Classes were cancelled on my first day of law school at Tulane due to the feared imminent arrival of Hurricane Andrew.  I had fled New Orleans the previous day in response to a plea from the city’s mayor, having seen the destruction that Andrew left behind in South Florida.  Since I hail from Wisconsin, land of sometimes tornadoes and many times blizzards — storms that could certainly be serious but had never required flight — initially I wasn’t sure how to respond to the mayor’s plea.  I knew the phone number of one person in New Orleans, a classmate I had met during orientation.  Her father found the closest hotel vacancy: a room in a B&B in Meridian, Mississippi.  So I shoved my Macintosh Plus desktop computer into a closet (we didn’t use laptops yet), grabbed my cat, and got in the car.  My cat, my new friend, and I watched a TV screen in a Meridian tavern as the Hurricane first strengthened, then moved farther west than the original projections had shown until it weakened and made landfall again far enough west of New Orleans to cause relatively minor damage there.  The city of New Orleans was spared (that time).

I arrived late to my first Civil Procedure class a day and a half later, after driving into the city through heavy welcome home traffic.  Civil procedure was as strange as the hurricane, with all of its foreign terminology, rules, and standards that seemed to have no place to sit in my prior learning of English and French literature, fiction writing, or environmental science.  I had made it back to New Orleans, but now I was really lost.