September 19, 2005|Maria L. La Ganga |
Times Staff Writer BLUFFDALE, Utah — The worst part of waiting for Tracy Kenerson wasn't the seven days of chaos in the New Orleans Superdome, where he couldn't sleep without someone to watch his back.
It wasn't the week he'd spent wondering whether his fiancee and year-old son, who had evacuated their hometown ahead of Hurricane Katrina, were dead or alive. It wasn't the 17 days they'd spent apart, with little chance to talk and none to touch, no way to take comfort or give solace, no time to plan together what to do next.
All of that was awful, no doubt about it. But the worst part of waiting for Tracy Kenerson -- after weeks when almost everything went wrong -- were the hours before everything began to go right, 240 excruciating minutes that felt longer than any he had endured since the hurricane struck land.
The plan: At 11 a.m. Wednesday, Latoya Lockett and their son, Tyler, would arrive here at the Red Cross shelter outside of Salt Lake City, where Kenerson had spent the previous 10 days.
At noon, the family would pack their scant belongings into a borrowed van and head downtown to the Northgate Apartments to get the keys to their new home. By 1 p.m., they would begin life anew, in a place as different from New Orleans as an American city could possibly be.
Kenerson had spent the previous two weeks working toward this moment, forcing a modicum of order onto a world spun out of control. He had not been able to protect his family from the hurricane; now, he thought, he could protect them from its aftermath.
But at the last minute, his careful plan unraveled. The van never came. The apartment wasn't ready. The background check required by landlords was bogged down in Baton Rouge.
So Kenerson was forced to wait -- again. "I was very, very angry," he said, and then words failed him.
In one way or another, waiting has become a central experience of Hurricane Katrina, for the evacuees bunking in Red Cross shelters and the holdouts in waterlogged homes. Rich, poor, young, old -- everyone touched by the storm and the flooding is waiting for something.
For the water to come back on or school to reopen. For word from a missing loved one or a check from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For a new life to begin or an old one to resume. For New Orleans to rise again. Or in Kenerson's case, for the chance to make things right for his family.
"Waiting when you're not remotely sure of whether a missing family member survived, or your home will be habitable again ... is the core of what makes psychological stress stressful," said Robert Sapolsky, professor of neuroscience at Stanford University. "And nothing does us in more than feeling as if things are coming into place and having the rug pulled out from under us."
In other words, nothing does a person in more than living through the kind of afternoon Tracy Kenerson had Wednesday in a shelter at the end of the broad Salt Lake Valley, where the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains meet.
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Kenerson is pacing the cavernous community center at the heart of Camp W.G. Williams, a National Guard outpost turned Red Cross shelter 26 miles south of Salt Lake City. He goes past a bank of telephones tying Katrina's victims to the outside world. Past folding tables in a lengthy horseshoe, piled with books and toys and games to help fill hours that can tick by with unimaginable slowness.
It is Tuesday, and in less than 24 hours, Kenerson hopes, he will be reunited with his family in a bright, clean apartment with bedroom doors that close and bathrooms they won't have to share with strangers. Lately he's been sleeping on a bottom bunk in a crowded dorm, and he is grateful. But this is not the life he wants for his son and the woman he calls his wife -- "We been together so long." \o7
\f7Kenerson is talking about the past and thinking about the future. He is a stocky 38-year-old man with close-cropped hair, a neat mustache and deep lines of fatigue etched beneath his eyes. He has worked since he was 15, his first job boiling shrimp at a New Orleans restaurant. Until the storm hit, he was a butcher at Family Farms Supermarket.
And just this year he had finally attained the life that he had always dreamed of.
"We'd found a house," Kenerson said. "I'd bought me a car. I'd gotten me a second job cooking at a restaurant on the weekend. A soul food place. Red beans, rice, fried chicken, pork chops. I had my car two months. A 1990 New Yorker made by Chrysler, and now it's gone."
Kenerson's chin rests on his fist, and his eyes are just a little distant. He has lived in New Orleans all of his life, and his words bear the deep imprint of his former home. \o7Ra-id Cross. Uh-pote-ment. Poke chops\f7.
"What I see now is, I'm starting from scratch again, starting from scratch," he said. "But I guarantee you I'll make it. I know how to survive. No. 1, I likes to work. I won't have no problem finding a job. Once I get my wife and son stabilized in an apartment, I'll get a job, and we'll live happy -- just me and him and her."
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