Hurricane Splintered

addison hill

Living in Louisiana means everyone knows it’s a possibility. During hurricane season, everyone is tortured by the reminders of plywood boards and sandbags in their garages. Channel six doesn’t let us forget about Katrina’s anniversary, either. For the entirety of August, reporters roam the still-leveled streets of New Orleans, talking about damages and promises of recovery projects that will never happen. So from June to November, Louisiana holds its breath like it’s just a tunnel to pass through. Somewhere in the middle of the tunnel, we forgot that it was a matter of when, not if.

On August 26th, 2021, I’m in English class with an hour left until freedom. In twenty-four hours, Ida will strengthen from a tropical storm to a hurricane over Cuba. There’s at least thirty yellow lines on the weather channel plotting out where it might go next. Last year, it was Laura in Lake Charles, and the year before that, it was Dorian in the Bahamas. It probably won’t be us. I tell myself that the entire walk to my ride home.

By the 28th, there’s less yellow lines. Six, to be exact. One hovers right over the dot marking my hometown. I bounce my knee and click my pen through all of my classes. Nobody is asking “What are you doing this weekend?”, but they are asking, “Are you evacuating?” The rest of the day is as normal as a day in Louisiana middle school can be. A teacher gets dragged across the yard by her hair trying to break up a fight. I get flipped off for accidentally walking in front of someone during passing period. Someone offers to sell me cocaine. After the fourth time a student makes fun of me or looks at me as if I’m nonhuman, I text my grandma, an all-caps plea for her to pick me up from school early. I tell her what she already knows: I hate it here, kids are so mean, I’m not learning anything, have I mentioned I hate it here? She says she’d already be at the door if not for the fit my parents would throw. But by afternoon, Ida is recognized as a hurricane that will cause catastrophic damage. After school activities are canceled, and everything starts to matter a little bit less. My dad texts to say he’s taking me home that day. I walk to the high school he works at and watch him lower the neon yellow football goalposts, putting them flat on the turf. He works fast, sleeves rolled up, dabbing the sweat from his forehead with his polo shirt collar. I don’t even have to ask him, because we already know. It’s going to be us.

People talk about what they’ll bring in a house fire. The things that they’d frantically scrabble together as the air gets warmer and the smoke gets thicker. Evacuating for a hurricane is different. They’re steady, the same way the hurricane approaches. That means there’s time for the realization to settle. That you may not have a house within the next three days, that you can’t bring everything. I sit on my bed, staring at the wall. I’ve already emptied my schoolbag out on my desk chair. The rest of my backpacks are slumped and lined up against the wall. There are pencils on my floor, an outline for an essay. I unshelve my books, stacking them as high off the ground as they can go. The ones that matter to me the most go into my red backpack. Everything else lands somewhere in my black one. My clothes get stuffed into the biggest suitcase I own. That alone doesn’t feel like enough.

Every southerner has memories of Waffle House. The crossword-esque yellow signs flag even the smallest of towns, staffed 24/7, 365 days a year. Waffle House is both unimpressive and life-changing. People go there if they want a laminated menu consisting of sloppy breakfast foods and some sweet southern love from an elderly woman that calls them “sugar”. Every southerner also has memories of the Waffle House Index. A replacement for the dated, much inaccurate Saffir-Simpson scale. Rather than numbers, the index is divided into colors, measuring the aftermath of a hurricane based on the functionality of the location. Green means that there’s minimal damage and the location has full power. Yellow suggests a limited menu, food running low, and power supplied from a generator. Red means the restaurant is shuttered completely and has faced severe destruction.

Almost every hotel, Airbnb, or rental is booked. Finding somewhere to stay takes a combination of me, my mom, and my grandma all frantically scrolling on our phones to find somewhere. My grandma comes through in the end with cabin five in Byrd’s Nest RV Park, a two-bed, gable-roofed cube of a house with a red shiplapped exterior. The cabin is too small for our family of five and five hours from home. Fifteen minutes from the Red River between Louisiana and Texas. Two minutes from the best fishing spot in Sportsman’s Paradise. And, of course, one minute from the closest Dollar General.

There are rules to follow when evacuating from a hurricane. Leave as early as possible, drag the patio furniture inside, board up the windows, don’t go east. My dad follows one more: leave a Bible on the counter.

We leave at 10:00 pm and get there at 3:00 am. My brain feels like a wrung-out towel by the time we’re unloading our bags into the cabin that looks just as cramped as the photos did on Airbnb. The air mattress hisses while inflating, my mom throwing around suitcases as if she’s Donkey Kong. The sleep won’t last. I know that as I wrap myself into a cocoon in my fluffy blanket. My grandparents will be there in four hours, the air mattress is uncomfortable, and the rampant barking of the dog currently curled up on my chest, his snout buried in my neck, will awaken me with a jolt once the door opens. And the moment I do wake up, I’ll be reminded of the hurricane heading towards the only place I’ve ever known, anxiety swirling around as if the storm is in my chest itself. I’m asleep in five minutes all the same.

On the 29th of August, I am sleep deprived and sad. I fling my fishing pole into the lake next to our cabin, aiming to hook a fish that will never bite. My friends whose families have ignored the mandatory evacuation order are already flooding my messages with photos of violent clouds, swathed around a sky that doesn’t know how to be blue anymore. My grandma smokes on the porch with her purse bunched up in her lap, drawing a drag from the cigarette as I trudge through the mud back to her. Her wrinkly hand is small, cold in mine, her wedding ring cutting sharp into my skin. “We’ll be okay,” she tells me. “We’ll be okay.”

That night, we go to a buffet that’s almost a full-service restaurant. The roof is tin, slanted and thick, meaning no service. It’s pretentiously southern in the way that all restaurants on the border between Louisiana and Texas are; the owners have mounted their taxidermied hunting kills on the walls, drinks are served in red Coca-Cola glasses, and advertisements for plumbing, air conditioning services and the like are printed on the tables. It’s the only food I’ll have that isn’t cooked in the kitchenette at the cabin for the next week and a half. We go there almost every night, stuffing our faces with slimy pork chops and hastily thrown together salads from the salad bar. For some reason, I have to fight back tears.

Out here, ten minutes from the Red River, I can smell the water. Briny, laden with sediment. The sky is clear over the Texas-Louisiana border, spotless of cloud stains. If not for the lovebugs landing on my hands while I walk my dog by the nearby pond, I wouldn’t think a storm was coming at all. But by the time I wake up tomorrow, it will have already made landfall.

At five in the morning when I first stir, my air mattress needs to be refilled and my blanket’s only halfway on my body. My senses were immediately overwhelmed by my grandmother’s rasping, high-pitched voice against the nasally sound of my mother’s gasping. Jim Cantore shouts on the weather channel. I get the strength to tilt my head up, and see him wearing a black T-shirt, a color he reserves for imminent death threats. He’s reporting from outside an inn I pass every day on Main Street. When I realize Ida made landfall, the first thing I do is roll over and go back to sleep.

What I thought was five in the morning had actually been eleven. I learn this when I pad down from the loft, already moving to drench my cold pancakes in syrup by the time I check my phone. The time now is one — actually one —, and Ida still hovers over my hometown. I can’t bring myself to make eye contact with Jim Cantore who now stands at a slant from the wind. My parents are already talking about damage. What’s been circulating the Facebook groups. My great aunt has water spritzing through the keyhole in her front door. That’s what we know so far. To keep myself from knowing more, I slip my headphones over my ears.

Our neighbors say our house is okay, for the most part. Our fence is blown to smithereens and there’s pink insulation everywhere, but the guy across the street says we’re only missing three shingles and the shed my dad built with his bare hands in his twenties is still standing. The yellow arches of the McDonald’s sign were warped into an unrecognizable shape, but parking lots were full with white linemen trucks. They’re trying to piece it back together already, only a few days after the storm itself. Our Waffle Houses were closed. I wish it would’ve been enough to destroy everything. Going back to something half-finished is worse than not going back to anything at all. There’s a tear in my stomach as if my guts are spilling out, but all I can do is try to hold them in.

Three hours after landfall, I’m at the state park, wading through the shallows of the Red River in my clothes. A rust-colored polka-dot shirt and flimsy linen shorts. My dad and grandpa fish twenty feet away, throwing line after line and coming up with nothing. The tide moves in rivulets, and my dad doesn’t scold me when I end up sitting cross-legged in water up to my shoulders. He doesn’t even look like he wants to as I drip water in the backseat of the car. I go back to the river three times before we go home, and every time, it’s for something. The first time is for that contemplation, for meditating as the water tried to erode me the way it could erode our land. The second time is for building volcanoes out of clay and creating riptides in the sand. The third time is for saying goodbye, and that’s the only time I bring a towel.

We know we need to get out. Ida might not have leveled our house, but from what we can see on Facebook, she came close enough. Over half of the houses in our neighborhood don’t have roofs anymore. My mom kept saying, voice incredulous, “It’s like a T-Rex stomped into the present and took a bite out of it.” Peoples’ belongings are in their front yards, streets are flooded, power lines are downed, buildings are missing chunks. We so easily could’ve been them that we probably will be by the time the next storm comes around. I don’t complain when we spend half of the next day at the real estate agency, my parents telling an agent we’ll never see again what we want in a house. There’s a STEM school up here that can give me a better education than what I can get further south, a quaint downtown main street with less violent crime, a thriving countryside with postcard photo horizons. Life was giving me what I wanted, but that didn’t mean it was easy to swallow.

When we’re running low on groceries and the Dollar General can’t suffice anymore, we make the thirty-minute drive into town. We fill up that metal buggy with everything we can get our hands on. Family-sized bags of chips, steaks, pop-tarts, Eggos, fish fry, sweet tea. We use self checkout, and the clerk notices my dad’s accent. Deeper south than where we’re at, hemmed with the drawl of his Texan upbringing. “Where y'all from?” she asks in that honeyed tone. I wring my fingers through the grid of the buggy with a death grip when he answers, “We evacuated from Houma.” She splays a wrinkled hand over her chest. Her mouth parts, eyes saucer wide. “Oh, bless your hearts!” She grabs her nearest co-workers, tugging them close by their arms. “These folks are from Houma! Can you believe it? Gosh, I can’t even imagine—”

I stop having to imagine when we get home. The drive into town is nothing short of unrecognizable. Some buildings, mostly empty warehouses, are just piles of bricks and wood. Hotel parking lots are chock-full of white linemen trucks. My neighborhood is a coral reef, starfish blue tarps sprawled out over what remains of torn up roofs. Trees are laid on their sides, their roots reaching for the earth they were taken from. I’ve seen videos of the aftermath of Katrina. The overcrowded Superdome, recordings of families wailing, the Coast Guard moving in. This doesn’t feel like that, like my life has been torn apart and I’ve only been given a bottle of Elmer’s glue to piece things back together. It feels like part of me has been ripped from my ribcage. It was never much to lose to begin with, but that doesn’t lessen the sinking in my stomach as I step into the smothering heat of my dark house. Sunlight is vanquished by those boarded windows, my phone flashlight beaming across the kitchen tiles. Insulation is on the floor of our hallway, blown through the attic by the wind. Our fence is flattened. Around us, every other house has fallen. I should be thankful, should be kissing the cover of the Bible my dad left on the cluttered counter, should be rushing to volunteer to drag the remains of buildings to the burn piles that they’ll put in the fields. But I’m not. Instead, I use my unlimited cellular data to look at cities further north, ones without hurricanes. Cities that, if I were luckier, I could’ve been born in. My dad powers up the generator, and the garage door stays open. A box fan whirs full speed in my parents bedroom as I sit cross legged on the floor.

Hurricanes return humanity to its most primitive form. It’s apocalyptic, the sort of thing that lends truth to what everyone thinks will happewhen the world ends. For the first five days after landfall, our next door neighbors took night shifts in their front yards holding AR-15s in adirondack chairs to scare off raiders. Still —nobody has power, half the town doesn’t have running water, food is hard to come by, and gasoline is gold. Gasoline keeps everything going: car engines, lights, and generators. This is evidenced by two things: someone siphoned the gas out of my dad’s truck, and on yet another random Tuesday afternoon, a man in a rusty pickup came into our cul de sac with a flatbed full of red gasoline tanks. Just like that, the truck becomes the cornucopia at the beginning of the Hunger Games. It’s clockwork from then on out. A cigarette lights, a spark flies, and a small explosion happens just down the street from us.

Stubbornly, I sleep in my own bed that night, not wanting another night’s sleep interrupted by kicking my dad in the nose or kneeing my mom in the hip. Their queen-sized bed isn’t built for all three of us, but it’s the only bed in the house that the generator can reach. It’s 95 degrees fahrenheit, and I’m bundled up underneath every blanket in my room, sweating bullets. The window is cracked, and I can smell the smoke from the burn pile across the highway, the gasoline from where it was hosed into the storm drains. What I don’t know yet is that an aftermath is not an ending, it’s only the means to one.

Addison Hill is a New Orleans born novelist and poet currently attending Interlochen Arts Academy as a sophomore creative writing major. She was a 2024 YoungArts winner and her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards. When she isn't writing, she can be found breaking in her roller skates, buying new notebooks, and thinking about Paddington the bear.