 "Photo: Photo Courtesy of MCT Campus")
Imagine the worst possible conditions: an overcrowded stadium filled with strangers, a urine-soaked piece of cardboard as your place to rest, waiting for military rations of food for hours on end, and not knowing when you are ever going to leave.
These are the decrepit conditions witnessed by Hurricane Katrina survivor Paul A. Harris who found himself trapped in those stadium walls on the day of as well as several days after the hurricane devasted "America's Most Soulful City", New Orleans in 2005.
In his Diary from the Dome he chronicles two very different trips he took to New Orleans, the first in 1977 when he was a 21-year-old drifter trying to find himself whilst backpacking around the country. Years later, the California native decides to travel to the city for a fifth time in late August of 2005. This trip however would be less of a vacation and more of a physical, mental and emotional test of his strength and perserverance. A test that would ultimately leave him angry, hurt, hopeful, and changed forever.
It was during this trip that he would find himself trapped in New Orleans as Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf with a projected path headed straight for the city. He tried to find a bus but found that the Greyhound depot was closed, there was no car rentals left and this is after his hotel forces him to cancel his reservations and leave immediately. He is left with his only option, trying to ride out the storm in the Superdome; a large saucer-shaped building that is typically home the Saints football team. The stadium is then transformed into a "safe" haven holding 20,000 people clinging to life in the worst imaginable environment. And to this survivor and many news outlets, the Dome would become a symbol of American citizens failed by their own government.
Harris's diary is blunt, eloquent, opinionated, and troubling. He goes in horrific detail about the overbearing stench of human waste, the ceiling tiles that violently rip away in the storm and soaks the field with powerful rain, and the generator that barely lights the field. There are rumors of rape, murder, and suicide (which only the last of these three became true). There is rampant paranoia, claustrophobia, racial tension, and a sense of hopelessness.
"As time dragged on and the horrific smell from the bathrooms grew, food lines grew as well. They now were getting to be two to three hour waits. But it's not like I had anywhere to be. The lines snaked back and forth and doubled up. It was sometimes hard tell where a line ended and a new one began. There was little control over the lines and shoving matches broke out", he says of the atmosphere in the Dome.
Though Harris sometimes slips into the mentality of despair and self-pity he never loses himself completely or his strong sense of morale. He rightly compares the situation to that of the Lord of the Flies where both the best and the worst of humanity can be revealed at any moment.
He witnesses theft and fights and yet also sees people of all races and classes coming together in the common interest of survival. He befriends homeless men as well as a large group of foreign travelers hailing from Austrailia, New Zealand, Denmark, and Taiwan to name a few. The best of the novel is in these forging relationships. They talk about their lives, their professions, their futures, and how they ended up trapped in the same place.
The novel slips in quality in his (though duly justified) angry rants over the lack of governmental support and the failed leadership of George Bush. He leaves control of straight-forward style and opts to go into a long-winded fits of rage that over-burdened with strangely articulated philosophies, especially in the epilogue to the diary.
Though it is hard to argue against his sentiments, he needs to articulate his points with more controlled passion rather than an unleashed explosion of pure emotion.
He also tends to get a bit-preachy and overbearing again when he discusses how his strict adherance to morals and yet he also admits to falling into the pratfalls of paranoia and heresay several times. He is human and he is flawed and for the most part he recognizes that fact. But he tends to drift into phases in which he paints himself as completely tolerant as he admonishes others for their behavior.
Overall, this is a piece of non-fiction that places the reader at the center of one of the greatest tragedies of recent memory and it does so with a great sense of honesty. He has given us a much-needed first-hand-account of the story that captured a nation and shamed a president.
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