Over three weeks ago, the winds of Hurricane Katrina poked holes in the tile roof over the house where Veronica Jones '06 and her family had decided to wait out the storm.
The day after the worst weather subsided, the levees that held back Lake Pontchartrain broke, sending floods nine feet high into senior Anton Hasenkampf's neighborhood. Hasenkampf was in Hanover when Katrina hit and is still unsure of his home's condition.
"No one's been able to get back to where I live," he said.
Jones, whose family remained in its home until the Wednesday after the storm, addressed the situation with a mixture of horror and humor. Her family members had planned to stay in their house until they had eaten all of the food there, but when the running water stopped working they decided to leave.
"The water was rising in the street as we were leaving," she said. "All the way there were electrical lines everywhere. It's going to be ages and ages before all that work's done."
To hear Dartmouth's New Orleans natives speak about the Katrina ordeal is an experience distinct from the black-and-white stories of horror and hope depicted in the mainstream media.
Six undergraduates at the College, all from New Orleans proper, emerged safely with their families and loved ones. Their parents still have jobs and their younger siblings are enrolled in schools throughout the South. They have clothes, but not entire wardrobes, shelter, but not in the houses where they grew up, and access to BlitzMail, but not from their own computers. All characterize themselves as lucky.
"It's kind of hard to complain," Michael Magner '09 said in the lounge of his dormitory in the Choates.
"We're inconvenienced," said Matthew Caverly '09. "We're not homeless."
Thankful that they don't have to mourn for loved ones, Dartmouth's New Orleans natives are hopeful that their hometown will survive as well.
"Everywhere outside New Orleans is, like, the South," Magner said. "New Orleans is very different; we have the whole European tradition, good food and cool architecture and coffee shops."
Megan Peck '06 hopes to be able to return to her house by Christmas. The walls of her home are covered in mold and the first floor will have to be gutted. However, Peck is glad her parents -- who were living temporarily in Houston until Hurricane Rita forced a second evacuation in three weeks -- decided to move back eventually.
"I loved growing up there," she said. "There's so much to the city. I think that the essence of it won't change [but] I'm not sure right now how many people will go back. I don't know if it will ever be the same."
When her parents returned to the house last week to gather some belongings, they wore protective suits and masks to guard against the stench and putrid water that remained stagnant in some parts of her Lakeview neighborhood. Both Peck's mother and father were inoculated for hepatitis and tetanus before returning.
"It's just been a nightmare," she said. "Right now I'm trying to stay positive and think of all the things that we do still have."
Though appreciative that fellow Dartmouth students have expressed concern for them, Magner and Caverly, who went to high school together, joke about the exhausted answers they use in responding to the same questions.
"We've boiled it down to a three-sentence shpiel," Magner said.
Caverly continued, by way of example: "My house is dry, everybody I know is alive and safe and the city is like a big giant septic tank filled with feted water and dead bodies."
In unison, they recite, "But it's normally a cool place, and you should come visit some time when it's not under water."
