Hey, gang -- this is my Think About It Column as will appear in tomorrow's Herald-Guide. Normally I put it on the HG website, but She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named screwed the site up pretty royally in my absense, and I don't know when (or even if) I'll be able to fix it. So here's the column in its entirety...

KATRINA: WRATH AND RESOLUTION

It was supposed to be a vacation.

My birthday was Aug. 25, and to celebrate, my girlfriend Erin was coming down from her home of Pittsburgh to visit for a few days. This was going to be a chance for her to meet my family and friends and see some of the beautiful city of New Orleans. I’d taken a few days off work here at the newspaper to spend with her. We made plans to see the Aquarium of the Americas, the Riverwalk, Café du Monde, maybe even the Audubon Zoo if it wasn’t too oppressively hot. I was going to do the whole “tourist in your home town” thing for once.

This was the plan on Thursday, Aug. 25. By Saturday, Aug. 27, it was clear those plans would change.

I woke that morning to a phone call from my brother informing me that the Aquarium and Zoo were closed. I got messages from the friends Erin was supposed to meet saying they were on their way to Texas. I talked to my father, and he said he was keeping an eye on the weather.

Katrina was coming.

We spent Saturday, instead of touring the French Quarter or cooing at the penguins at the Aquarium, boarding up houses and picking up any lawn furniture or plants or anything else that could turn into flying debris. On Sunday, my father announced that we were evacuating. My father, a man who in the entire 28 years of my life never went farther for a hurricane than my grandfather’s house two doors away from his own, and that for Andrew. In a convoy of three vehicles -- Erin and I, my parents, my sister and her fiance, my Aunt Mona and Uncle Joe and six very confused cats between the eight of us -- we set out. We didn’t even know where we were going. Just “west.”

We left at about 9 a.m. on Sunday. We didn’t stop until about 4:30 a.m. on Monday at a hotel in San Antonio, Texas, the closest place we could find rooms -- even that was thanks to a friend of Erin’s who works for a Comfort Inn back in Pittsburgh (and should you happen to read this, Kelly, we owe you big time). One of the cats, Rascal, meowed the entire 19 hours, not sure what was going on. I had a feeling Erin felt the same way.

Those of us from the gulf coast have built up something of a tolerance for Hurricane Season. It’s something to be concerned about, but not something that keeps you up at night. Sure, once or twice a year we may need to board up the windows, stock up on canned food in case the power dies, keep our cell phones charged... maybe even, once in a while, get out of Dodge. But these are always “better safe than sorry” measures. These are the things we do “just in case.” And even as the sun set on our way through Texas, that’s what we thought we were doing again.

Nobody thought Katrina would become... well... Katrina.

After only a few hours of sleep, we rose on Monday morning and turned on the national news. The storm had hit, but not as badly as predicted. We felt justified, vindicated, and we figured we would be home by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest.

Then the levee burst.

We spent the next several days glued to the television, hoping for some glimmer of hope, some reason to think things would get better. But the waters rose, the looters in New Orleans got bold, and the cries for help got louder.

We spent three days in San Antonio and another three in Houston, constantly watching the television. Oh, we’d try to get our minds off it -- we went to the Alamo, took a long walk along San Antonio’s Riverwalk (we didn’t know if its New Orleans namesake had survived), had dinner with my mom’s cousin who lives in Houston -- but our thoughts never left home.

Communication was a nightmare. As cell towers fell, calling people became an ordeal. Family, friends... we couldn’t get through to any of them for a long time. It was a miracle when my grandmother checked in and told us that two of my parents’ best friends were in the same hotel as her in Shreveport. When I finally borrowed Erin’s phone to call the friends she missed the chance to meet, I only got through to one person, my old pal Chase. Fortunately, he’d been in touch with my other friends and told us they were okay. When my friend Ronée got through to me a few days later, I was startled because it had been so long since I’d heard my cell phone actually ring.

I will say this for the people of Texas -- nearly every one of them was extremely kind, extremely hospitable, especially once they learned where we were from. A woman handing out coupons for a restaurant welcomed us with open arms, a clerk who noticed my sister’s Tulane university hat gave her a discount on some food she was buying, a woman who overheard my parents and aunt talking while waiting to get haircuts paid for all three of them anonymously and then left before they even knew. Heck, we were even housed by my aunt and uncle’s friend Howard and his wife and son, who graciously offered up their house in Houston to us for three days before we decided to brave the trip home. Erin, a born and bred Yankee, told me repeatedly how astonished she was at what she called “southern hospitality.” I was touched by it, but I was never really surprised. That’s how they grow us down here.

It wasn’t just Texas either. In Shreveport a hotel manager gave my grandmother 50 percent off her room rate after the first few days. Friends who wound up in Memphis reported free meals at restaurants. On the news we saw a group of people from Alabama, slammed hard by Hurricane Ivan last year, coming into New Orleans with supplies and hope, returning the favor to the people who had done the same for them.

In the end, it’s all a matter of family. When we got home on Saturday, five days after Katrina cut through, uncles and cousins helped clear a fallen tree that blocked the door to the house. (The tree also smashed the windshield of my car, but if that’s the heaviest price I pay for this monster storm, I consider myself one of the luckiest people alive.) We were safe -- we were with family.

In New Orleans, police from around the country are coming in to relieve battle-weary officers who have held a city in peril for two weeks now. Officers from all over the country, even from other countries, are volunteering to brave the toxic soup and cracked hoodlums of this No Man’s Land, and they are doing it to help their brothers and sisters -- to help their family.

This, to me, is what New Orleans -- and really, the whole south -- is about. It isn’t Mardi Gras or Jazzfest or Bourbon Street or swamp tours. Family means something to us -- blood family, yes, but also those family you choose for yourself, the friends that share your life and make it worth living. I was worried for my aunts and uncles, cousins, brother and grandmother, and worried just as much for those friends whose names appear in this column so often -- Ronée, Jason, Chase and Jenny, Mike and Kim. Because they are family too, and I love each of them as much as I do my own blood.

I look at the news now -- of the homes and towns utterly destroyed by Katrina. I wonder how the rebuilding can start. I wonder how things will ever get back to normal, even as, on some level, I know that what used to be normal will never exist again.

I know that we’ll all need to find a new normal.

And I know that, for me at least, that’s okay. Because everyone I care for, everyone I love is accounted for. Some have lost homes, some will have to start over, and I’ll be there to help them if I can, just as I know this country will pull together and rebuild Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, no matter how long it takes, no matter how much it costs. I know these people will rise again, and that not a one of them will have to do it alone.

Because they’re all family.

We’re all family.

And as devastating as Katrina was, I have to thank God that she reminded me of that.