On Changing Course; Or: Realizing I Didn't Cause Hurricane Katrina, After All

Next door to my house is the Glover Park Market. (In most other neighborhoods I've lived in, we'd call this 'the bodega'.) On the other side of that, there's a pseudo-parking lot -- more of a delivery zone, really, but people park there. There's one car that's there all the time: an ancient, mustardy yellow Toyota wagon with a single bumper sticker, a Turkish proverb:

"No matter how far you've gone down the wrong path, turn back."

I love that. Now.

I fought with it for a while. For a while, it didn't make enough sense. What if something only SEEMS like the wrong path, because it's hard? And what if you turn back, and later you realize it had been the right path all along?

Then I thought: 'I suppose you could just turn back then, too.'

The last two weeks have been hard. The entirety of 2012 has been a bit if a bastard, frankly, but woven through with bolts of the sublimely wonderful; it's hardly like I've been locked in a medieval dungeon. Still, when it's hard, it's easy to play 'what if'. What if I'd stayed, what if I'd turned left, what if I hadn't asked. What if I'd turned back then? What if I turn back now?

In August of 2003, I was 21 years old. The day after the blackout that shut down much of the northeastern United States, my father and I left Amherst, packed up Gladys, my ancient white ES 300, already the heroine of so many stories, and drove south, to New Orleans, where I'd start at Tulane Law in a less than a week. I was happy, ambitious, excited. Pops and I played endless games of 'guess the population of...', ate at a number of fine roadside Cracker Barrels. I fussed with my cranky CD-changer, popped dozens of nicotine lozenges out of their foil for him while he drove down the center of empty highways. Somewhere in Virginia, Gladys lost a piece of muffler, and announced our presence like a stock-car when we pulled in anywhere. The trip took three days.

Three years later we'd repeat the drive, in reverse, Pops at the wheel of my mother's Tourareg this time, accompanied by an additional passenger: Baylor, snoozing contentedly in a back-seat cave of duffel bags and Irish suitcases. I was a different person on this drive* so entirely divorced from the proud 21-year-old with her new fondness for martinis and morbidly expensive denim. I felt raw, and tired, drained of all sweetness, sharp at the corners with a new fear of the future. I didn't even know where I'd be living until we crossed into Pennsylvania. What happened?

I was turning back.

Midway through the second semester of my 2L year, I fell apart. I remember those months in bits and flashes, like scanning radio stations. Sometimes I hit on something I recognize, try to go back and catch the signal, but I fumble and it's gone, static. There are chunks of the important things: the cross country trip to LA with B, Colorado and canyons; the best meal of my life, scallops at Dante's Kitchen; swimming home from F+M's after the freakest storm, the most intense flood we'd ever see, until later. And of, course, the moment I decided to turn back:

It was the end of the semester, before exams. I'd lined up an internship at the National Trust for Historic Preservation in DC (how curious, six years later, I'd take a job in historic preservation, three minutes away from their office) I found a sublet in Logan Circle with a girl and her dog who seemed just lovely. Everything was just as it should be.

So it surprised even me, that weekend afternoon in the pitch-black shower (I did not fucking care, about anything, especially not the burned-out light bulb in the shower, which I couldn't reach anyway, which I never remembered until I was already in the damn shower... Besides, the ability to cleanly shave your legs in complete darkness is a skill you'll never regret possessing) when I whispered to myself "You don't have to do this" and felt like I'd inhaled after months of not even realizing I'd been holding my breath. I said it again, "You don't have to do this", and my knees actually buckled, dizzy with this freedom I hadn't realized I'd had at hand all along.

And I didn't do it. I didn't do any of it.

I pulled out of everything. I went home. I went to Ireland with my family, for what we all acknowledged would be our last Original Recipe Family Vacation: Mom, Dad, kids, and I think, expressly because of that bittersweet, it was the best vacation I've ever had. Much of that summer was dark and lonely and awful -- sometimes a lot of weird shit has happened to the path since the first time you walked down it, and it can be a goddamn CHALLENGE to traverse, in reverse. I'd gone a long ways. It might have been easier to just keep going. I didn't get it, not just then, that part of turning back meant finishing what I'd started. Law school is painful enough when you want to be there.

I don't believe in God, per se, I never really have, but I prayed to something every day and night that summer: Please, Please, Please. Don't Make Me Go Back. But it seemed like no one listened, because in August 2005 I was standing in Louis Armstrong International Airport waiting for a ride, rooted to nothing except a giant duffel bag I'd stuffed too heavy to move under my own power.

I was back for exactly a week when Hurricane Katrina showed up on the Doppler Radar. And I went home again.

So, you see - and I've only admitted this to a few people, it's so ferociously crazy - for years I thought Hurricane Katrina was, at least partially, my fault. (The Army Corps needs to take their blame, ALWAYS.) Like the grown child I still am, I thought the power of my magical thoughts had destroyed thousands of lives just so I could sleep on a mattress on the floor of my adolescent bedroom, so I could lie paralyzed with indecision down the hall from my parents. So I could wrap myself in the cocoon of Amherst, where nothing bad could ever really happen, where nothing had to be real, because if you squint hard, you can see everything through your child-eyes.

I realize now, it was just part of the road back. If I'd gone to DC that summer, I might have realized that I loved old buildings, but not in the legal sense. I might have turned back then. Or maybe it would have taken longer. I don't get to know that, that alternate future. But since then, I've learned to trust myself more, to follow what feels right, even if it looks crazy. And that was actually enough.

I said here, four years ago (good lord!), that we always return to our truest states, whether by pressure or force or space or time. We just do. Because it's our nature. I still believe that. Hurricane Katrina would have happened either way. Of the millions of lives that storm affected, the stories of me and mine are just one tiny, relatively uninteresting tributary.

So, really, this was all to say: when it's the wrong path, I think there's a moment when you just know. And it doesn't mean it's an easy decision, or a clear one, but you get where you're supposed to be in the end: your life will take you to all the important stops, if you listen to it, if you let it.

Until then, as my father says: just keep writing.


*I called my father before I posted this, specifically to ask how I was on that ride back. He said I seemed relaxed and happy to be done, so at least I put on a nice face. And I'm glad I called to ask, because of all the things I don't remember about that year, I do remember that drive, and how lucky am I, that every long drive with my father has been a wonderful one.