Christmas Surprise

The aging gent who does occasional chores around here broke the last of his new year’s resolutions at the end of 2004.

He’d been determined to sit down on Thanksgiving Day for his annual telling of the Lorenz family’s notable events, and he did. Then something else came up.

Maybe a nap on the couch. Maybe the carcass of a turkey to be dumped in the garbage before the cats made off with it. Whatever it was, the 50 or so words that had danced off his fingertips remained in the computer, like that bowl of leftover cranberry sauce abandoned in the back of the refrigerator.

Then came the feast day of St. Fortunatus. Abby and Neil knocked on the door. She had been in Tampa for a seminar, and they just thought they would stop by and say hello on their way home from the airport, she said.

That was nice, but a bit odd; they aren’t in the habit of dropping in like that. But we all sat down in the still-to-be-holly-decked family room and chatted for a minute or two about nothing in particular until Abby suddenly stood up and said that she had brought souvenirs for the missus and the aging gent.

She reached into a pocket of her jeans and handed each of them miniature Florida license plates. Her mother got one with “#1 Grandma” stamped on it; the aging gent's read “#1 Grandpa.”

There may not be much joy in the rest of the world these days, but it is overflowing in this household.