James Carville made a poetic connection between the two big stories of today, saying something akin to “Sarah Palin is like a levee about to overtop”, regarding all the news coming out about her, from her pregnant daughter to the alleged firing of her sister’s ex-husband. (I foresee a new FOX sitcom—or reality show—named Juno…all the elements are in place…)

Meanwhile in the safety of our decidedly less dramatic hotel, smells of dog and chlorine spill through the hallways, which last time I walked through were clogged with a group of evacuees swapping rumors.

“My brother called and said the levees broke, then he called back and said they didn’t. I don’t know what to believe!”

“They said they’ll make a decision about us going back tomorrow at 2 p.m. but LaFourche Parish may not…”

“I’m going home through Memphis…going through Shreveport getting up here was a mess…”

I walk past them pretending I have no idea what all of this means, like they are speaking about places I’ve never heard of, like I am just another Labor Day tourist in Little Rock, as I head back to stare at the television in my room for another few hours.

I should be relieved, I know, and even celebratory for the good news so far overall. The levees held (so far) and the worst thing in my area may be power outages and downed trees. But I’m impatient, and mad that we didn’t pack any playing cards (wasn’t that suggested as part of a minimal emergency evacuation kit?) and sorry I didn’t bring any alcohol, or better books to read.  There was adrenaline and urgency while we watched Katrina unfold, and a sense of surrealism because of its unprecedented nature. Also, I had only been a resident for one year so I was not a likely candidate for sorrow or regret or nostalgia, nor was I even longing to go home. New Orleans wasn’t home then, but it is now.  The unknown chaos back then seems better than the anticipation and glacial pace of this situation now, as ridiculous as that sounds. Not better…just more distracting, more fast-paced, entirely more confusing in a way that kept us all on our toes. This situation just makes me want to take naps.  We know the worst case scenario, but we’re not prepared for the best, which is…just wait. Wait until we clean up and get power back on. Again, I know I should be happy, and deep down my New Orleans soul is breathing a sigh of relief and softly humming “Do You Know What It Means…” But my brain and my body just want to be back in my apartment making toast and preparing for the morning show. 

So this is the new normal, I thought, as I flip the channels from GOP convention to hurricane coverage--from female strategists and analysts discussing and arguing over the ramifications of Palin’s announcement of her 5-month pregnant daughter to men in Gore-Tex shouting out about the tornadoes they are starting to feel whip through their hair and force their baseball caps to roll down Canal Street. One of the analysts at the GOP convention keeps shrugging off the Palin daughter pregnancy, saying that people understand what Palin is going through (I’m younger than Palin and I’m in shock) and that it essentially makes her even more “average American”.  While they are trying to downplay this, the Gore-tex boys and girls are trying to up-play the levees overtopping.

Drama, drama, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.  

Meanwhile, downstairs in the lobby people are gathered around the t.v. as though watching a football game, swapping stories and laughing and commenting as Anderson Cooper fills them in on the much ado about nothing. There’s a camaraderie that I should envy but don’t. To me this is just an interruption, a waste of time and money, a crappy change in plans compared to our original Labor Day weekend vacation plans, this is…hey, is this going to happen again? That nagging thought keeps hitting me over the head like the debris that barely miss the daredevil Gore-tex wearing newscasters tethered to poles.  I’m not buying into an annual evacuation routine any more than I’m buying into the fact that most families can relate to a teen pregnancy. We should be relieved she’s not having an abortion, that she’s marrying the father…just as we should be relieved that the hurricane didn’t ruin us.

Bravo. But as I breathe a sigh of relief at the fact that the levees created to save us did work, out of the other corner of my mouth I’m saying: Well, shouldn’t they? Isn’t that what they are there for? It’s like clapping when a plane lands safely…we should assume it will, but we know we can’t assume anything…and this is unfair and frustrating. I hate to think that every year we’re going to have this kind of wait-and-see attitude once we know a hurricane is headed for the Gulf. Sure, pat ourselves on the back this year, but…please tell me this is not the new normal.

Meanwhile, a reporter on the GOP Convention floor says some of the mutterings among delegates include frustrated, “what next?’s” regarding Palin. They are just as wary of surprises in their campaign as we are of surprises in our levee system. And while we pretend that we’re relieved Palin’s daughter is keeping her baby rather than aborting it, we’re also thinking, huh? How did that happen? What else lurks in the Palin Peyton Place?

But everything’s fine. No death and destruction, just power outages and a pregnant 17-year old. Things could be worse. We could be talking about The Mother of All Storms rather than a young mother. Huh. I guess there is a silver lining after all.

Maybe it’s just that simple: we should be grateful for life. Is that the message here, the unifying theme of this Labor Day?  Palin’s going to have a grandchild because she’s pro-life, and as far as we know nobody died in New Orleans due to Gustav.  I guess all of our labor paid off in some way or another.  McCain’s team is convincing people that Palin’s good family values paid off, Obama’s saying the unity along the Gulf Coast can be likened to the unity of the labor movement which asserts that no one stands alone, and Jindal and Nagin and Riley and Chertoff and Blakely and everyone else involved in strategic hurricane planning—well, their labor paid off.

(Applause, applause)

But now I just want us to pull into our driveway and clap at our own safe arrival—home.   

So I’m watching various national news channels from my hotel room in Little Rock, where we escaped—er, evacuated—yesterday.  The two families they chose to feature to summarize this impending crisis were a white affluent family putting their paintings and valuables up on the top floor of their large house and a black woman and her pregnant sister waiting for a city-sponsored bus to take them out of town. “This is horrrrrible, just horrible,” said the latter woman, standing in the heat in a line with what appeared to be over a hundred others equally dehydrated and frustrated. Apparently there had been a glitch in the computer system registering people so they were waiting in the ungodly August New Orleans heat longer than they otherwise might.  “My sister is pregnant…” she said, and rattled off some other complaints, her voice rising and falling in a familiar "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore" victim of the system kind of way. It was déjà vu all over again, but this time it was the bus station, before a hurricane, not the Convention Center, after a hurricane. It felt about the same, though.

If I were a newscaster coming down to New Orleans from elsewhere, I’d  try my damnedest to go beyond the Katrina clichés. I’d go find that crazy white guy staying with his guns; find a few people who arrived for the annual Southern Decadence Festival, aka New Orleans’ “gay Mardi Gras” who are still partying, talk to Labor Day tourists from Colorado to Connecticut, and interview the folks of all backgrounds in their cars, leaving, as well as some people who just moved here post-Katrina and are confused, concerned, and bewildered about this, The Real Thing. No doubt newscasters have done all of these things, and then decided to sink their teeth into the more obvious and newsworthy: New Orleans seems more organized with all the public evacuations, and would you return if Gustav turns out to be another Katrina or not?

This is what they asked the white family, whose son was writing a request to the Blessed Mary on his bedroom wall (in pencil, which seemed to show a lack of commitment, if you ask me), asking Her to keep Gustav away. When the mother asked her kids if they want to return to New Orleans if the storm is as severe and damaging as they think, the kids automatically replied with a resounding, simultaneous “NO!” The Mom nervously laughed and uttered a reluctant, smiley, “Yes, we’ll come back. Probably--" to the camera.

No one knows what is going to happen. Watching the sometimes useful, sometimes frustratingly vague and useless news is a losing proposition. With Katrina, we had no expectations, and waited with curiosity and fear and a fair amount of ignorance. With Gustav, we know too much and want too much. We can compare our last evacuation, compare our methods, compare our emotions, our expectations, our failures and successes. But each storm, like any huge horrible catastrophe or any mundane part of life, is unpredictable. No two wars, no two marriages, no two road trips, no two children, no two anything are the same, no matter what similarities there appear to be. It’s a lot of guessing and preparing and praying and waiting.

I’m ignoring all of my friends and families’ phone calls and emails, save for my parents. Let them tell them what I know: nothing. Let them tell them I’m safe for now in Arkansas, and waiting, like them.

But when I walk down the streets of Little Rock I am amazed at how I miss New Orleans in the simplest ways, from noticing the lack of visual surprises, the strange and sweet aromas of New Orleans, even the way the heat falls on you just as cruelly there but less anonymously than it does here. Everything’s intimate in New Orleans, like it or not. You can’t remain isolated from the beauty or the tragedy.  It’s hard to explain without going into clichés myself and romanticizing a place that quite honestly has made me less romantic and more cynical than any other place ever could.  

I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m just saying there’s a lot of grey--a color not readily associated with New Orleans--that you need to consider when you watch these news reports, and they’re gonna get more extreme and less accurate as the storm hits and especially afterwards. Just consider the middle. Just try and consider those of us who took our laptops and cats and a few other valuables, those of us who don’t have expensive artwork to stash or a house with the height big enough to stash them from rising waters; those of us who do have our own cars and can get out; those of us who are just as afraid as the two black sisters and just as pissed off and scared as we might be if standing in the heat, pregnant and waiting; just as worried and hopeful as the redheaded white boy writing in pencil to the Blessed Virgin to save us; just as nervously optimistic and non-committal as the white mother who says “Probably” with a smile that says: I don’t know. I just don’t know. Anymore. Yet…

On Monday, my older stepson told me about a girl at his school who was moving to Montana over Labor Day weekend. “It’s gonna suck for her,” he said. I told him Montana was beautiful. “She said we better be on MySpace all the time because she’s gonna be so bored.” I admitted there might be comparatively little to do in the Big Sky State for an eleven year old girl from New Orleans, but that it is a cool place with lots of mountains and forests and wild animals. “God, she’s gonna be so bored!” he said again.  I told him about the time I worked at Yellowstone Park and hitchhiked through the Bear Tooth Mountains and vowed I’d live there someday. I said the girl was lucky to be moving to such an amazing place--even though she might hate it now, she’ll love it when she got a bit older. He just shook his head. “She’s so gonna miss New Orleans.”  I had to agree with that.

Yesterday, we went to get sno-balls to fight the midweek heat. As we drove there we listened to the live radio broadcast of emergency preparedness officials giving a news conference about Gustav. While there was little specific information other than the refrain of “get ready now”,  it was comforting to hear that everyone was taking this seriously and planning ahead. 

When I parked the car on a street adjacent to the sno-ball stand, my stepson said “Hey, that girl who’s moving to Montana lives on this street.”  With Gustav in the picture,  I now envied that girl even more.  When first told about it, the thought of packing up and moving north over Labor Day was not too appealing, although I could imagine how wonderful it would be to arrive in the U-Haul feeling a crisp 60 degree mountain breeze in late August. Now, as we walked in the breezeless heat to the sno-ball stand, past a daycare center where children ignorant of an impending evacuation were swinging and screaming, I smiled at the thought of this Montana-bound girl and her parents. “They must be really happy to be going now,” I said. He didn’t seem to register that I was referring to Gustav. “I mean instead of evacuating somewhere, they’re just…moving.” He wasn’t buying it. He still felt sorry for this soon-to-be-bored-girl. “She will thank her parents ten years from now,” I said, maybe too wistfully. The boys barely heard me, contemplating which flavor they wanted and bragging that they were going to add sour squirts to their orders.

As we stood in line sweating and giggling, watching the elderly owner very deliberately and carefully make our sno-balls, we talked matter-of-factly about the path of Gustav and his possible arrival date.  By the time we finished and got back in the car, our lips garishly coated in reds, greens, and blues, the emergency preparedness folks were off the air.  I put on the classic rock station and Michael, the youngest, did air guitar.  We talked about how generous the sno-ball stand man was with the flavored syrups, and they explained how he was painfully slow making them at his own stand, but when he came to their school for summer camp, he was very fast. As we pondered why this was, and Michael complained that he never got as much sour squirt as he wished (“it’s only on the first layer…he just squirts it on top…I would pour it all over!”) I felt grateful for these petty concerns in the face of pending catastrophe. 

When we got home, I turned on the computer and looked at the digital weather tracking systems.  The kids did their homework.  I poured a glass of wine and settled in to read all of the emergency email alerts, and thought about dinner.

“Hey you guys, since we might need to evacuate, how about a Freezer Buffet for dinner? I’ll make all the stuff in there—tator tots, pizza rolls, chicken nuggets…and we can have a smorgasbord, a buffet, a tasting of all that’s left…” They liked this, and we started joking about it being a Chinese buffet without the Chinese food. As I did my famous imitation of an old Chinese woman for them, “you eat food from freezer, we use up…you eat here for free, no charge, Gustav special…” they laughed and began speaking back in high pitched, stilted Chinese voices. 

As I opened the freezer door to investigate what other odds and ends lurked in there begging to be sacrificed before the weekend, I felt the cold air hit my face and remembered the girl from Montana. In just a few days, she might roll down the window of her parents’ car and be shocked to feel the icy mountain air hit her cheeks. New Orleans will seem so far away, but she might suddenly be glad about that. They might not have sno-balls and Mardi Gras and crawfish, but they also don’t have Category 3 hurricanes. It might not suck so bad after all.