Salvation Row

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John Milton peered through the rain that hammered on the windshield, trying to pick a path that would spare the car the deepest of the potholes that disfigured the muddy track. He had been driving for six hours, the headlamps on all the way, initially caught up in the throng of traffic as people sought to escape the city. Then he had been slowed by the terrain, the visibility, and his lack of familiarity with his surroundings. He rolled past a fork in the road, slowed and parked the rental on the margin of the road. It wasn’t much more than a backwoods track by this stage, cutting between groves of cypress trees that were garlanded in Spanish moss, heading straight into the heart of the bayou.

His directions told him to look for a big red maple tree.

Milton saw it, just off the road.

He had been in New Orleans for a week, arriving just as the meteorologists had given Katrina her name and warned the city that she was headed straight for it. People had initially laughed it off, and Milton had overheard plenty, suggesting that this would be no different than any of the other storms that made landfall here. But then the forecasters had become more and more apocalyptic, upgrading Katrina all the way to a category five storm and warning that she could be the big one. The mayor and the governor had issued mandatory evacuation warnings, and people had started to listen. It had been bumper-to-bumper gridlock until he was out past Norco, and even then, the roads had only started to flow easily when he exited at Laplace and made his way into the swamp.

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