Final Pre-Katrina Post

28 August 2005

Those of you who are not fleeing the storm, please remember those who are.  It looks pretty bad, and there is likely to be a lot of destruction before it is all over.  All the projections said that if a category 4 hurricane came up the river, there would be hundreds of thousands dead.  Katrina is now a category 5.  Kathe left this morning with the animals, and is getting out of Dodge.  Many people remain in New Orleans, with no way out of the city.  Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

The two-week “vacation” ended up being a crazy haze of “it’s Tuesday; this must be Belgium”.  We walked everywhere – to the apartment, to the ruins in Antigua, to market, to check e-mail, to Jeanne’s house, to breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

After a full season of whining about food, I can brag again.  While the folks were here, I ate some of the best meals of my life.  At the outset, I had a diet of meat.  It was three days before my brain allowed me to want anything besides protein and iron, and a week before I had a vegetarian meal.  And I still have not had a scrambled egg…

The first few days were spent wandering around in the highlands.  We stayed pretty close to the hotel (eating and living in Casa Santo Domingo is such a chore…), just letting us all get our feet under us. 
Mom and Dad had just done a trip to Romania, followed by a trip to Boston, and then came to try out Guate.  But we wandered around for a while to get the feel of the city, and Mom and Kathe bought textiles.  Those of you who have been here know of the sensory overload that occurs at the artisan market.  Take two artists and turn them loose, well, the results are pretty frightening.  It isn’t so much the money they spent (but it is such a wonderful deal, don’t you see, and if I were to work for a month on a tapestry…) but what to do with them.  Even after buying gifts for people we have not yet met.  And then when we got to Chichicastenango, let me just say that it was difficult getting the suitcase closed at the end of the trip, and only part of that was coffee from the coffee plantation we visited.

Time in the Petén was spent panting a little more.  After introducing my folks to the beauty of walking everywhere with no oxygen (Antigua is about a mile high), I got to introduce them to the jungle again.  We walked over Tikal, Trinidad, and Yaxhá, and even coaxed everyone, even a severe acrophobe, up to the top of a couple of really tall structures.  Temple IV at Tikal is just about as high as it gets, and the drop off from the top of the principal structure at Yaxhá is pretty terrifying.  But the view from both (see the attached images) is amazing.  It does not appear that the filming of Survivor did much damage to the site, and it is still my favorite of the sites in the Petén. 

Interspersed with walking all over creation for days on end were some more fabulous meals (as well as some forgettable ones).  But for the most part, we ate like kings.  For one night, we stayed at a still-under-construction hotel called Casa las Americas next door to the camp.  The couple who took care of us there were wonderful.  Jean Luc and his wife Lori were amazing – they cooked us meals to die for, and made sure we had what we needed.  When the construction is finished, and the water pressure is enough to shower (our one complaint), the hotel will be among the finest anywhere.  Just beautiful.

We also ate at Carlos’ house, and we brought the ice cream.  It was a wonderful evening, and we have a large number of fabulous pictures of the kids and the adults all having a great time. 

We ended up spending very little time in the Petén, and proceeded back to the highlands, where we continued our walking tour of everything for the two days before everyone, sadly, went home. 

The time since then has been a blur of packing and watching CNN and Fox.  The hurricane was as amazing and horrific a disaster as I could ever have imagined.  The focus has always been on getting traffic leaving the city to flow more easily – we have had a number of evacuations before, and every one of them resulted in calls for better control of the traffic.  But because all of the evacuations were “fire drills”, the issues that got addressed involved getting vehicles out of the city, and not the poor people who failed to evacuate.  I honestly believe that because the previous drills were false alarms, the only people truly inconvenienced by the drills were those whose voices were later heard, complaining about sitting in traffic for hours.  As a result, traffic flow was amazing.  Over 80% of the inhabitants of New Orleans fled the city in a very orderly fashion, much more quickly than any of the previous attempts. 

But because none of the hurricanes responsible for the previous evacuations resulted in the flooding of the city, the plight of those who stayed behind were not truly addressed.  The horrific display on CNN has shown the result of that oversight. 

The media coverage has not addressed the entire city, though.  Uptown has been conspicuous in its absence from the overhead shots.  My suspicions were confirmed when I was directed by a friend to the www.noaa.gov web site.  A large part of Uptown New Orleans is dry and undamaged, including both my house and GM’s house.  Dry, undamaged houses don’t make the evening news, and so the coverage of the newscrews failed to include my neighborhood.  I am pretty glad of that.  It does not make the suffering any less (most of the shots you do see come from about a mile from Earth Search, where I worked last year), and I would never diminish the true suffering that  is going on.  People are dying, people are sick, and people are really displaced.  But the media are also making it seem even worse than it is.  If I saw the statistic “80% of New Orleans is currently under water” one more time (80% of New Orleans is under water with every spring rain that comes through) I was going to scream.