Sure as the floodwaters one year ago, we have been saturated with stories of Katrina during this first anniversary media-fest.  Heartbreaking images of the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish have filled our TV screens and computer monitors, scenes of the refurbished Superdome and rebuilt Gulfport casinos amid still-sitting piles of debris. 

And yet, I feel like I have fallen in a hole.  My home was in St. Tammany Parish.  Overwhelmingly middle class, Slidell, Louisiana is just not news.  My sleepy surburb of a town doesn’t have the stink of tragedy or mystique of the legendary city it sits in the shadow of.  In a strange twist of fate, I find myself grateful to FOX News, the only franchise that seems to have picked up our story. 

So, let me tell you about my neighborhood.  Let me tell you the Katrina story you are not going to get from the news.

My neighborhood in Slidell sat in the shadow of I-10, the river of interstate that connected most of us with our jobs.  Most of the homes were new, many less than five years old.   It was a place people bought homes when they had “made it” for the first time.  Most of us were the first generation to have the resources to own nice decent homes in a nice decent neighborhood.  It smacked of subdivision suburbia, with a New Orleans twist.  It was the kind of neighborhood that showed the South the way it can be at its very best.  Multiracial.  Multicultural.  Harmonious. Peaceful.  The children played basketball in the street and politely moved to let our slow-moving cars pull into their driveways.  Mothers watched from the ends of the driveways.  People kept their lawns cut (no mean feat in weather that grew vegetation like the Brazilian rainforest), and had obvious pride in their piece of the American dream.  We waved to each other in the morning as we left to work and in the evening as we walked our dogs.  It was, simply, a pleasant little neighborhood. 

We had our own levy and pump system, and we paid for the privilege.  Every year, we voted overwhelmingly the millage to approve the maintainance of the walls that would keep the few feet of anticipated flood water out of our living rooms.  Outside the 100-year floodplain, we were a “dry” neighborhood.  We had never flooded – not even the old section.  Not in anybody’s memory.  We prepared for hurricanes by routine.  Windows got boarded and garages sandbagged.  Whether you were staying or going, you picked up everything off the floor to a height of two feet.  Two feet.  That’s all we would ever expect in our wildest dreams.  People left their pets in the garage, with a bit of “high ground” and food for them to ride out the storm withouth a second thought.  If you stayed and rode out the storm, you filled your bathtub, stockpiled canned goods and water, filled up your propane and the batteries in your flashlight.

In retrospect, the things you do by rote are ludicrous.  Running the dishwasher so that you don’t have stinky, dirty dishes.  Drying a load of clothes so they won’t mildew in the three days you expect to be gone or without power.  But those are things you do in “normal” evacuations.  The ones we make at least once, usually twice a year.  They are an annoyance, but we come home, take down the boards, drain the tub, put everything back on the floor and send our children back out to play in the street.  Fully two-thirds of our neighborhood had no flood insurance.  It just wasn’t required, nor, in most eyes, needed.  We paid for the levies.  We were on high ground.  We were safe.

The Fisheries and Wildlife boats who rescued people from the second stories of the homes in my neighborhood didn’t even know the levies were there until they came back the next day when the flood waters began to recede and had to portage their boats over them to look for more survivors.  Katrina’s massive winds, clocked at 175 mph at our marina, forced the waters of Pontchartrain in a 15-foot storm surge that buried my neighborhood, my entire neighborhood, hundreds of homes, in seven feet of water at a point over five miles inland.  All told, over 50% of the homes in my town, over 5,000 homes, were destroyed or heavily damaged to the point of being uninhabitable.  It pummeled I-10, our lifeline to the city, collapsing its massive concrete structure into the lake.  The levies that we had relied on to keep the water out, now proved better at keeping the water in.  It took almost three days for the floodwaters to drain.  Three days which made the difference between salvagable and ruin.

Most of the homes in my neighborhood are being rebuilt.  This is not to say that most people have returned.  From speaking to those we saw, laboring in the heat beside us to save what few possessions could be saved, fewer than 50% of the pre-Katrina residents will return.  Many had lost the jobs that allowed them to buy those coveted first homes.  Most recovered what they could, gutted and sold for whatever they could get to try to come out ahead of their mortgages.  Real estate speculation abounded in the first flush of rebuilding after Katrina.  The sad shell of our home sold in seven days on the market.  Many have been selling to refugees from other parishes who will not be allowed to return or rebuild the homes they lost, or cannot buy insurance south of the Lake.  Some still sit, as they did before the storm.  Boarded and untouched.  Rotting from the inside out.

My neighborhood will be rebuilt, but it will never return.  What were formerly modest middle class homes, newly renovated and remodeled, are selling for 75% more than they had pre-Katrina.  The kind of people who walked my street with their dogs, chased their children and balanced coffee mugs in their cars on the way to work cannot afford these homes, with the attendant increase in insurance and tax.  I could not afford my home, if I still had a job to return home to.  The houses will look much as they did before the storm, freshly sided and roofed, with the red rescue X’s scrubbed clean and the death tallies gone.  But the shades of the faces that look out of the windows that once held “Help Us” signs will not be the same. 

Some tiny piece of the American Dream has been moved just a little bit further away.  It’s a slow tragedy, a quiet seeping of the floodwaters, and it just doesn’t sell newspapers.