Rukdafaidas
09-01-2005, 08:47 AM
http://www.kcchiefs.com/news/2005/09/01/gretz_a_foe_he_cant_cover/
He sat in front of his locker, punching the buttons on his cell phone, holding it to his ear and hoping. After a few moments that seemed like an eternity, he would pull the phone down and start all over again.
Always the results were the same for Patrick Surtain. There was a busy signal, or an operator message that all circuits were busy, or the phone would ring and ring and no one would answer.
As he sat in the dry and air-conditioned comfort of the Chiefs locker room at Arrowhead Stadium, his thoughts were at the other end of those unanswered calls, back in his devastated hometown of New Orleans.
Surtain was trying to reach his father, who he hasn’t talked to now for several days. His mother and other members of his immediate family are with him here in Kansas City. They came in for last Saturday’s game and could not return home.
But his father is down there somewhere. So are other relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins and a lifetime of friends.
When Hurricane Katrina blitzed the Gulf Coast earlier this week, it left behind destruction that it’s almost too massive to fully comprehend. As a nation, we see the pictures coming out of New Orleans and it seems so hopeless.
Surtain sees his hometown and wonders if things will ever be the same.
“To see the place you grew up, where you spent all your life, where your family still lives – 80 to 90 percent of my family lives there – to see the whole city under water, it’s like a big old movie,” Surtain said.
But there’s no DVD here, no Hollywood mega-hit with super special effects.
It’s very real. It’s life. It’s death.
“When that water clears, so many people are going to be gone,” Surtain said. “New Orleans is a tight knit city; everybody knows everybody.”
Surtain knows that some of the bodies in the water, others hidden in the rubble of his neighborhood east and north of the French Quarter are going to be familiar faces to him.
“The way it’s looking right now, there’s no more city,” Surtain said. “All we can do is pray that our family got out.”
Right now, Surtain spends every free moment he has dialing his phone or watching the television reports out of New Orleans. He goes to meetings, works on the practice field and tries to put the whole thing out of his mind. That might last for a few moments, before the reality comes crashing back into view.
Every time one of those shots from a helicopter shows the city, he tries to pick out landmarks, something that looks familiar, something that will tell him whether that’s his neighborhood or not.
“There’s so much water,” Surtain said. “With that water comes other things, diseases, alligators, crocodiles, snakes; a lot of things come out of that water. Just to see people walking in that chest-high water, people sitting on the roofs …
“You hope it gets better soon, but it’s not looking good right now. They say life goes on, but right now, it’s just in slow motion. That’s how it feels right now. You look at the pictures and it’s not getting any better.”
And, there’s nothing he can do. That won’t be the case in the future. However, at this moment, he has to sit, wait and worry.
“I’m not sure what the future is for New Orleans,” Surtain said. “Whether it can bounce back from this, it’s going to take a long time. When the time comes, all of us who have come from those streets, we are going to have to give back and help New Orleans get back on its feet.”
That’s for down the road. Right now, Patrick Surtain would just like somebody in the 504 to answer his call.
He sat in front of his locker, punching the buttons on his cell phone, holding it to his ear and hoping. After a few moments that seemed like an eternity, he would pull the phone down and start all over again.
Always the results were the same for Patrick Surtain. There was a busy signal, or an operator message that all circuits were busy, or the phone would ring and ring and no one would answer.
As he sat in the dry and air-conditioned comfort of the Chiefs locker room at Arrowhead Stadium, his thoughts were at the other end of those unanswered calls, back in his devastated hometown of New Orleans.
Surtain was trying to reach his father, who he hasn’t talked to now for several days. His mother and other members of his immediate family are with him here in Kansas City. They came in for last Saturday’s game and could not return home.
But his father is down there somewhere. So are other relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins and a lifetime of friends.
When Hurricane Katrina blitzed the Gulf Coast earlier this week, it left behind destruction that it’s almost too massive to fully comprehend. As a nation, we see the pictures coming out of New Orleans and it seems so hopeless.
Surtain sees his hometown and wonders if things will ever be the same.
“To see the place you grew up, where you spent all your life, where your family still lives – 80 to 90 percent of my family lives there – to see the whole city under water, it’s like a big old movie,” Surtain said.
But there’s no DVD here, no Hollywood mega-hit with super special effects.
It’s very real. It’s life. It’s death.
“When that water clears, so many people are going to be gone,” Surtain said. “New Orleans is a tight knit city; everybody knows everybody.”
Surtain knows that some of the bodies in the water, others hidden in the rubble of his neighborhood east and north of the French Quarter are going to be familiar faces to him.
“The way it’s looking right now, there’s no more city,” Surtain said. “All we can do is pray that our family got out.”
Right now, Surtain spends every free moment he has dialing his phone or watching the television reports out of New Orleans. He goes to meetings, works on the practice field and tries to put the whole thing out of his mind. That might last for a few moments, before the reality comes crashing back into view.
Every time one of those shots from a helicopter shows the city, he tries to pick out landmarks, something that looks familiar, something that will tell him whether that’s his neighborhood or not.
“There’s so much water,” Surtain said. “With that water comes other things, diseases, alligators, crocodiles, snakes; a lot of things come out of that water. Just to see people walking in that chest-high water, people sitting on the roofs …
“You hope it gets better soon, but it’s not looking good right now. They say life goes on, but right now, it’s just in slow motion. That’s how it feels right now. You look at the pictures and it’s not getting any better.”
And, there’s nothing he can do. That won’t be the case in the future. However, at this moment, he has to sit, wait and worry.
“I’m not sure what the future is for New Orleans,” Surtain said. “Whether it can bounce back from this, it’s going to take a long time. When the time comes, all of us who have come from those streets, we are going to have to give back and help New Orleans get back on its feet.”
That’s for down the road. Right now, Patrick Surtain would just like somebody in the 504 to answer his call.