When the Place You Live Becomes Unlivable

“New Orleans is the only ship I’d go down with,” my friend Ben wrote on Facebook in the hours before Hurricane Ida upended southeast Louisiana. He rode out the storm in the city—“hunkering down,” in standard hurricane parlance. Anxious but safe, I read his post at a splash pad in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My family and I had evacuated New Orleans the day before, on August 28—two dogs, two kids, and two adults—our destination determined by the projected path of the storm and the availability of an animal-friendly rental. Though far from the “ship,” we monitored Ida’s movements obsessively. The updates weren’t encouraging: The storm intensified at an unprecedented rate, and by the time it reached Grand Isle, the only inhabited barrier island in Louisiana, wind was blasting at 150 mph, making it just shy of a Category 5, the highest in our hurricane-rating system.

Three weeks earlier, my daughter had contracted COVID-19 at her day care, so my kids and I had been in isolation. But my husband, Yussef, an infectious-disease doctor, had continued to see patients, a necessity at his overburdened hospital. Then the hurricane arrived just as the state’s fourth coronavirus wave crested, prompting. Yussef and I framed our evacuation as a lark—surprise vacation!—but our daughter detected our worry. As he parked our rental car in downtown Tuscaloosa, Yussef turned to me and asked: “Would any of this be happening if we lived somewhere else?”