Published August 29, 2024

You don’t ever forget, even if its impact on you was hardly what it was for many others. On the 19th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, I’m remembering.

I’m remembering Katrina, Rita and all the other major storms that hit Louisiana during my childhood and adulthood, and after I moved away.

Camille. Andrew. Gustav. Ike. Laura. Delta. Ida, which came ashore three years ago today. Ivan, which turned and weakened at the last minute, largely sparing the state but playing a mostly forgotten role in affecting Louisiana’s state of readiness for Katrina a year later.

Then there were the ones I heard gruesome stories about growing up, older folks speaking of them in hushed or animated voices. Audrey. Betsy. Unnamed Hurricane. And many others.

A long time ago, I was inside the Superdome during a football game, with one eye on a World Series baseball game and the other on an approaching hurricane, while a mostly meaningless NFL game played out in front of me. That night I drove a friend back across Lake Pontchartrain as water splashed over the sides of the Causeway. We were fine, but the four hours I drove that night were not fun.

The worst that hurricanes ever got for me was losing electricity for days, a few and a lot of days and nights, going without sleep for a 63-hour stretch after Katrina, icky heat and humidity and being grateful for cans of Vienna sausage and “potted meat product.” Friends and loved ones had it far worse, but at least one hurricane was a life-changing event for me in ways I won’t detail here.

My ex’s first-born son entered the world on Aug. 29, 2005. I once started a new job on Aug. 29, 2013. From the safe distance of the Pacific Northwest, I watched live coverage of storms about to make landfall in the hours before, during and after Aug. 29.

You don’t ever forget that date.

It’s all complicated, as most things are, but living a two-hour drive away from Mount St. Helens gives me another interesting but heartbreaking perspective on people who refused to budge from their place in harm’s way and did not live to tell about it.

Today my thoughts are with friends and strangers who suffered 19 years ago today, the next day and the next, and for months and years afterward. My thoughts are with all those we lost.

Calling them thoughts makes them sound more organized and intellectual. They are, for the most part, twinges, aches, muscle memory.

The heart is a muscle.

Causeway photo by Mark Runde via Shutterstock.