Lucky Ones from New Orleans

^ Willy and Swinkle in New Orleans, summer 2005. ^ 

Silver guy in the middle? 

Surprisingly, not me. 

We were discussing one of the worst natural disasters in American history when a funny topic arose. A thousand miles south of Fond du Lac, Swinkle was reminiscing into his phone outside of a restaurant in New Orleans.

“Willy had ordered a hammock that was supposed to be delivered on the day Katrina hit.”

“I paid for it!” Willy said.

“It was a standalone hammock, meant to replace his bed,” Swinkle said in his thoughtful drawl. “He couldn't get in touch with the company for the longest time. Then we found out a month or two afterward that the company that took forever to ship it to him was actually in New Orleans. So he was never going to get his money back.”

“Think about that,” Willy said. “It was taking them a while even though we were in the same city. And when I was supposed to finally get it, a hurricane took them out... as well as the post office, the mayor's office, and any chance of me getting my hammock.”

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina—settled with a wife, two kids, and a steady job, Willy has never realized his dream of sleeping in a hammock every night. Later in our talk it was reiterated that there are probably worse fates.

###

We did the interview a half-hour later than planned. My iPhone couldn't directly record the call with Swinkle because I guess that's illegal. Willy had arrived at my apartment on time but forgot to bring his digital recorder. My backup plan was a Microcassette relic with playback that made me sound like a demon on Quaaludes. Willy called an audible and we drove to his house for his Zoom Mic, then to his mom and dad's, where his sister joined us in an upstairs bedroom. When we belatedly got through to Swinkle at 8:30, I felt a tinge of pressure to prove I was truly a pro.

“Uh... So, Swinkle, you were born in the south. Right?”

“Yeah, in New Orleans.”

I nailed it! Swinkle elaborated.

“As a kid, I took stuff like Mardis Gras for granted, but you also knew it was kind of a magical place in the deep south, not like anywhere else you'd ever been.”

In the fall of 2001, Swinkle was lured upstream of the Mississippi River by recurrent wanderlust, a love of music, and a mutual friend of Willy's who played drums in their rock band Reveal. Willy and I had been pals going back to the X-Men battles of our youth, and so I was introduced to Swinkle shortly after he arrived in Wisconsin. We have been triangulated ever since.

Treasured memories, enduring kinships, and some good tunes notwithstanding, the band ran its course, and on a much heavier note, Swinkle's father passed away in August of 2004, prompting his return to the bayou to be with family.

Willy relocated in June of 2005 with no way of knowing his timing was to be as bad as that of a certain hammock vendor. I asked him why he made that move when he was 22.

“Because there was somebody who could set up a living situation ahead of me,” Willy said. “And the main reason I moved there wasn't necessarily New Orleans. It was to get out of Fond du Lac. It wasn't exactly like running away. It was more, 'If I'm going to understand where I'm from, I have to understand what it's like to not be here.'”

Swinkle summarized how they spent their summer.

“I was working for AmeriCorps by day, and I'd lined up Willy with a job working for a contractor,” he said, referring to Ronnie, a born-again survivor of '80s decadence who had composed a dozen or so odes to God. “And we were recording crappy Christian music at night.”

(As a side-note, I visited them that summer, weeks before Katrina, and witnessed a jam session in Ronnie's garage. A Ronnie line the three of us have been known to quote can be found in his critique of the material world: “I don't drink my coffee in a fancy can/ You know that I'm a simple man!”)

“It was his goal and he wanted help with it,” Willy explained. “And it just made sense for us to keep playing music.”

Amen. The time had come for me to ask about that despicable wet thing.

“Initially, how serious did you take the warnings about the tropical storm that became Katrina?”

“I'd heard mention of it a day before we left,” Swinkle said. “The truth is, you get so many hurricane warnings per season, and over 90% of the time, it comes to the fruition of a bad rainstorm. Rarely did we ever really get hit.”

A number of false alarms had contributed to what Willy called “desensitization.” We believe this to be a product of human nature.

“What was the definitive moment that made you realize the best plan was to get out of the city?”

“When Mayor (Ray) Nagin made a televised press conference, live, seriously urging people to leave,” Swinkle said. “I had been working in gardens until four or five when my boss told me the news. I got a ride home and told Willy we probably had to get out of town.”

Evacuation was the plan, but there was a daunting obstacle: Neither man had access to a car. Weeks after it had made the trek from Wisconsin to Louisiana with his belongings in tow, Willy sold his 1990 Ford Escort. Swinkle's ride was being repaired at the shop; he had borrowed his ex-girlfriend's car to get to work that Saturday morning. She had since reclaimed it and fled the city. His plight seemed compounded by the fact that he'd also lost his cellphone.

Swinkle recalled: “Willy started gathering valuables, clothes, stuff we wanted to bring along and preserve. And I was on the computer, trying to find any kind of a rental, flight, bus, or shuttle.”

They were focused but perhaps overmatched. Mercy interceded in the form of a gracious ex.

“Luckily,” Swinkle went on, “My ex-girlfriend, who had my phone, called Willy. I'd left my phone in her car. She'd been on the road for about three hours, and was only about 15 miles out of town because traffic was so bad. She turned around and came to return the phone so I could have it, and she ended up helping us because we didn't have any other options.”

They packed into her sedan a military Duffel bag full of clothes, two acoustic guitars, some recording equipment, and most legendarily, nine lighters. Anything they couldn't stow on a plane was to be destroyed.

“I had just inherited my late father's furniture. His couches, his records. I had that material connection with my dad,” Swinkle said. “I thought, 'I can take care of his stuff now.' Then it's gone.”

Katrina would deprive Willy of a brand-new mandolin. “She was a good girl,” he eulogized. When asked if he had christened her with a name, he deadpanned, “Amanda Lynn.”

There was no use pining over possessions as they drove to the airport where Swinkle had made reservations for a rental car. They waited in line for over two hours. Swinkle noted that “people were definitely frustrated and a little freaked out, but they were civil at that point.” When at long last the trio got to the counter, their fortune waned.

“Because my ex was not yet 25 and paying for it, they couldn't release a car to us.”

What a hassle. “Big Easy,” my ass. Furthering her sterling reputation, Swinkle's ex agreed to let the guys tag along on her journey three states east to Albany, Georgia, where she had family. Willy and Swinkle crashed on the couches of total strangers in the wee hours of Sunday, August 28^th, 2005. Later that morning, they emptied their funds for plane tickets. In a deluge of nasty rain that foretold Katrina, the pilot of a "small puddle-jumper” worked up the nerve to fly them to Atlanta. It was the last flight the plane was to hazard that day. From Atlanta they were flown to Milwaukee's Mitchell Airport. Willy's family was there to drive them home to Fond du Lac.

That night and Monday morning, we gathered around the TV watching the news, sipping coffee, somber and shocked. This was more than a “bad rainstorm.” Katrina was the malevolent payback for all those false alarms. With winds upwards of 175 miles per hour, Katrina was a rare and ferocious category 5 hurricane. Exterior levees had been built to withstand the magnitude of a category 3. Interior floodwalls like that of the 17^th Street Canal were undermined by faulty engineering. The death toll exceeded a thousand in New Orleans alone. Overall damage to property is a scarcely comprehensible figure: $108 billion. New Orleans' burden was exacerbated by its geography; the city exist in a bowl with elevation dipping seven-to-ten feet below sea level. Flooding continued after the storm had passed. When the levees failed, the effects were catastrophic. By Tuesday, over three-quarters of the city was submerged. The Upper and Lower 9^th Wards were especially decimated.

We watched images of desperate souls on rooftops or floating on mattresses from our living rooms. We saw the Superdome embroiled in a doomsday struggle from far, far away. I didn't say the obvious to my friends. “That could have been you.”

“We weren't the only people who wanted to evacuate but had very little means to do so,” Swinkle said.

“We're very lucky,” Willy agreed.

In a town of about 43,000 at the foot of Lake Winnebago, they roomed together in a spare bedroom at Willy's sister's house. Within two weeks, they realized they couldn't return to New Orleans anytime soon. They got day jobs. Swinkle in particular began to loathe the news reports, the inevitable inquiries. People called them the lucky ones even though they had lost everything. I had to wonder if there was more to the story than luck.

“Do you think you benefited from divine intervention or simply good fortune?”

Willy's answer was immediate.

“Before we had any knowledge of the hurricane, I remember stressing out. Thinking about how I wasn't going to be able to continue at that pace, as far as bills and income were coming along. It was a mountain of obstacles to overcome. And I had a moment of asking for divine intervention, getting on my knees and praying to God, saying that I can't do this without some help, and I will do whatever it takes.

“When I look at all the circumstances, I can't help but feel a little bit of hair standing up on end,” he continued. “I specifically asked for help. Then Swinkle left his phone in her car—and that helped us. My last paycheck, all my money, was almost the exact amount that I needed for a plane ticket. We got the last flight... I asked for divine intervention, and I think I got it.”

As a brief editorial, an answered prayer like that could speak volumes about the madness of the world in which we live. I don't think faith or science will ever solve the ongoing mystery and it's hard to be at peace with that.

I questioned Swinkle about the city's efforts to revitalize.

“Being part of the rebuilding with AmeriCorps, I respect the resilience. The resilience resulted in a tighter sense of community. Not only that, but the huge outpouring of support nationally... We had college groups, church groups every week. Buses full of people taking weeks off their lives to come down and help us rebuild, and they didn't get a dime.”

“The worst nature sometimes brings out the best in people,” I said.

We were on our way to an optimistic conclusion. From Fond du Lac, Willy had his faith intact and I had an upbeat ending to an otherwise morose tale. (Maybe I could mix in a few more jokes! I thought selfishly.) Swinkle believed New Orleans was toughened and united by hardship... But he also had something to add.

“Well, initially, Nick, it was horrible. You know, with the Superdome. One of the girls I worked with had to identify her boyfriend-of-four-years' body after he was murdered, shot point blank in the back of the head. The military and police that were established were gone. Anybody in a position of authority had bailed. The building just got taken over. So, this girl came back from the coroner's office with a dry face and told me exactly what it was like to identify her boyfriend's body, but she couldn't open up about the Superdome. Ever.”

We were left with sunken hearts and I was all out of questions. There were no jokes to lighten the mood as we changed the subject and said our goodbyes.

But it struck me as a fine encapsulation of the human condition and empathy. At the end of retelling their adventure, even the lucky ones had to dwell on the sadness.