Even though the shameless national media and the garish exaggerations of Weather Channel reporters had many folks’ friends and families across the nation terrified and convinced Hurricane Isaac was indeed a “Katrina Redux,” for a great many of us, it wasn’t.
Though for some, it was, but across the region, not so much. Lives were lost. Homes flooded. Sorrow. Despair. But not with the vastness of Katrina. It was its own solitary tragedy.
There were though some comparissions to be be made. Not the comparisons a statistician, engineer or meterologist might make but, ones those people may make independent of their positions, ones just an average person may make. Comparisons made in the senses and psyches of those of us who have been victims before. Ethereal ghosts.
Like the smells.
The most pungent aroma is the rotting refrigerator. A few short days after power goes out, the quickly decaying proteins and carbs sealed tight in the festering, humid and dank environments inside the darkened Frigidaires and Whirlpools begin to putrefy. Sometimes still in their plastic wrappers but other times in loose cellophaned styrofoam. What was to be a comforting Sunday dinner took a turn in the multiverse and become a corroded chunk of cow corpse, the juices leaking out onto the linoleum.
No matter what the neighbors say, the smell will never leave the fridge. Some days you won’t smell it at all, and others there will be that slight scent of spoilage. But the apparition will remain. You’ll remember this storm and with it your decision not to replace this refrigerator. You will have yourself and Mother Nature to blame.
I haven’t noticed the tombstones of refrigerators outside of houses this year as much as after Katrina but I have tried to stay hunkered down. I actually prefer hunkering down. I support hunkering down even if a storm isn’t passing overhead. Hunker down as much as possible. Never get out of the boat.
There is also, outside, a more generalized smell of dank, dead leaves and foliage. A billion leaves must have perished in Isaac. It’s an Earthy smell, something a worm would love. They are always down there you know. Waiting for us all. Waiting for our return. Ashes to ashes and dirt to dirt.
And of course there is the auditory sense. The generators are brave R2 units in the battle against power outages. With them comes the cacophony of models and wattages producing different sounds but all of them together sounding like we came from another past where the combustion gas engine became the preferred power source.
This hum was around after Katrina too. More sparse as not so many people were back. But some people were in such a hurry to get back and start their lives after being marooned in real America for weeks or months with no direction, they rushed home with or without power. Jack O’ Lanterned houses would buzz with generators.
The light is similar to Post-Katrina. The sun is in the same spot in the sky as it was back then with its late Summer slanting. The trees have lost a lot of foliage and certain degrees of sunlight slip through the weather beaten plumage just like in 2005 and 2008 after Gustav. Painters who work with color will say the light is everything. It changes how things essentially appear. Less shadow now. More light and more heat.
The computer models we constantly check and the National Weather Service’s 5-day forecast maps are pretty standard and haven’t changed much since Katrina. They are visual ghosts. My wife gets anxious when she sees the ugly green and blue forecast graphic on my computer screen. The “spaghetti” models with their slight disagreements appear sometimes abstract. An optimist and a pessimist can read the same models in different ways. One sees the storm trending away, another coming right for us.
And then finally there is the anxiety, that fear in people’s psyches as the same words and phrases are said: “Cat 3,” “storm surge,” “11 p.m. update,” “northeast quadrant” and more. These are the technical phrases those haunted by the ghosts of hurricanes understand.
So for most, but not all, Isaac wasn’t a Katrina redux. For the rest of the country, there was nothing to see here. But to us here on the Gulf Coast, living victims haunted in our heads by hurricanes like Betsy, Camille, Ivan, Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike. Their ghosts linger within us on our skin and in our souls just the same.