7. Survive a Hurricane

August 2005  Ten days into my teaching career, the Superintendent phoned hundreds of households around the parish explaining that school would be delayed due to an incoming storm.  Students and teachers alike cheered.  Visions of hurricane parties and days that resembled summer break made us giddy.  A meteorologist's dream, Hurricane Katrina swirled through the Atlantic - a northerner's lore and figment of mythology.  I filled my bathtub with water.  My roommates unplugged the toaster, the television, the hairdryers.  We filled paper bags with the contents of our refrigerator.  And, I fled Baton Rouge, cursing my cell phone that failed to work and watched the cypress stumps take the ebbs and flows of the Atchafalaya Basin as I drove north, inland.

A week later, we returned - our yards filled with detached, homeless tree limbs, our classrooms filled with the limbs of children, still drying, still mending.  The faces of our students were weathered, but new to us.  While we waited for the phone call to announce school's resume, our new students waited on rooftops, on bridges, on patches of hot, black highway.

Then, after Rita, the walls of our school snaked the furry mold that grows in only the moistest of windowless buildings.  Again, we were home from school so that the mold could be scrubbed with bleach and the soggy poster boards peeled from the chipping beige walls.

August 2008  Seven days into my second year of graduate school, I watched meteorologists nearly wet themselves in excitement.  A three year hiatus, these men in rain slickers could once again use their favorite vocabulary words to describe Gustav: wrath, fury, devastation.  From Pittsburgh, I became an onlooker, an outsider.  I phoned friends who left town and returned only to sweat out their discomfort in salty beads and wait for the phone call that would announce their return to school.  New Orleans, this time having stood firmly against the gusts and pelts of rain, quickly faded from the meteorologists' lips.  South Louisiana, to the rest of us, was silenced and life resumed while children fanned themselves in the sticky heat of their Baton Rouge living rooms.

I sit in my air conditioning - comfortable, dry, and complete my homework for my classes that haven't been cancelled due to a hurricane.  I miss my students and almost can't believe the first group is now in high school and the second preparing for the LEAP.  I worry about their progress - whether their teachers challenge them or give them worksheets and lines when they've misbehaved.  I wonder how their homes fared.  If their, our, powerless school again snaked with mold only to be killed with the whitest, most potent bleach.  I'm reminded that they, without realizing, are triumphant despite the odds of hurricanes inside and outside of their classrooms.