IN THE YEAR OF THE STORM
The Topography of Resurrection in New Orleans
by Duncan Murrell
Harper's Magazine
July 2007
I CAME TO TOWN in the bristling dark of a hundred highway signs ruined and powerless. The wind had twisted their posts until they bent over as if genuflecting. I wasn't used to it being so dark along I-10, the flat four-laner from Mobile through Mississippi to New Orleans. In the daylight it was green and deep and thick and mysterious, but also beautiful. Now it was just wild. I knew what was out there, the humps of canebrakes, the miles of lowland and bayou, the acres of grass and hillocks of pine. No mercy. I punched the station wagon up to eighty and hit Elysian Fields Boulevard at around ten p.m....
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