Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/82405
LIFE AFTER KATRINA CALIFORNIA SCREAMING After living 15 years in California, moving back home to New Orleans was a long-anticipated event I finally accomplished in spring 2005. I set up my massage studio on the ground floor of a century-old house my family and I had bought in 1995 and had been refurbishing for 10 years. Prepared for start-up in the fall, I headed back to California for a summer of teaching at my other home, the International Professional School of Bodywork in San Diego, California. When compared to other hurricanes in the area, Katrina's visit at the end of August would have only meant some relatively minor mucking out for us in the city. The hurricane did bring devastation to the Gulf Coast, including two New Orleans' suburbs south of the city. However, New Orleans itself suffered little harm directly from Katrina. It was the catastrophic failures of the levee system after Katrina had passed that caused the flooding. Watching in horror from my safe perch in San Diego, my eyes were glued to the television screen. Knowing well from the experience of 9/11 that I needed to turn it off or suffer continual loops of traumatic images, I could not bring myself to press the off button. I was looking for the faces, and the bodies, of those I knew and loved. Obsessively, I peered into the scenes, examining the backs of heads, noting gaits and gestures, knowing with a sick stomach that any minute I'd see my neighbor, or the guy with the fruit truck around the corner, or the clerk at the post office, or even my own Auntie. I feared for everyone I knew in my city. Phone calls began to pour in. "Have you heard from Aunt Betty? She was trying to get on a bus and we lost her." "Can you wire money—I'm getting kicked out of this motel in Alabama because my credit card is maxed out." "Can you Google Earth my house and see if it's still there?" In my own body, and in the voices I connected with on the phone, there were tremors of uncertainty, as well as wavering and rambling speech filled with unfinished sentences and incomplete thoughts. I felt a deep uprooting and couldn't help but imagine what those in the city must feel—if they chose to stay connected to their bodies at all. FIRST TRIP IN It would be almost six weeks before we were allowed into our neighborhood. The first four weeks of that time, our house sat in nearly nine feet of water. Here and there, as we traveled the country waiting to get into our city, I worked on a friend in need, but I didn't really have the heart for providing massage. I was truly heartbroken as I saw what was happening to the people in New Orleans. We were finally allowed to return, and to witness firsthand the devastation we had only seen on television and computer screens. Our usually lush green city was gray and silent. It would be months and years before we recovered the sweet sound of birds singing, of children playing. Visually assaulted on every front, there was nowhere in our neighborhood that looked normal, like it did or should look. Everything was coated in an ashen gray; everything was askew. And the smell was deeply disturbing and permeated everything. You could feel hearts breaking all over the place, as stomachs fell and throats closed. Our first task was to suit up in Trash heaps hint at the destruction inside still-standing homes on the author's street. HazMat gear and pull out everything from the first floor of our home. I barely registered what was lost as we hauled out sofas and tables, refrigerators and stoves, drapes and artwork, and, of course, my massage studio. The loss was compounded by the visual and olfactory assault that was our home. By late October, we were still on curfew and had to leave the neighborhood at 54 massage & bodywork july/august 2011