While most Tufts students were spending the weekend before Halloween searching for costumes and preparing for midterms, Tulane University senior Jennifer Near flew to New Orleans in an effort to rescue her memories.
"The apartment where I had left all my belongings was being gutted and completely emptied," Near said. "I bought a very expensive ticket last-minute so I could try to salvage something before it was all thrown away."
Near, who is originally from Moltonboro, N.H., is one of about 40 displaced Tulane students spending the fall semester at Tufts. She is thankful for the kindness of people in Boston, but New Orleans remains her "second home."
On Oct. 22, Near landed at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. The previous Wednesday, she had received a devastating call that her landlord had already started discarding the contents of her apartment. Upon landing in Louisiana, she hurriedly joined a friend's mother in a rental car and drove to Tulane.
When she arrived at her apartment, Near's anxiety turned to sadness. "[The apartment] was unrecognizable: no walls, no furniture, no remnants of my life whatsoever," Near said.
Searching through a pile of things that were deemed salvageable by workers, Near found nothing of hers had been saved.
"Everything I had collected for the past four years, and many years prior to that, had just been tossed," Near said. "Pictures, journals, things I had bought while working in an orphanage in the Dominican Republic and while visiting my family in Italy, books, CDs, movies, clothes - pretty much my entire life, except for the tank tops and flip flops I had brought home for summer."
As she walked outside, Near saw the only item that she recognized as her own: a fake Hawaiian flower she had worn in her hair while working as a camp counselor. For Near, the flower lying on her front lawn was symbolic of the hurricane's aftermath.
"That's where the contents of many people's lives lie - on their lawns, on the sidewalks, in the streets," Near said. "The only way I know how to describe what New Orleans visually looks like is to say it looks like someone picked up the entire contents of the city and threw it down wherever they pleased."
Near left her apartment with nothing but mixed emotions. "Overwhelming does not even begin to describe the feeling," Near said. "Angry doesn't either."
Though Near recognized that she was fortunate - she has her health, family and friends - her grief was still strong.
"Even though they're just physical things, so much of what I owned had much deeper value," Near said. "Even though I still have the memories in my head, it's hard not to feel like I've lost part of myself and those memories now that the evidence of them is gone."
Near spent the rest of the evening walking around Tulane's campus. She was happy to see the beauty of the school remained.
"There's definitely damage and machinery everywhere," Near said. "But it's still the same beautiful, vibrant school I fell in love with."
Many of her favorite small businesses had reopened, including The Boot, which even gave her a free slice of Dough Bowl pizza. "It's amazing to see the people and places you love getting back on their feet," Near said.
The following day, Near took a shuttle back to the airport and was hit with distressing reality. While driving on I-10, the major interstate in New Orleans, the driver pointed out the water line where the floods had reached. "The line literally was almost as high as the overpasses," Near said.
"It's mind-boggling that the road you're driving on, the road you took to go to the movies or out to eat with friends, was recently 15-plus feet underwater," Near said. "The visual just doesn't fit with your memories or with what you see now, but you still know it happened."
As she boarded her plane back to Boston, Near reflected on her first trip back to her second home. "The city is in rough shape," Near said. "Everyone's struggling, everyone's hurting. Unless you know someone who's been affected or you have been affected yourself, you cannot imagine how many lives this has affected or on how many levels."
Though her apartment is now non-existent and her personal items were blown away with Katrina's winds, Near remains optimistic about the recovery of New Orleans, and she will return to Tulane in December.
"As much as the devastation is overwhelming, the amount of hope is equally as moving," Near said.
