 "Photo: Susan Baxley")
Many freshmen arrived at Tulane University on Aug. 26, checked into their dorms, unpacked their things, and were then asked to evacuate as Hurricane Katrina neared the Gulf Coast.
"They told us to come back Wednesday and that classes would start Thursday," said Robert "Spike" Schwab, from Dallas.
Spike found his room, unpacked his bags and then left to drive back to Baton Rouge, where his grandparents lived, and to wait out the storm. Traffic crawled out of New Orleans, and long lines of cars snaked out of gas station parking lots as people waited to fill their tanks.
It was oddly sunny. Spike didn't realize the severity of the incoming storm until he heard a priest come on the radio to bless the city, as if giving last rites.
Spike returned to Dallas on Sunday, where he's now living at home and trying to decide whether to enroll at Southern Methodist University or the University of Texas at Dallas.
"I spent so much time preparing to go out of state," Spike said. "It's pretty disappointing to be back again. I had my heart set on [Tulane]. Of all the places I could have gone, I picked this one."
Many students, especially Texas natives, who had planned to go to school at Tulane, Loyola or Xavier universities, have now been absorbed into the UT System, which loosened its enrollment requirements to accommodate the evacuees.
These "special admission" undergraduates will be charged a $700 flat-rate cost for the semester, according to the UT Web site.
"It took me three hours to do what it takes most people six months to do," said Ryan Samuels, from Houston, who'd also planned to enroll at Tulane. Samuels, since Monday, is a freshman liberal arts major at UT. "I applied, registered and bought my books in an afternoon. UT cut through a lot of its bureaucracy for us."
Samuels is living in a converted meeting room in San Jacinto dormitory with another New Orleans evacuee, Emilio Grijalva. The room is spacious, nicer than the old dorm he would've been in at Tulane, said Samuels. He knows many high school friends at UT and grew up coming to football games in Austin.
"But we've still missed out on a lot," Samuels said. "I don't feel like a complete student. I still have my Tulane ID. I feel like a dual citizen."
Samuels was to study architecture at Tulane. He'd like to apply to the UT school, but his portfolio is still in New Orleans.
The two sat in a San Jacinto study lounge and talked about how it was to be uprooted so quickly and to have their college plans change in an afternoon. Grijalva was quieter. He'd just left his house in Houston on Saturday, the car packed to go to Loyola, where he hoped to study music business and international business. When he got a call from a friend telling him of the evacuation, he turned around.
"I was 10 minutes from home," Grijalva said.
He gets teased by other evacuees for being a second-class hurricane victim, with fewer war stories to tell, enjoying perhaps less of the minor fame the others have received. Mostly, though, there's a sense of solidarity among the evacuated students. If he sees students in Tulane shirts, Samuels will talk to them.
"It's kind of like we're all from the same country," Samuels said.
All are trying to settle into a very new place - Grijalva and Samuels are not used to the size of the campus and their classes.
"[But] there are good landmarks," Samuels said. "It's like the stadium - that's where home is. And the Tower - that's where classes are."
It's strange now to watch the television coverage, Grijalva and Samuels said, the chaos growing, the city sinking, everything much worse than either had imagined it might be.
Samuels said he didn't understand the magnitude of the storm at first. He left his dorm, saying, "See you Thursday," to his roommate, who attempted to wait out the storm in a hotel in the French Quarter. His roommate eventually made it home to New Jersey, alive.
"I guess I knew it was bad when I heard Katrina was Category 5," Samuels said. "And when I heard that the flooding wouldn't stop until the levels in Lake Pontchartrain and the levels in New Orleans were the same. That's pretty disheartening news."
"It just keeps getting worse and worse," Grijalva agreed. "It really didn't hit me until a couple days ago."
They both called the destruction "unbelievable."
"[Tulane's] version of the Drag is Broadway," Samuels said. "It has all the bars, restaurants and frat houses. I saw pictures of people boating down Broadway."
And the violence, both said, is scary to watch.
"The looting I understand," said Samuels, "for food and maybe even the occasional flat-screen. But I don't understand the killing. A lot of it is misdirected anger. I guess if I had to wait as long as some of those people did, I'd be mad, too."
Neither student knows whether he'll return to New Orleans in the spring.
Tulane President Scott Cowan hopes the university will be running again by then, a prediction that seems overly optimistic, Samuels said, given that it might take months to pump the water from New Orleans' streets and backyards.
"It won't be the same city it was," Grijalva said.
"It'll never be the same," Samuels said. "Maybe it'll never be the same for the worse, or maybe it'll get a facelift."
He cited Galveston, which was successfully rebuilt after a devastating hurricane in the early 1900s.
"My dad's worried about me going back. He sees New Orleans like Baghdad or Beirut: great cities that have become war zones," he said.
Professors have been displaced as well. Gaurav Desai and his spouse, Supriya Nair, both on the English faculty at Tulane since 1996, came to Austin from New Orleans because they have friends here. Nair received her Ph.D at the University.
UT has offered them faculty status and library privileges, and Desai will spend the semester conducting research at the Harry Ransom Center and the Perry-Canstaneda Library.
"We left [New Orleans] about a couple of hours before the mandatory evacuation was ordered, because it became pretty clear that this one was not going to spare us," Desai said.
"New Orleanians always live with the threat of hurricanes at the back of their minds, and many evacuate regularly when the threat is imminent," Desai said. "Our own experience driving out was smooth. The part of the evacuations that is most disturbing is that those who did not have the financial means or assets like cars to leave were left behind - they should have been bused out."
Desai said he and Nair were unsure of whether their house, in the Uptown area of New Orleans near Tulane, had suffered at all. There was probably no flooding, but high winds had knocked oak trees onto structures in the area, and he'd heard of fires in the neighborhood.
Both hope to return to New Orleans in the spring.
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