I sit here typing while half a continent away people have been plunged into a world where basic survival is the only thing that matters. The survivors have had the carpet pulled out from under them. Many of their homes are under water. Gone, just like that. I can't begin to imagine what it must be like. It's like New Orleans has become a set for one of those post-apocalyptic science fiction films, except nobody is acting. It is not a movie. They haven't even begun to tally up the dead. Hard to do that when 80 percent of the city is submerged. Strength be with them.

I was thinking about homes when the new janitor and I set about our task of ripping out a toilet and a septic tank today. There is an employee who lives in one of those old seventies trailers parked on our site. It probably hasn't seen a road in decades, and is hooked into the sewer line like a real house. The only problem is that there's a leak somewhere, which is costing us 1000 gallons of water a day, so we had to get in there and pull everything out. Under one of the beds was the original water tank from back when the trailer was mobile. As I fiddled around trying to hook up the water lines in a way that would drain it, I wondered if the water inside had been there since the seventies. It sure smelled like it. We managed to get a bit of it on the carpet, making the whole trailer smell like chemicals mixed with the vague odor of septic tank (we poured a couple of gallons of bleach into it before we even got started). Then I imagined a whole city drowned underneath water even more toxic than this. I'm sure a lot of the homes there were even more meager and depressing than this trailer, but they were homes nonetheless, full of keepsakes and irreplaceable belongings. The soundbites on the radio today were mostly of people saying things like, "I didn't have much, but I wish I still had it." I wish they still did too. It's hard to think about mundane things right now.