Day 391 - Waiting for Gustav

Leg 7: 497 miles from Lockhart, TX, to New Orleans, LA
Leg 8: 1,377 miles from NOLA to NYC via Amtrak
(3,959 driving miles; 5,336 total miles)

I am writing this from a train I wished they called the City of New Orleans. Alas, it’s called the Crescent which, frankly, wants for an iconic folk song to match Arlo Guthrie’s paean to the former Illinois Central’s New Orleans-to-Chicago train.

We left New Orleans on time, just past 7am today, Friday, due in New York tomorrow afternoon. I arrived at the station 30 minutes before we were to depart to find there were already several hundred people queued up along three walls in the cavernous 1950s waiting hall. Someone mentioned that there were 200 more passengers than was usual for a Friday before Labor Day.

This is what the early stages of an evacuation look like in a major American city. And it’s worth noting that it’s the three-year anniversary, to the day, of Katrina.

Gustav is still days away from clarifying its intentions for the Gulf Coast. But that hasn’t kept a jittery quarter-million residents in New Orleans from engaging in a high-stakes guessing game as to where he might go.

Weather models envision landfall anywhere from eastern Texas to western Florida, a gapingly broad swath. New Orleans may be spared, or it may receive a glancing blow, or it may take a direct hit. The problem is no one knows, and no one will know more until late Monday or Tuesday when landfall is hours away. By then, if it is aiming for New Orleans, it will be too late for residents to safely make their way out of town, and hotels sufficiently inland will be booked anyhow. So they make plans now—and will likely begin to leave days before we will know exactly where Gustav will go—because that’s what you do when you live in a city that is largely below sea level with infrastructure inadequate to compensate for that fact during hurricane season.

The past several days have been a surreal combination of tense conversations in households (“You think we should go to Hattiesburg or Alexandria, honey?”); anxious calls to motels a few hours inland (imagine 100,000 people doing this simultaneously); and desultory conversation (overheard from grocery stockers the next aisle over: “So, you got a plan yet?” “Oh, I’ll probably just put a few things in my car and head up to my mom’s place in Hammond for a few days. I already got most of my stuff stacked on tables and shelves.” “I hear you.”). It reminded me more of idle chit-chat about sports scores than strategies for keeping appliances and keepsakes from being inundated.

Then again, my hosts and I were no less schizophrenic about it. We dutifully filled the gas tank in the car, another canister of “emergency gas” in the trunk, and reviewed maps for a departure route. In between we were drinking casually all afternoon, smoking a brisket in the backyard, and planning a dinner party for seven which we had taken to calling our big Fuck You to Gustav. Tension mixed with resignation. But tense about what, exactly? Resigned to what, precisely? No one was sure.

One radio show on the local talk station was interviewing callers about the best ways to secure your RV on the side of the road if you got stuck in traffic on the highway during the brunt of the storm. A DJ on a rock station further down the dial was playing tunes for a New Orleans citywide going away party. What else can you do but make a plan, compare notes with neighbors, and then engage in gallows humor to pass the stunning 72 to 96 hours until you implement, tweak or abandon your plans?

But, like I said, most people will just go because they won’t wait until the last minute and risk getting caught in town when it’s too late to leave. That’s whom I was lined up with in that waiting hall this morning, and who are on this train with me now. Phil and Daisy Mason are heading to Atlanta to stay with her daughter. How long I asked? Weren’t sure—a week, maybe, they guessed? Mike from Slidell was heading the same place. Jackie and Marion, further north to the Carolinas. This was just a sampling from the tables in the dining car.

Tulane has canceled classes until next Thursday already to allow students to evacuate. Loyola has done something similar. The University of New Orleans is sure to follow if it hasn’t already.

Even if Gustav never comes close to New Orleans—if not so much as a single drop of rain falls in the delta, and if no mandatory evacuation is ever called by officials—100,000 New Orleanians are likely to have left town this weekend. That means hundreds of thousands of person hours of work lost as businesses close down for a few days. The city, in addition to the direct costs of orchestrating this mass migration, will be out that sorely needed tax revenue. And think of all the out-of-pocket money about to be spent by residents holing up in hotels and motels in northern Louisiana for a few days, possibly for nothing.

Several friends and colleagues here have told me that if Gustav is a substantial storm that hits New Orleans directly, the city’s done—end of story. People who came back before won’t come back again. I guess that may be true. But as concerning should be that this sort of mass fleeing in advance of storms which may never actually make landfall is unsustainable. Residents won’t be able to afford or endure it--assuming they heed the call at all, next time. Businesses—especially major national and international businesses—won’t tolerate it. This collective wincing in the face of approaching storms will chase away the private investment that is essential to New Orleans’ resurrection over the long haul.

So pray for Gustav to pass New Orleans by. And then pray for another three years before another storm is even forecast to come close. We need it.