One Year Ago...

I can hardly believe it but on Monday it will be a year since I went down to Houston to volunteer with the Hurricane Katrina survivors. For the last month I've been really consumed with visceral memories from that week.

I went to Houston with my co-worker Mac from 826LA. I think about 15 of us from various 826's around the country ended up going down but Mac and I kind of pioneered the whole thing. We flew to Houston on September 11, which was strange in and of itself because I had been living in New York when September 11 happened four years prior.

I remember how monumentous it felt to be boarding an airplane and on my way to witness another American disaster, four years to the day since I stood on my roof in the East Village watching the towers burn.

Mac & I arrived in Houston without any sort of plan. We had been trying to get people on the phone for a week, trying to get clearance to go to the Reliant Center so that we could work with all the kids who were stranded there. The plan was to do Storytelling & Bookmaking sessions inside the Reliant Center, where there were rumored to be around four thousand evacuees. But unfortunately, we ended up flying down there blindly, armed only with a hotel reservation and a shit-load of bookmaking supplies.

After we checked into the fancy Hilton (which of course lent itself to much cognitive dissonance even though it must be noted that the Hilton generously donated quite a few rooms to evacuees and as well as providing a pretty sweet hotel bar) Mac and I headed straight over to the Reliant Center. The place was a madhouse. For one thing it was enormous and confusing and cordoned off in a million places.

(Click on pictures to enlarge.)

There's a bunch of other stuff we had to go through to finally get in there like dealing with insolent Texas cops, hurried and distracted FEMA workers, and a really awesome Reliant Center worker who gave us a ride on his golf-cart, but I'm going to skip all that and say this: Nothing, not the NPR reports I'd been listening to for two weeks, not the footage on CNN, not the newspaper articles I'd read, could have prepared me for what we found when we were finally let into the evacuee area. First of all, it was the largest room I'd ever been and quite possibly the coldest room I've ever been in (Texans are serious about their air-conditioning). It was windowless and endless and despairing and thrilling and thought-stopping and loud, so incredibly loud.

And it was filled with people and cots and stuff, all kinds of stuff, all the kinds of stuff that are in your house right now that you'd try to salvage if there was a hurricane in your city and the government hadn't paid attention to all the things they're supposed to pay attention to and your house got flooded and you grabbed whatever stuff you could and ended up in a nightmare of relocation and emotional heartache and eventually an enormous windowless room in Texas with all your stuff.

Anyway, there we stood in the middle of all this chaos, trying desperately to take it in while at the same time trying to seem professional and like we knew what we were doing as we tried to convince the Reliant Center person we were talking to that it would be a good idea if we set up a bunch of crafts and projects in a corner so that we could try to help some kids. Meanwhile, the same kids that we were so desperate to help were whizzing by on big-wheelers and building forts with the cots and playing jacks on the cold linoleum floor and nobody seemed to be paying attention to any of them.

On top of everything else, there were these constant, booming announcements over the PA system, announcements like, "If you would like to relocate to Cinncinati, Ohio please be at the information center with all of your belongings and your family in the next five minutes. There are buses waiting outside waiting to take you there now." It was absolutely overwhelming and over-stimulating and I wasn't even one of the people who had just lived through a hurricane.

The next morning found about ten of us, laden with supplies and volunteer wristbands, setting up what would become 826 Houston for the next week. We had barely unfolded all the tables and laid out the crayons when kids just started appearing. It was amazing. They came out of nowhere and just plopped down and started coloring or making bracelets or telling us stories. They were listless and full of energy and rage and need. Their emotions yo-yo-ed across a thirty-second spectrum and we all tried like hell to be patient.

The whole week we never really saw their parents. This was mostly because the adult evacuees were either incredibly depressed and curled up on their cots under the florescent lights which stayed on even at night or they were standing in one of the endless lines which hopefully led to a person who would help them with food or housing or money or lost family members or legal matters.

The kids on the other hand were left to run loose and they were absolutely desperate for attention. We were told that we shouldn't pick them up or hold them but what were you supposed to do when a little four-year-old girl was pulling at your leg and crying, "hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me," or if an over-sized seven-year-old just climbed into your lap out of nowhere and started sucking his thumb?

And so the week went. We never once did a Storytelling & Bookmaking session but instead drew a lot of pictures, painted a lot of water colors, and made a lot of bracelets (the kind you made at camp with thin pieces of brightly colored string and a lot of accidental fucked up knots). One day we brought in a bunch of duct tape so that the kids could build forts out of this massive pile of cardboard boxes behind us. It was fun and wonderfully time-consuming and before too long they'd built this towering structure, the likes of which might never have been rivaled in the world of cardboard box fort-building, except that suddenly one of the littler kids took a running start and plowed straight into the entire structure, all the while yelling, "I'M HURRICANE KATRINA!" Not even a moment had really passed before all the kids were doing the same and that glorious cardboard monument fell with surprising simplicity, much like its predecessors: the city of New Orleans and the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

At the end of the week, enervated and enlivened (yes, both), Dave called to say that he needed evacuee interviews for the next Voice of Witness book. I spent my last afternoon at the Reliant Center lusting after Joachim Phoenix who had arrived to help out but really just stood outside smoking cigarettes and looking cashed out, and alternately interviewing an amazing couple named Austin & Aldrena Duncan about their experience getting out of New Orleans.

Their story helped me to see this country in a way I never had, taught me something about human endurance, and brought me to tears on more than one occasion. I've heard that it's one of the best interviews that was gathered for the book. Unfortunately, and by unfortunately I mean FUUUUCCCKKKK, no one has been able to locate Austin & Aldrena to do a follow-up interview. Therefore their story is not going to make it into the book. However you can read a quote from it and see their picture here.

A year. I know I'm in an entirely different place than I was a year ago. In almost every way I'm in a better place than I was a year ago. I hope that the Hurricane Katrina survivors are as well.

Comments

[stephenismycopilot]

oh, claire. this is a great story. i'm glad that you're able to look back and smile and feel things and tell us about them.

[Brit Blaise]

I initially visited your site to see how you’ve been faring after your father’s death. How wonderful to read about how you’ve reached out to help others. Your father would be so proud, as I’m sure you’ve been told often. I look forward to the book…

Brit

[Meg]

This is brilliant. Thank you for writing it. I'm always looking for more voices and perspectives on everything that went on. One of my dearest friends lived through it, and he's back there now, but he can't ever quite put all of it into words.

Thank you for going to care for the kids.