GOING BACK

What home meant before, and after, Hurricane Katrina

- BY CLINT SMITH

The scene before me appeared and disappeared and reappeared again with every breath I took, the hot air from my lungs fogging the gas mask that fit snugly over my face. My mother, father, and little sister stood in front of me wearing hazmat suits. It was October 2005, and we'd been among the first in Gentilly, our New Orleans neighborhood, to receive permission to return to our home after Hurricane Katrina. I was nervous. Gentilly had sat beneath up to eight feet of water for weeks. I didn't know what I would see, or how I would feel.

Our neighborhood had never been this quiet before. There had always been kids riding bikes, or someone playing music from their car or their front porch or their shoulder with a bass line that made the street vibrate. There had always been the sound of a basketball colliding with concrete as boys went in search of a court and a hoop and a game. Squirrels had always scurried through trees, where birds sang. Now there were no birds, no balls, no squirrels, no bikes. Only an eerie silence.

A silver car with clouded windows had crashed into the trunk of the old oak tree in front of our home, its hood bent into a crooked crescent. Branches from that old oak—some as thick as bodies—were scattered across the street and the yard. On the boarded-up window next to our door was a spray-painted orange X, a symbol used by search-and-rescue teams that could be seen throughout New Orleans in the days and weeks after the storm. Each quadrant of the X had a different number. The top quadrant showed the time and date the house had been searched; the left one identified which team had conducted the search; the right indicated any hazards found inside; and the bottom was for the number of people, dead or alive, found there. Our bottom quadrant read “0,” but I am still haunted by the orange spray paint on homes we passed that said something else.