Water, water everywhere

New Orleans, my beloved city, is drowning, and it is absolutely breaking my heart.

I imagine that for many people, it must seem like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah or the fall of Babylon, but for me, it's the loss of my childhood home. Even though it's been more than 20 years since I lived there (if you count the two years I spent at Loyola University in the late 1980's, then it's more like 15 years), I still feel a closer connection to The Big Easy than I do to either Chicago (where I was born, and where the majority of my blood relatives live) or Atlanta (where we moved to after I finished 8th grade in school).

It seems a little bit silly, but for me it's almost as if I'm watching my childhood die right in front of my eyes (via TV and the internet). I take some comfort in the confidence that the people I know and care about there surely did the smart thing and got out before Hurricane Katrina blew through the area. Still, it will never be the same again. Tens of thousands of houses will have to be rebuilt after having been submerged in the flood waters from Lake Pontchartrain and the Industrial Canal.

I was planning to go there in October for a work-related conference, but that is almost assuredly out of the question at this point. It's more likely that my next trip there will be as part of a relief effort with UMCOR (The United Methodist Committee on Relief) than a pleasure trip.

The ironic thing is that for a while it seemed that New Orleans had once again, through its mystical powers, managed to escape the forces of mother nature, only to be surprised by a failure of its floodwalls. I am told that at present the Mississippi River is calm and almost blue in color. For me, it's an eerily unnatural picture of the river; churned-up mud and silt has always been a sign of the city's status as a hub of water-borne commerce.