From The Boot to The Square

Last week, a Cambridge Police officer stopped Sophie Noero as she emerged from a night of scorpion bowls at the Hong Kong. “Need any help?” he asked from his patrol car. The Tulane senior asked him to turn on his light, play some music, and let her dance. She was drunk and having fun even though the Kong was nothing like The Boot, a New Orleans bar where she had spent so many similar nights before the hurricane hit.

It was a Wednesday evening, three nights after she had arrived in Cambridge, three weeks after the storm destroyed her city. Her visit here only temporary, the Kong was not a college institution she could cling to. Still, she didn’t know what had happened to The Boot, and local immersion seemed the best way to get acclimated to her new life at Harvard.

She still doesn’t know how long she’ll stay here, or what will come out of the semester’s schoolwork. She doesn’t know when she will graduate, or whether she will be able to write the thesis she has been planning since last year. For now, it’s all on hold, and like many of the 35 Gulf Coast students temporarily enrolled at Harvard, Noero is caught in limbo.

One hundred applied for the spots Harvard had created for displaced students in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; 45 were accepted. Just 35 eventually enrolled—all but three of them from Tulane. Most live in Apley Court and Claverly, and some freshmen are in the Yard. Two live off-campus with friends.

A third come from states hit by the hurricane; others, like Noero, had grown to call New Orleans home though their families lived elsewhere.

Noero and her roommate Sarah M. Hattier, a New Orleans-born sophomore from Tulane, seem confident that if their school doesn’t reopen, Harvard will take care of them. Meanwhile, they continue to pay Tulane tuition, feeling that it wouldn’t be proper to desert their school in a time of need.

But administrators have made it clear that there’s no chance they’ll graduate with a Harvard degree, and no matter how many A’s they receive, their grades will only translate into pass/fail credit if and when they return to Tulane. Like other visiting students, they can petition to add another semester to their time here—and if New Orleans is not ready to have them back by spring, they may have to.

WHAT HOME WAS LIKE

On the Saturday before the storm, Noero was working at a storied Italian restaurant in New Orleans called Giacomo’s, where she has tended the office for the past two years. She had intended to stay in town despite warnings of the approaching storm.

Noero asked around, looking for others who were planning to stay put, but the more she talked, the more it became apparent that she should heed Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s plea to evacuate. That evening, she circled the streets in the New Orleans neighborhood of Uptown looking for gas, but the lines were so long that she simply jumped on the interstate to the neighboring parish to get fuel. She cruised the banks, trying one empty ATM after another before finally finding cash.

She left town with six friends, driving to Memphis to stay with one of their families. It was supposed to be a “hurricane vacation,” a chance to get out of New Orleans while yet another storm drove past the city. Last September, for Hurricane Ivan, Noero rode with some frat buddies all the way to Houston, where they went to concerts and bars as if they had planned the trip all along.

At first, Katrina was no different. But the storm descended ferociously on August 29, and by that evening, the mood had altogether changed. Noero went out to the Tennessee bars to meet with other friends, not to drink but to regroup—assess the damage. They were quiet.

The next day, as flooding and lawlessness took over her city, Noero got in the car with one friend and drove to her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. She was still considering simply skipping the semester, but when she realized that all her friends were applying for visiting status at other universities, she decided to follow suit.

Noero wanted to come to Boston to be with friends—many would end up at Boston University, Tufts, or Babson. So she started putting together the best application she could. It was impossible to get in touch with Tulane professors, so she got recommendations from a friend of the family and two high school teachers.

Then, she pressed the gas pedal on a solo road trip through Pennsylvania and all the way to Boston University, where she crashed with high school friends from her days at Andover. Since she moved to Harvard, she’s stayed on the grind, attending eight classes on the first day of shopping period.

Whether any of them would ever count toward a Tulane degree, she had no idea—and in fact, Noero doubts she’ll graduate from anywhere this spring.

FAILED DREAMS

Had it not been for the hurricane, she would have already written the first chapter of her senior thesis on documentary films and politics in Latin America. As it stands, she’s not yet in touch with her adviser.

At breakfast in Lowell House last Thursday morning, Noero dipped her fork into a plate of ketchup, scooping it up with scrambled eggs.

Back home, she was telling Hattier, there was a boat on the steps of the athletic center, and the parking garage had imploded and covered the cars with pink fuzz. Hattier, whose Lakeview home near the infamous 17th Street Canal was all but destroyed, carved into a grapefruit half.

Noero thinks of what might have happened to her apartment at Willow Street and Nashville Avenue, a blue-gray shotgun house that stands not on a foundation, but stilts. Before Katrina, there had been a small front stoop for sitting, a leaky roof, worn wood floors, and five homeless cats, she said. She hasn’t seen anything of it since she left.

“I don’t think we’re going back in January,” Hattier said. There was no need to say “Tulane,” or even “home.”

Don’t worry, Noero said. They are rebuilding.