Watching

We waited and then we watched. Watched as the giant amoeba-like storm slowly undulated its devastating way across the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Captive as always to its whim, we could be thankful that at the last moment Katrina decided to slip and slide a little to the right and the left to spare New Orleans, that beautiful bathtub city, almost certain complete ruin. Still, it was terrible enough, worse yet in the Biloxi area and around Mobile, Alabama. Mississippi’s Governor said the hurricane had delivered his state a "grievous blow." Indeed it did, and the up-close information, the real human losses are not yet available.

One side note: years ago when I was very young, probably twenty-five, and a completely inexperienced, hard-charging, career-building, self-involved and oblivious television newsman there was a sudden pier fire on the waterfront in Seattle where I was living and working. In those days the cameras were huge, and we were captives to the heavy cumbersome cables that chained us to them. I would have hand carried all the equipment myself and run the entire way to have the chance to cover the story. For two hours I reported from the scene, live the entire time. It was almost unheard of, virtually unprecedented to do that back then. Pushing past firemen, crouching down on the smoky pilings, gesturing to the flames as they danced at my feet, I ad-libbed, I interviewed, I assessed the possibilities. Not for one moment did I have a slightest idea what I was talking about and never once did I consider that I was in real danger, that the old, encrusted wood holding up the planks beneath my feet might be ready to go. I was too excited, too filled up by the opportunity the fire offered. When I returned to the station the head guy, the toughest bird I ever worked for, was waiting. “Hey,” he said. “You could be a pretty good professional one day.” For maybe the next ten years I lived on the perfume of those words.

Forty years later I was reminded of that as the frenzied Katrina reporters ricocheted around parking lots, clung to makeshift anchors on wind whipped waterfronts, excitedly pointed to windows popping and debris flying as they huddled in small rain choked pockets outside hotels. Long after the cleanup, after the people have returned and rebuilt, those reporters will believe they did something important and lasting today. That in those perilous moments, as they disregarded their own personal safety, as their names were called out and heard in safe and dry homes across the county, they will believe that what they did was lasting and important. It will be difficult for them when they come to realize it was not.