Amber Pelzl remembers the first time she saw New Orleans.
It was March, and the magnolias were budding. The city’s warm breezes and slow charm captivated her.
“You know how you can walk into a place and just fall in love? That’s the way it was,” she said.
Now the 18-year-old college freshman, valedictorian at her high school, will also remember the last time she saw New Orleans.
The panic. The chaos. And a four-day adventure full of tears, prayers, new friends and small blessings.
Pelzl was unpacking boxes in her dorm room at Loyola University on Saturday when her resident adviser issued a warning.
“She said everyone needed to leave,” Pelzl said. “This hurricane was serious, and it was headed our way.”
While students scrambled to find rides or bus tickets, Pelzl called her grandparents in Clearwater, Kan.
They had just returned home from dropping her off at college. Now they were a day’s drive away, unable to help.
Pelzl panicked. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “There were no bus tickets, no plane tickets. I didn’t have a car.”
As she talked with her grandmother and checked the Internet, trying to formulate a plan, a stranger poked her head into her room.
It was Coleen Hickey, a freshman from Macon, Ga.
“My mom’s coming to get me,” she told Pelzl. “Want to come with us?”
Yes, she nodded, then relayed the news over the phone.
“I’ve got a ride. We’re leaving,” she told her grandmother, Margaret Pelzl.
“OK. ... But wait a minute,” Margaret Pelzl said. “Where are you going?”
“Mississippi,” came the answer. “Bay St. Louis.”
“All right,” Margaret Pelzl said. “I love you. Be careful. Call me as soon as you can.”
She hung up, then reached for her atlas. Her heart stopped.
“Oh, my God,” she told her husband, Jerry. “They’re going east.”
Later that night, Amber Pelzl called her grandparents in Bay St. Louis, at Hickey’s uncle’s house. Two other freshmen had ridden along, a girl from Salt Lake City and one from New York.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Pelzl said.
“How far are you from the ocean?” her grandmother asked. She tried to sound calm.
“Oh, I don’t know. I can see it right over there.”
She was just yards from the shoreline, between New Orleans and Gulfport. But Hickey’s uncle swore they’d be safe. This house had weathered hurricanes before, Pelzl said, including Camille in 1969.
By noon Sunday, reports showed Hurricane Katrina growing more ominous.
Hickey’s uncle decided to give the girls one of his cars and let them drive to Stennis Space Center, a NASA test site just northeast of New Orleans. It was a designated shelter, designed to withstand a nuclear attack.
They hunkered down in a room on the second floor of an office building and went to sleep.
They spent the next day and night in limbo, wondering what to do. They couldn’t go back to New Orleans. They couldn’t reach anyone by phone. They didn’t have much gas or food.
On Tuesday, they finally decided to head north to Hattiesburg, Miss. But the drive, normally an hour, took eight. Downed trees and power lines littered the roads, Pelzl said. They stalled in traffic.
They finally pulled into a Dairy Queen parking lot near Hattiesburg and called Hickey’s dad. They got through.
“Stay there,” he told them. “I’m coming to get you.”
They got into Macon, Ga., early Wednesday. After a meal and a shower, Pelzl and Hickey headed to a local coffee shop. They recounted their story through a cell phone that finally was able to hold a signal.
They were relieved. Exhausted. But still worried.
Hickey still hadn’t heard from her uncle’s family in Bay St. Louis. She feared the worst.
Pelzl had booked a flight to Kansas City and was expected to meet her grandparents there Wednesday evening.
The girls, strangers just days ago, had laughed together, shared stories and prayed the rosary while a hurricane raged. It was going to be weird saying good-bye.
Pelzl was supposed to start classes at Loyola on Monday. On Wednesday she knew there’d be no fall semester. She didn’t know whether her college, or New Orleans, would ever recover.
But she was headed home to Kansas, and her grandmother was grateful.
“Bless her heart, her whole life is just messed up,” Margaret Pelzl said. “But I told her, `At least we have you, and you’re OK, and we’ll worry about that other stuff later.’”
