My Hurricane Katrina Experience

Yes, in case no one's caught it, I'm a "Yat" from New Orleans, four generations of my French, German, Filipino heritage has amounted to me, DeeMarie. As you all may know, only in my beloved city could these nationalities find a way to intermix.
The term "Yat" explains our accent. It's not a southern drawl as most expect. It's a cross between Brooklyn, Boston and Acadian Coon-Ass French, if you could imagine that? To be a Yat, you would have to be a native of New Orleans because you know this word is derived from the expression to say hello "Where Ya At". Now "Where Ya At" was a common salutation used by local musicians in the French Quarter. As they walked down Bourbon St. to their next gig, if they saw a fellow musician they'd yell at them "Where Ya At!" meaning where are you playing. I'm a Yat because I have the New Orleans accent. I try to camouflage it sometimes, but put me in a room full of Yats, and there I am. Dat's what we do. Dare ya go. Hopefully, there will always be Yats in the new New Orleans. I know many have left because of Katrina, but just like me, we all wanna go home and boil some crawfish, eat gumbo, have a po-boy sandwich and three beignets with a cup of Café au lait. (that's coffee with boiled milk)
Every time August comes around, I relive August 29, 2005. It's embedded in my mind so deeply, yet I wish it was just a bad dream instead of being the reality it was, a catastrophe that changed the lives of 200,000 people or more.
I'm thankful that I missed most of the coverage because I didn't get to electricity for 5 days, not meaning that I didn't evacuate. I just went to the wrong place. Because of my experience of evacuating for hurricane Ivan, I wasn't too keen on leaving again. I believe this to be true of many of the people who did decide to stay. The year before, when hurricane Ivan was heading for the mouth of the Mississippi river, many people fled and like me, they were stuck in traffic for 12 hours or more. When we returned, we were all aggravated because Ivan had taken a turn to the west. We lucked out and felt like idiots for leaving again. We fled from hurricane Andrew too. It takes money and time to make these runs for your life. After the 3rd of 4th time, you start thinking about gambling. I wanted to gamble on August 27th, while Katrina was lurking in the gulf. All the weather forecasters were warning us to leave, but I'd heard this before. Besides I'm old, I don't have any young children and I have an axe in the attic of my townhouse home. My sweet little daughter-in-law was panicking. She's young and wants to live.
I get it. I insisted that she and my son leave, I'll be fine. I told my son to put some water in the bathtub, bring up the water and food supplies to the 2nd level. I have a radio, batteries and an axe in the attic. It sounded like a good plan to me.
Funny thing happened. Not long before hurricane Katrina was heading our way, there was a tsunami that hit somewhere on the other side of the world. It was horrible, many people lost their lives but I remembered something I heard over the news. They said the animals seemed to know it was coming; very few animals died in this disaster.
I found this interesting, because when I walked outside of my home on August 27th, I noticed about 100 birds on a power line; this reminded me of the movie "The Birds". As I was watching, I noticed 100 other birds joined them, within a few minutes in unison they all flew away to the north. Aha. You can't fool Mother Nature and the birds aren't fooling me.
"New plan", I announced to my children. We're leaving, but we won't go west again. We'll head northeast because the weatherman was pointing out Katrina was on a northwest path. Brilliant! I thought.
(to be continued)