Looking Back 20 Years After Katrina: One Man Remembers His Fish
As part of Capital B’s coverage of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina later this month, we’re proud to present “What Was Lost,” a series of reflections by Louisianans who survived the storm, produced by our collaborators at Verite News.
New Orleans — Ten years before Katrina, my wife, Phyllis, and I were house shopping. We wanted to live and raise our kids in the 7th Ward, a neighborhood that held great childhood memories for both of us.
We went to tour a house we knew was out of our price range. It was an immaculately renovated, nearly 200-year-old Creole cottage blocks from the Fair Grounds.
When we arrived, the out-of-our-price-range thing couldn’t have been more evident. But we went in anyway. The tour ended in the backyard, which looked like a park, with grapefruit, orange, and satsuma trees. There were wildflowers everywhere. And splitting the yard in half was a 60-foot-long by 6-foot-wide pond filled with hundreds of Japanese koi. There was even a bridge to get to the other side of the yard. When the owner stomped on the bridge the koi would gather to be fed. There were hundreds of them — and they were huge. We were amazed.
For days, I dreamt of that pond and those fish.
Illustration by Bethany Atkinson / Deep South Today
Expecting no more than a laugh, and against Phyllis’ best instincts, we made an offer we could afford. The owners accepted it, saying they wanted to leave the house in the care of a young couple who seemed to value it as much as they did.
I had my fish!
Every day before school, my kids and I would walk to the bridge with a bucket of fish food and stomp our hearts out on the bridge as the fish gathered for feeding time. Life was great.
Ten years later, Katrina hit. My family evacuated to Atlanta. I was still in New Orleans a mile away from home, hunkering down at work. As far as we knew, our neighborhood had never flooded, so maybe everything would be fine. I held out hope.
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A week after the storm and the flood that followed the breach of the federal levee system, I drove to the French Quarter and waded nearly a mile through sometimes-chest-high water to the house, feeling things under my feet that took my imagination to scary places.
When I arrived home there was about a foot of water in our raised house and nearly 4 feet still in the street. I went to the yard. I cried as I looked out over downed trees and standing water across the yard.
Only the highest point of the arc of the bridge was visible. There were no fish that I could see.
When the water had receded, weeks later, I went back to fully survey the damage. The pond was filled with muck but there were no dead fish. Not a single carcass in the entire yard.
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My family returned from Atlanta the following year. The house was something that could be fixed, but the fish were gone. The pond is now a pool (I lost the family vote).
Sometime later, after things began to settle down, I ran into a friend of mine for the first time since the storm and told him about my pond. He laughed.
A few days after the storm, he was standing on the steep steps of the courthouse at Broad and Tulane looking out at the flood waters, he said. He saw what looked like a school of Japanese koi.