Five close physician friends make an interesting census as well. One spent Katrina in Charity Hospital, which lost power but not phone service, so I talked to him daily while he waited for rescue, relaying his information to friends in the national media so they could get their stories right. His house was undamaged, but he sold it and left anyway; the buyer has already put it back on the market — not to flip, just to get out. Another friend had an endowed chair at Tulane Medical School; the university, citing extraordinary financial exigencies, fired him and several other endowed chairs and took the money. A third friend, also at Tulane Medical School, got fed up with the lack of something meaningful to do and took a job at the University of Missouri. A fourth, on the faculty at Louisiana State University Medical School, spent Katrina working on the elevated portion of I-10 and at the Superdome, doing what he could with almost nonexistent resources. Although in the two years before the storm he won awards for both teaching and clinical research, LSU fired him. No patients. He took a job at Vanderbilt. Only the fifth remains — and he couldn’t leave: he was Rex, King of Carnival, this year.

Yet, for all this I'm optimistic about the city. There’s a toughness, a resilience about those who remain. Yes, we want more help from the federal government, or, for that matter, from the state. But the reality is, we are on our own — and we know we are on our own. Even if we get that help, we know we have to do it ourselves. And we are doing it ourselves, sometimes with unbelievable tenacity. An artist friend of mine, Dawn Dedaux, lives across from the race track in Gentilly. Her house was raised and she only had six inches of water inside, but since she was not allowed back for weeks, the mold destroyed it anyway. A few blocks away was her studio; her work was undamaged by the storm, but the winter after there was no power in the area and some squatters broke in to get out of the cold. They started a fire and got careless and the fire spread. Because of pipe damage from Katrina there was no water pressure to fight the fire, and it destroyed her work. At that point most people would have been crushed, yet somehow she shrugged it off. In fact, she put it into her work. She just had a show inspired by the hurricane; the pieces were extraordinary, wild and ferocious, and yet reflecting a perfect order, and several museums instantly made purchases.

Many others are showing their own tenacity. I was just talking to someone who’s back in his home by the lake, having rebuilt it, but he is still surrounded by devastation, by homes that are not rebuilt, in a neighborhood without drugstores, or dry cleaners, or supermarkets, or basically commerce of any kind. He said, “You have to really want to live here.” Those who remain do want to live here. Before the storm, New Orleans, of any major city in the country, had the highest percentage of inhabitants who were natives. I remember at a dinner party asking someone how long his family had been in the area. He told me his first ancestor here was a scout who warned Andrew Jackson that the British troops were coming his way. And plenty of people predate that. As former mayor Marc Morial told me, “My family was here before the American flag.” Those people aren’t leaving. But many of us, including myself, are not from here. I was at dinner not long ago with eight people.

None of us grew up here. Yet we were all fighting our little battles to keep our lives together, and stay. And most of us who remain see things as good — even if we still have a simmering rage somewhere within us, like a pilot light on a gas stove, that can suddenly flare up. The pessimists, or those who don’t want to fight, have already left. Just this morning, nearly two years after the storm, I talked to someone who is having a party to celebrate the arrival of a pole outside her house: the pole will carry wires, which means she can finally get electricity and finish rebuilding. We go through all this because this is still New Orleans. And no other place in the world is like it. My first note of optimism after Katrina came when a friend told me about some National Guard soldiers from rural Louisiana who were standing outside the Convention Center. It was in the middle of the worst of the times. Even so, one of them looked around and said, “I finally made it to New Orleans. Jeez, isn’t it great to be here?”

One thing we can’t do alone, however, is protect ourselves from floods. Progress is being made there. In another three years the Corps of Engineers will have built protection against a one-hundred-year storm. A real one-hundred-year standard is better than most places in the United States get, and better protection is coming. It should be: The Dutch and Japanese protect their densely populated areas against a ten-thousand-year storm. And that brings us back to where we began.
Rebuilding the region, just like building it, depends on the river. The chief economic engine will remain the port and, a new element in New Orleans, riverfront development. The river will also protect the region. The two thousand square miles we lost cannot be rebuilt, but the river still carries enough sediment to stop the bleeding and shore up particularly vulnerable areas. And since the marsh is alive, when it comes to rising sea levels it can, within limits, even do what Manhattan can’t: it can raise itself with the sea.

T.S. Eliot grew up in St. Louis, so it is perhaps not surprising that he wrote,
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god ...

Let us hope that he was right.