Later this year, Louisiana, southern Mississippi and the rest of the Gulf Coast will humbly and sadly mark the 20th anniversary of the most devastating time in our lives— when Hurricane Katrina hit, the levees failed and life changed as we knew it. Many folks lost much in Katrina: lives, homes, family members who moved away.

But sometimes, it’s the little things we lost that trigger the most vivid memories of that time. Maybe it’s the photograph you took when you graduated high school, or maybe it’s a memento or piece of furniture your grandmother handed down to you. Or a book signed by your favorite author. Or a drawing done by your young child.

We open What Was Lost with the story that inspired the series from our co-founder and editor-in-chief, Terry Baquet, who lives in the 7th Ward. We encourage you to read Terry’s essay and hope you’ll follow along with the series.

Ten years before Katrina, my wife, Phyllis, and I were house shopping. We wanted to live and raise our kids in the 7th Ward, a neighborhood that held great childhood memories for both of us.

We went to tour a house we knew was out of our price range. It was an immaculately renovated, nearly 200-year-old Creole cottage blocks from the Fair Grounds.

When we arrived, the out-of-our-price-range thing couldn’t have been more evident. But we went in anyway. The tour ended in the backyard, which looked like a park, with grapefruit, orange, and satsuma trees. There were wildflowers everywhere. And splitting the yard in half was a 60-foot-long by 6-foot-wide pond filled with hundreds of Japanese koi. There was even a bridge to get to the other side of the yard. When the owner stomped on the bridge the koi would gather to be fed. There were hundreds of them — and they were huge. We were amazed.

For days, I dreamt of that pond and those fish.

Expecting no more than a laugh, and against Phyllis’ best instincts, we made an offer we could afford. The owners accepted it, saying they wanted to leave the house in the care of a young couple who seemed to value it as much as they did.

I had my fish!

Every day before school, my kids and I would walk to the bridge with a bucket of fish food and stomp our hearts out on the bridge as the fish gathered for feeding time. Life was great.

Ten years later, Katrina hit. My family evacuated to Atlanta. I was still in New Orleans a mile away from home, hunkering down at work.

As far as we knew, our neighborhood had never flooded, so maybe everything would be fine. I held out hope.

A week after the storm and the flood that followed the breach of the federal levee system, I drove to the French Quarter and waded nearly a mile through sometimes-chest-high water to the house, feeling things under my feet that took my imagination to scary places. When I arrived home there was about a foot of water in our raised house and nearly four feet still in the street. I went to the yard. I cried as I looked out over downed trees and standing water across the yard. Only the highest point of the arc of the bridge was visible. There were no fish that I could see.

Terry Baquet at his hurricane-damaged creole cottage in New Orleans on Jan. 25, 2006.
Terry Baquet at his hurricane-damaged creole cottage in New Orleans on Jan. 25, 2006. Credit: Lee Celano / The New York Times/Redux Credit: Lee Celano / The New York Times/Redux

When the water had receded, weeks later, I went back to fully survey the damage. The pond was filled with muck but there were no dead fish. Not a single carcass in the entire yard.

My family returned from Atlanta the following year. The house was something that could be fixed, but the fish were gone. The pond is now a pool (I lost the family vote).

Sometime later, after things began to settle down, I ran into a friend of mine for the first time since the storm and told him about my pond. He laughed. A few days after the storm, he was standing on the steep steps of the courthouse at Broad and Tulane looking out at the flood waters, he said. He saw what looked like a school of Japanese koi.


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We at Verite News would like to hear from you, whether you lost treasured things in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, or you just have a story to tell. We’d like to hear it.

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