Then we immediately had to start rebuilding. We literally had to get out of harm's way so that we could stay alive. But we were in a near-death environment, so we didn't really have time to process it. "For those of us who were here, it was a deeply emotional, deeply personal, painful experience," he says. He tries to explain how 10 years passes like a day. One afternoon in August, the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, meets me at an old seafood market reimagined after the storm as a high-end culinary destination. But within this hopeful word an idea hides in plain sight: For something to be reborn, it must have first died. Everything is governed by this spirit of renewal, and everything is viewed through its lens, from the fervent love of brass bands to the New Orleans Saints, the standard-bearers of a city struggling back to its feet. REBIRTH HAS BEEN the standing field order of the past 10 years in New Orleans, a powerful force shaping the city in ways big and small. "No White Flags," it says on the Team Gleason foundation's T-shirts and wristbands. It's an ugly thing to watch someone fight a battle he cannot win. Lauren stays strong in front of Steve but when she gets around the corner into the kitchen, she falls apart, slipping into a bedroom to be alone. "Dear New Orleans," he begins, and when he finishes reading the letter, one of his assistants, Lauren, wipes Gleason's eyes and nose with a towel.
Since he can no longer use the muscles in his mouth, he speaks through a computerized voice, his humanity blunted by a droning, syllable-centric machine.
#WRIGHT FLOOD INSURANCE AND BROWN AND BROWN SERIES#
Gleason uses his eyes and an interactive tablet to highlight the first sentence of the text, one of a series of love letters to the city that a local nonprofit asked influential citizens to write on the 10th anniversary of the storm. There is a 9-foot statue of him outside the Dome now, but the actual Steve Gleason is paralyzed, four years into an ALS diagnosis. In the team's first night back in the Superdome after the storm, he stretched out his arms and blocked a punt in the opening series of a Monday Night Football game. New Orleans treasures hyperlocal folk heroes: Soulja Slim, the king of the street rappers before the storm, shot at least three times in the face and once in the chest, dead in his black Reeboks Trombone Shorty, who closed out this year's Jazz Fest instead of Elton John or Lenny Kravitz Chris Rose, the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist who wrote the best stories about the storm until his life unraveled and he found himself waiting tables. That's as good a place as any to start a Katrina story, with the wires and plugs and tubes strapped to the back of his wheelchair, a life-support apparatus doing the heavy lifting for one of the most fervently alive people the city has ever known. Ith the air conditioner off for filming, the only noise in Steve Gleason's home is the breathing machine that keeps him alive.
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