Hurricane Katrina swamps history student's plans to complete graduate work at New Orleans University
BY LORI BONA HUNT
Christopher Kent tries not to get too emotional each time he thinks about his adopted hometown of New Orleans and everything and everyone he left behind.
“I allow myself to have an episode every now and then, but if I cry too much, I know I'll keep going and going and won't be able to stop.”
It's been nearly two weeks since Kent got into his 1988 Volvo and made the long trek to Canada, to a city he'd never visited and to a university he knew little about.
He saw U of G's invitation to students displaced by hurricane Katrina on a temporary website for Tulane University, where he was to start the second year of a history master's program Aug. 31.
Since arriving in Guelph, Kent has been mercifully busy: setting up residence in a graduate house; meeting faculty and other students; and registering for and attending classes. Things are calming down a bit now, and it makes him nervous.
“Everyone has been absolutely wonderful, but I'm worried that once I settle in, reality is going to hit and the levee will break — damn those water metaphors!”
Kent never expected to be in Canada, let alone Guelph. In fact, he never planned to leave New Orleans. He was going to ride out hurricane Katrina tucked away in his ground-level apartment. He lived less than two blocks from a river, but it was in one of the higher regions of the bowl-shaped city. “I thought I'd be safe.”
He had enough food in the house and, with school starting in a few days, plenty of work to keep him busy. Plus, he was low on cash and his car is a bit of a gas guzzler.
“So I figured I'd stay, thinking that if the storm got really bad, there was always the Superdome.”
He started to change his mind on Sunday, Aug. 28, after seeing Gov. Kathleen Blanco's face on the late-night news. “She's usually so stoic, but she looked so concerned; there was real fear there. It scared me. I started thinking: ‘Maybe I should get the heck out of here.'”
Kent also remembered that he'd forgotten to mail his rent cheque the day before, meaning he had enough money to finance his evacuation. So at 3 a.m. Monday morning, he grabbed his wallet, keys, some shirts and a few pairs of shorts.
“I figured I'd be gone for a few days — that's how it was with hurricane Ivan the year before.”
On the way out the door, he spotted an old suitcase that he'd taken with him when Ivan hit. He'd left it fully packed. “It had all my valuable stuff in it: my baby blanket, the stuffed animal I had since I was four years old, my birth certificate, some photographs and other things.” He grabbed that, too.
Once on the road, things went surprisingly well. All the entrances into New Orleans had been turned into exits, and Kent joined a steady stream of cars leaving the city. Nine hours later, he arrived at a friend's house in Houston, Tex.
The next day, he was relieved to hear that the damage from Katrina wasn't as bad as expected. “I let out a big sigh and started thinking about going home.” Then came the news that the levees had broken, and Kent's life — and the lives of countless others — was flooded with pain.
“For the first couple of days, I was shell-shocked and in complete disbelief. Because I was out of the city and watching everything unfold on TV, it didn't seem real. Then the horror of it all started to hit me: the looting, the crime, the destruction, the suffering of the people. It was hellish. I couldn't take it anymore and I shut the TV off.”
He wasn't sure what to do or where to go. He had no idea — and still doesn't — of what became of his apartment and belongings. So he registered with FEMA; visited the Red Cross, where he picked up some much-needed donated clothing; and sent some e-mails to his family back in Michigan and to friends. He tried to contact his university, but to no avail. The scheduled first day of classes came and went.
Kent didn't think he had the luxury of taking a semester off from school. “I'm a ‘mature' graduate student,” he says with a smile, noting that he went back to school at age 32. He'd had a career in the telecommunications industry, having already earned undergraduate and master's degrees, the latter from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston. He'd worked and lived in New York, Washington, D.C., and Austin before enrolling at Tulane.
When he realized he couldn't return to New Orleans, Kent considered attending the University of Texas at Austin or the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “So many universities opened their doors, which was wonderful,” he says.
Tulane eventually started communicating with students via a temporary website, and Kent saw the notice from Guelph. It had been posted by Prof. Karen Racine, History, who did her graduate work at Tulane. He contacted Racine, learned Guelph was a good fit for his studies in 18th-century Atlantic world history and “was ready to tear up the middle of the United States to get here in time for classes.” He stopped only long enough to sleep, driving 12 to 13 hours a day.
Kent arrived at the border in Port Huron, Mich. “I was really nervous. I didn't know what to expect or whether they'd let me cross.” All he had was a letter from Racine and the telephone numbers of president Alastair Summerlee and Prof. Alan Shepard, associate vice-president (academic).
The immigration official ended up being a U of G graduate. “She was a joy. She went on and on about how much she loved Guelph and would I say ‘hi' to professor so-and-so in philosophy. She was unbelievably kind.”
Kent entered Canada feeling upbeat for the first time in weeks, and the good feeling has continued.
“I can't describe how grateful I am, how kind the offer was for me to come here. There just aren't words to describe it. There has been a tremendous outpouring of support.”
He often thinks about the people who didn't leave — who couldn't leave — New Orleans. “Most of them were too old, too sick or too poor to go. They were the ones who ended up suffering, who ended up dying.”
He could have been one of them. “Had I mailed my rent cheque, I wouldn't have been able to afford to leave. I'd have ended up at the Superdome.” He physically shudders at the thought. “What happened there was unfathomable; it truly became the mouth of hell.”
